I’ll be out of town until this weekend, so nothing new from me in the coming days. I’m deputising all of the contributors here to issue e-beatdowns if anyone gets out of line. Next week I’m going to focus on the 2008 Draft, give some detailed thoughts on each pick. After that, I’ll do my affiliate by affiliate breakdowns and then work on the Top 30, as well as some other good stuff. Until then…

Hey, what timing!

Link.

Just like the Phillies with the Paul Owens Award, I’m going to give a PPPoY to my most outstanding pitching and positional prospect. This year, the inaugural year for the award, the winners are JA Happ and Michael Taylor. Neither choice was particularly easy, and I moved around a bit on both selections, but in the end, I was fairly confident in the Happ selection, and marginally happy with the Taylor selection. I’ll go through my reasoning on each guy, as well as the runners’ up and some more details below…

Continue reading Phuture Phillies Player(s) of the Year →

No big writeup, just his stat lines, but Taylor was on BA’s Second Team in the OF along with Dexter Fowler (COL) and Travis Snider (TOR), both of whom are now in the majors. This caps a huge season for Taylor, one that will see him shoot way up BA’s rankings this winter. Congrats to Michael, he finds himself in elite company on this all star list.

I’m in the process of preparing to move, and with that obviously comes a lot of other stuff. I was planning on writing the in depth draft recap starting next week, but I will be out of town from Tuesday through Saturday. I think the better course of action is to devote the following week to the draft. On Monday I’m going to roll out the “Phuture Phillies Player of the Year” feature, which is kind of what it sounds like, just my answer to the Phillies Paul Owens Award. I’ll give you my winner, and then 2 runners up for both position players and pitchers. Then I will be out of town, and when I get back, the draft is of prime focus. For today, in preparation for the PPPoY special, I thought I’d allow you to weigh in with your selections. Simply list them like

Winner
Runner Up
Second Runner Up

One for position players, One for pitchers.

Have a nice weekend.

So I did some thinking on this after the discussions yesterday. And I think I’ve come up with the solution. Eliminating this site would definitely not be the way to go. I have lots of big plans still in the works. But my goal is to basically eliminate the trolling/disrespectful posts in the comments section. So for now, I have a solution. I’ve changed the commenting policy here to require you to be a registered wordpress user. Basically, going to wordpress and signing up for a free wordpress account takes like 60 seconds. You don’t have to write a blog of your own, you just need to sign up at wordpress for a wordpress account. After you do this, you’ll be able to log into wordpress and then post here in the comments sections. My thought is, if you want to participate in the discussion here and be a part of the site, you can take 60 seconds to sign up for an account. Everyone is still free to read the site, that won’t change, and I won’t ever place ads on the page. My goal is to create a better environment to discuss this stuff. The original intention of this place was just for it to resemble a website, with information. It has evolved into a great (for the most part) place for discussion as well. I guess its just time to take a hard line with this stuff and try to root out the problem before it gets any bigger. If you have any questions, send me an email.

Quick schedule update. I believe Gregg is working on season recaps for the Lehigh Valley affiliate. I’m beginning to work on the draft recap feature, which I think I’ll roll out next week. It will be quite in depth and will take up multiple posts. I’ll also work on a recap of my Top 30 and Top 100 in the next week or so, and might even go with the Top 30 recap tomorrow or Friday. Thanks again for everyone who visits daily, for the nice feedback left in the comments yesterday, and for the emails I receive almost daily.

The Phillies added the “real” prospects with this callup, bringing back Andy Tracy, Mike Cervanek, and Les Walrond. The most interesting aspect of the callups is the lack of Carrasco and Jason Jaramillo. Carrasco, who made his debut in 2004, needs to be protected on the 40 man after this season, so it was a matter of not starting his service time clock. Jaramillo is already on the 40 man roster. Gillick had this to say

In Marson, Phillies fans may well be getting a look at the catcher of the future — and that future could be next season. He hit .314 at Reading, was the starting catcher for the U.S. Team in the Futures Game in July and caught for the U.S. Olympic team in Beijing, China. Marson hit .308 in the Olympics as the U.S. earned a bronze medal.

“He might get some action, he might not,” Gillick said. “We don’t have any hesitancy of putting him into a game. He’s a good receiver, he makes good contact. I’d say he’s pretty close.

“We still like Jason (Jaramillo, the Phillies’ Triple-A catcher). He’s got a chance to catch in the big leagues. But Lou has forged ahead a little bit right now. We’re more confident at this point with Lou.”

This is interesting to me. Jaramillo is older and was already on the 40 man roster before they added Marson. Does this mean that Jaramillo gets traded this winter? Hard to see the Phillies moving Ruiz.

Per the Phillies official site.

Right-hander Adam Eaton and left-hander J.A. Happ were recalled from triple-A Lehigh Valley and outfielder Greg Golson and catcher Lou Marson had their contracts purchased from double-A Reading.

Somewhat surprising that they brought up Marson and not Jaramillo. Gordon and Rosario were moved to the 60 day DL to make room.

Much rejoicing!

More on the team here. (thanks to “Rickey Branch” for the link)

per Ken Rosenthal. Should be a marginal prospect. Stairs has been on the decline after a hot start, and he’s like 50 years old, but he’s better than Taguchi, the guy he should be replacing. We’ll see. More info in this space when its available.

Update: Its the model dictator