Hot off the press.
1. Dominic Brown, of
2. Carlos Carrasco, rhp
3. Lou Marson, c
4. Jason Donald, ss
5. Kyle Drabek, rhp
6. Michael Taylor, of
7. Travis D’Arnaud, c
8. Zach Collier, of
9. J.A. Happ, lhp
10. Jason Knapp, rhp
Please do not copy the full text of any scouting reports here.
I figured I’d ring in the new year with an always popular feature, a Q/A with the top prospect guru at Baseball Prospectus and longtime phuturephillies favorite Kevin Goldstein. KG recently unveiled his Phillies Top 11, and was kind enough to answer an extended set of questions I had on his list and on all things Phillies prospects. You know I’m not one to shamelessly plug sites here, but I’d recommend the Baseball Prospectus yearly subscription for Goldstein’s weekly features alone, but you also get good major league coverage, as well as access to the PECOTA projections, probably the most accurate baseball forecasts out there. Highly recommended. Before we get into the Q/A, check out Kevin’s list from last year here, as well as the Q/A he did for the site last year. Now that we’ve set it up, here is the latest buzz from Kevin…
Just wanted to quickly say thanks for the continued support here in 2008, and thank you for continuing to come back. 2008 saw the site pick up considerable momentum, peaking right around draft time. The site basically started at the end of December, 2006, so its essentially 2 years in the books now. Some numbers for 2008
Total hits: 1,125,603 (up from 514,000 in 2007)
Busiest day: 14,098 (June 5th, draft day)
Busiest month: July; 183,767 (busiest month in 2007 was June, with 78,561 hits)
Highest average hits per day: July; 5,928 hits per day
Total blog hits since inception; 1,640,739
Thank you again for coming, thanks for spreading the word, and I look forward to an even better 2009. Happy New Year.
As posted in the Info Outpost, Jim Callis answered a bunch of Phillies questions today
Andrew(Philly): Was it necessary to take 2 weeks off before giving us the Phillies top 10. C’mon, we’re the World Series Champions. Couldn’t you have stopped before the Nationals. How about a little hint. Who is prospect #11?
SportsNation Jim Callis: (2:14 PM ET ) Prospect No. 11 for the Phillies? LHP Antonio Bastardo.
Pete (Philly): Michael Taylor of Dominic Brown?
SportsNation Jim Callis: (2:47 PM ET ) Brown.
Zac (Flemington, NJ): Have any insight on Julian Sampson? He was supposed to have nice stuff coming out of HS, yet his k-rate was alarmingly low this year in A ball. What does he throw and how does it grade out? What kind of ceiling does he have? Thanks.
SportsNation Jim Callis: (2:41 PM ET ) I still like him. He’s more of a groundball guy than a strikeout guy right now, but he has a nice sinker. He just needs to refine his slider and changeup.
Zac (Flemington, NJ): What do you know about Edgar Garcia? The Phillies continue to promote him aggresively, and he has always been very young for his league, yet his numbers have been pedestrian. Any thoughts?
SportsNation Jim Callis: (2:24 PM ET ) Promising young arm but not real polished yet. He needs a year to catch his breath, and then he might turn into a pretty decent prospect.
The voting between Antonio Bastardo and Edgar Garcia again went down to the wire, with Garcia edging him out 71-69. As was mentioned, I’m going to put Garcia 13 and Bastardo 14, and we’ll move straight to #15. I’m going to add in 1 player to fill in the gap in the voting, and of course, write in votes are welcomed.
So, this is something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time, and I finally got around to it tonight. We now have a phuturephillies message board/discussion forum. You can find it here. Proboards seems decent enough for a free discussion forum, its going to take some time to figure everything out and add different things to it, but I think it will serve the purpose for now. As I’ve mentioned before, the purpose of this site has never been to turn it into a message board, though the discussion is great. I don’t want to extinguish all of the discussion from this site of course, but I wanted to provide another outlet for people to discuss whatever they’d like relating to Phillies prospects. Its a work in progress, but it should be fun.
I’m going to do some work on the site this weekend, including possibly changing the layout/design/color scheme and all of that stuff. It feels like its time for a face lift. So if you check back and things look out of whack, don’t sweat it, I’ll get it back in order. Thanks.
[Update 1]
So I’ve done a bunch of re-organizing. I changed the main theme of the site. It seems a bit more bright and less dark/dull, which I think makes it easier to read. I’ve changed the hierarchy on the left side, using a few more category headers and trying to better organize the categories. I also added a FAQ/Intro type statement and some site rules.
[Update 2]
Ok, I’ve scrapped the new design and brought back the old version. I changed the red color to a brighter red, and I’ll continue to work on some other things.
The list is up.
Five-Star Prospects
1. Carlos Carrasco, RHP
Four-Star Prospects
2. Michael Taylor, RF
3. Kyle Drabek, RHP
Three-Star Prospects
4. Travis D’Arnaud, C
5. Lou Marson, C
6. Jason Donald, SS
7. Dominic Brown, OF
8. J.A. Happ, RHP
9. Zach Collier, RF
10. Jason Knapp, RHP
11. Anthony Hewitt, 3B
Sleeper: Julian Sampson, RHP
Just Missed: Travis Mattair, 3B; Drew Naylor, RHP; Joe Savery, LHP
Thats the info available to non-subscribers. If you’re a subscriber and have access to the other info, please don’t post it here. Kevin is going to be kind enough to answer questions on his rankings. If you have questions, post them in the comments here and I’ll try to work them in.
Newly acquired John Mayberry Jr takes him spot #12 in the Reader Top 30, while Edgar Garcia and Antonio Bastardo engaged in a tight race for 2nd place. The Phillies BP Top 11 list should be out today or tomorrow, when it is I’ll have some thoughts, but please don’t post the full text here. Kevin Goldstein, the writer of the list, has agreed to do a Q/A, and I’ll start a separate post on that to solicit questions for him. So lets just keep this to the discussion of #13. I’ll try and get that post of the Top 11 up when BP runs it, but that will be my last transmission until after Christmas. So, from me to you, Happy Holidays and thanks for continuing to come back. Now onto #13…
