Pitching is the most sought after commodity in baseball and every team has learned that you can never have enough of it. Good pitching is hard to come by, especially in this day of small parks, tightly wound baseballs, more frequent arm injuries and hitters swinging for the fences. The recent first year player draft was certainly proof of that with young, strong arms being drafted often and in the first rounds. As arm injuries seem to be more and more frequent, pitch counts have grown to be considered paramount in trying to prevent arm, injury and shoulder mishaps. There is also the obvious learning curve for young pitchers moving up through the minor leagues and the progressively tougher competition.

Continue reading Triple A-Last Stop Before The Show? (Part Two) The Pitchers →

I updated the rosters for both short season teams today. You can find them by clicking the appropriate tag on the left side of the page. I still need to spend some time updating the rest of the rosters, but I had a request for the short season teams, so I did those. Not all of the starters might be right, I just did it quickly without looking at box scores to see how many games player X started at Y position. If there are mistakes, just leave a comment on the roster page and I’ll update it. In the next day or two, I’ll also be adding links to the legit prospects on the Prospect Tracker page at the top for our short season prospects, as well as updating all of the other roster pages. If there’s anything else that needs doing here, let me know.

The Clearwater Threshers earned their best first-half record in their short four-year history going 39-31.  The team had six players selected to the FSL All-Star game:  pitchers Carlos Carasco, Andrew Carpenter, Pat Overholt, OF/DH Jeremy Slayden, and catcher Lou Marson were elected by the managers in the league and Greg Golson was selected by the commisioners office to attend the game. 

Continue reading Clearwater Threshers First-Half Wrap Up →

The Phillies announced JD Durbin would get the call Friday against the Mets. Talk about being thrown into the fire. Durbin is out of options, so if he bombs out as a starter, they might try to stash him in the bullpen for a while, because if he’s sent down to AAA, he has to clear waivers again, and that seems unlikely. Good luck JD, you’re going to need it.

We’ll finish it off today, with 20 prospects left. Starting from the ground up…

B

Jarrod Freeman, RHP – Freeman was and still is a promising arm, but it didn’t work out for him in Lakewood. He got battered around, allowing a .518 slugging % in 43.1 IP. He’s still plenty young, so hope is not lost.

Jesus Sanchez, C – Short season ball.

Alex Concepcion, RHP – Concecpcion was one of my picks to have a breakthrough year, and he’s shown some positives, including his 10.3 K/9. He’s given up a few walks (3.99/9) and has averaged a hit per inning. He’s also been a flyball pitcher, which could jump up and bite him at the next level.

Drew Carpenter, RHP – Carpenter has struggled more at High A than I thought he would, but that is to be expected for a guy who skipped Low A in his first season. 6.51 K/9 and 3.55 BB/9 is not what you want to see, especially because he doesn’t have dominant groundball tendencies.

Scott Mitchinson, RHP – Recovering from surgery, short season ball.

Brett Harker, RHP – Harker was rolling along, stringing together save after save, but he’s blown up over the last few weeks, seeing his ERA rise above 8. A definite setback.

Continue reading Midseason Review, Part 3 →

Jon Lieber hit the DL, and from the way it looks, he won’t be back for a while. I have to think Gillick is scrambling to try and trade for a starter at this point, but will probably have to use an internal option for at least a start or two as to not be held over the barrel. A few weeks ago, I lobbied for Kyle Kendrick to get a shot, and in two starts so far, he’s more than held his own. Kendrick was our best option at the time, but let’s see who the best option is now…or should I say, the least damaging option.

Continue reading Ok, so who’s next? →

My blog was selected at bloginterviewer.com and I was asked to fill out some simple questions. If you’re curious what I had to say, you can check it out here.

We’ll cover another batch of prospects today, looking at how they’ve fared in the first half of 2007. Again, a few reminders. The grades listed below were the grades assigned to the player prior to the start of this season, they aren’t midseason grades. I won’t assign a grade for 2007 until after the season, this is just kind of a one sentence overview of how each guy is playing this season so far. Any and all comments are welcome, as always.

Continue reading Midseason Review, Part 2 →