Today was the day for big cuts in the minors.  Here is a list of the Phillies’ transactions based on the latest minor league roster, and a summary of the changes from the week 3 roster including the cuts made today.

Continue reading Black Monday in the Minors →

I’m up against it today, so I’ll keep it short. We’re getting closer and closer to the time where the games start to count, and because of that, I need to kick it into high gear on the player profiles, hopefully this weekend. Again, if you see that a prospect doesn’t have his name on the left side of the page under “players”, then let me know so I can add him. If anything else happens, I’ll pop in for a quick take, if not, I’ll be back Monday. Have a Good Friday.

I’ve been trying to crank out these profiles, but always seem to get distracted. I did a few recently where I didn’t have as much info as I’d like, but I still want every legit prospect to have a profile page. Here are the newest entries

Antonio Bastardo, Darren Byrd, Alex Concepcion, Heitor Correa, Andrew Cruse (with video)

As always, if you have any articles, pictures or info on these or any other prospects, please share it so I can add it to their respective pages. You can find the profiles on the left side of the site under the “Players” heading, and each player has or will have his own profile. If you look to the left and see a legit prospect who doesn’t have his own player heading yet, please let me know, as I don’t want to overlook anyone. Thanks.

This site has been functional since the end of December, 2006. I really assumed I’d have to make this post a lot sooner, but everyone has behaved far better than I could have imagined. So, this is a friendly reminder. I can see your IP address. Using different logins from the same IP address to post ridiculous/childish comments isn’t going to work. If you do it, I’ll just mark your comment as spam and delete it. It’s as simple as that. My goal here is to make this site as informative and readable as possible. That’s why I don’t make even a penny off of the site by littering it with ads and links, and thats why I’ve turned down offers to sell the domain and its contents to another site. I enjoy writing here, I enjoy the discussions, and I think this site has come a long way in 16 months. But I’m still protective of the content and standards, and that applies to the comments as well. So, for 99.9% of you, thanks for being civil. The .1% will be weeded out.

I’ve gotten a handful of e-mails in the last few days, plus comments in various posts, about Greg Golson, and asking how I felt now that he’s played well, and how I’m probably bummed because I’m “anti-Greg Golson”. I’m not anti any of our prospects. In fact, I probably support all of our prospects more than anyone outside of their respective families and friends, and Golson is no different. When you follow the minor leagues closely and you invest time in learning this stuff, you grow attached to these guys. And much like the girl/guy you chase in high school and can’t ever seem to get, you start protecting yourself from getting hurt. Golson has not lived up to expectations yet, and he has a few very clear flaws in his game. Even so, I never stop hoping he’s going to flip the switch and suddenly put it together. He’s Phillies property, and I’ve spent 4+ years hoping he’d make passing on Phil Hughes look smart. I hope he does. But I’ve tempered my expectations, and I still have my doubts that he can recognize/hit a curveball. Do I want him to? Of course. Will I be extremely excited if he turns into the next Eric Davis? Absolutely. I’m far from anti-Greg Golson. I’ve just toned down my expectations to about as low as they can go. Whatever he becomes, as long as it happens in the major leagues at some point, will be a bonus. He’s had a bright spring, lets hope it carries over.

For those of you who aren’t already familiar with me from my work last year, my name is Jeff, and I provide the weekly updates on the happenings within the Threshers organiztion for James here at Phuture Phillies. I also run a Threshers site with daily game recaps and player profiles along with player of the game awards, and end-of-the-season awards. Check out the site here. I’ve talked with a few of the players from last year’s FSL Champion Threshers team and set up some upcoming interviews with Andrew Carpenter, Jason Donald, and Lou Marson. Like most of you I am a fan of the game and not a professional journalist, so I’d like to get your input on these upcoming talks to make sure that what I ask and write about are of the most interest to those of you who frequent this site. I want to throw out this opportunity to you all to allow me to be the surrogate for the questions that you would ask if you had the opportunity to talk with these players.

You can use the comments section here or drop me an email and get your input into the upcoming articles.

I hope to have the interviews up within the next week, so let me know soon if you’d like some input.

I wanted to just give a brief update and explain whats going to happen over the next month or so. I’m pretty much going to just be doing a post every day recapping the events of the spring training game the day before, highlighting the performances of the prospects involved. If any other news comes up, then we’ll get that in of course, but I’m going to spend the bulk of my time between now and opening day working on player profiles, trying to get as many of them as I can completed. I’m also going to be getting in touch with my correspondents for Lakewood, Clearwater, Reading and Allentown and giving them some details on future plans.

So heres what I need from YOU, the loyal reader. If you come across any biographical tidbits/articles/pictures/videos of our prospects online, and I don’t already have the info posted on that player’s profile, please post it. If I’ve already created a player’s profile page, you can post a link there or you can post it on the new “Info Dump” page at the top of the blog. You can also get there by clicking here.

Thanks again for all of the contributions from all of you, thanks for continuing to come back, and I’m really looking forward to this season, both for the big league club and all of its affiliates.