Keith Law has another article up (prolific lately, no?) regarding prospects that could impact teams in 2010 but aren’t in the top 100.  He bypasses the Cardinal prospect (Jaime Garcia) that I believe is better in the long run due to injury related inning limitations in favor of Lance Lynn.  There’s nothing earth-shattering in his evaluation but I wanted to compare his comments to my own scouting report very briefly.

Read the rest of this entry »

Passing this list on from Mike, here’s all the players invited to major league and minor league camp for the Cardinals.

Two Cardinal farmhands rank on the top 100: Shelby Miller, 38 & Daryl Jones, 59.

Link

Law has been consistently bullish on DJ Tools upside and obviously sees much of the same in the arm of Shelby Miller. Again, this seems eminently reasonable to me.  I’m having a recollection of a KLaw chat where he implied that Jones would be ranked ahead of Miller though.  If anyone can come across that or also remembers that, drop a note in the comments.

More interesting for us is his top 10 list for Cardinal prospects:

1. Shelby Miller, RHP
2. Daryl Jones, OF
3. Lance Lynn, RHP
4. Jaime Garcia, RHP
5. Robert Stock, C
6. Dan Descalso, 2B
7. Eduardo Sanchez, RHP
8. Adron Chambers, OF
9. Francisco Samuel, RHP
10. Audris Perez, C

It’s an interesting list that clearly favors eventual upside over proximity to the majors.  Accepting that prospect worldview I think Sanchez is a touch underrated.  Audris Perez is a Dominican Republic signee who played in Johnson City last year (also seen as Audry Perez).  I think the Lynn over Garcia rating is bogus (and may or may not be influenced by the wrongly classified “RHP” Garcia).  Overall though, a solid assessment.

The Cardinals ZiPS projections by Dan Szymborski are up and contain projections for a few minor leaguers. A random assortment of comments follows. Read the rest of this entry »

Keith Law prefaces his Top 100 prospects coming out tomorrow with organizational rankings today.  It’s behind the subscription pay wall so no reprinting the text.  The Cardinals rank 29 out of 30 with the admission that he may be slightly underrating some of the newer additions to the farm.  FWIW, I doubt he’s underrating them and I’m not surprised the Cardinals are in the bottom 5.

With the acquisition of Rich Hill, I’m suddenly wondering if I can count our potential AAA starters on just two hands.  Do I need to take my shoes off?

Read the rest of this entry »

Because it’s a New Year and people like lists.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Cardinals have most of their 2010 bullpen penciled in I would imagine.  Ryan Franklin to close out games.  Jason Motte to setup from the right side.  Trevor Miller and Dennys Reyes to retire lefties. Kyle McClellan and Blake Hawksworth as holdovers.  Then there’s a plethora of guys to fight it out for that last spot – Mitchell Boggs, Rule V Draftee Ben Jukich and “Ridin’ that 2006 Wave” Josh Kinney.

There’s a couple other names that could insert themselves into the discussion.  Starters like PJ Walters or Adam Ottavino likely will get a look in Spring Training.  Eduardo Sanchez certainly made some noise towards the end of 2009 in Springfield and there are live arms littered through the system with Francisco Samuel being at the top of that list.

One name that doesn’t come up as often as it should is Pete Parise.

Read the rest of this entry »

CHONE is the brain child of Sean Smith.  It’s a regression based projection system that utilizes TotalZone (a psuedo play-by-play metric) as the defensive underpinning and a linear weights (read: wOBA) offensive projection. You can find the complete projections over at the site baseballprojection.com.  We’re going to take a glance at a few of the projections for Cardinal prospects in 2010.  I’ve added the replacement and position adjustment to the offensive and defensive projections for a WAR based on a full season’s production.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is part II of Steve’s look at our AFL pitchers.

Some time ago I promised a pitch f/x write-up on Scott Gorgen. The bonus here is that he should still be in the organization at the end of the week (for those that missed it, shortly after my Parisi write-up, he was snagged by the Cubs in the Rule V draft).

We’ll start again with the summary table. See this post for points of comparison.

A couple things stand out from that table

• The fastball, like Parisi before him, is a few notches below average, and unlike Parisi he never really gets it above 91-92. Also unlike Parisi it didn’t appear to be a ground ball generator (more on this later)

• The breaking ball looks like a “show me” pitch, both in utilization (not frequent) and in results (low whiff)

• And the most glaring number in the table, the whiff rate on the changeup is outstanding. We’ll dig deeper into that shortly

First we’ll take a look at the fastball. As the bullet point says, it’s a bit below average from a velocity perspective. Also of note is how infrequently he is using the pitch (~54% of the time when you combine the FF and FT). For comparison, PJ Walters (not noted for his vaunted fastball) used his fastball 60% of the time in his cup of coffee this past season.
As mentioned in the bullet points, his fastball (all of his pitches actually) doesn’t appear to generate ground balls. The following table summarizes his batted ball profile from the AFL season

These results are in line with his career minor league numbers.
Moving on to the most noteworthy thing about Gorgen, his change-up. Az made note of it after seeing him pitch, and the numbers seem to back up his assertion that it could be a plus pitch. While clearly a 64% whiff rate is unsustainable, the idea that it can be a swing and miss pitch probably has merit. So what makes his change-up successful? Or more exactly, what distinguishes his whiffs from the ones where the hitters make contact? For those questions I have a two-part answer (both parts are fairly obvious), movement and location.

First movement

It does appear that the more fade and sink the change-up has, the more likely a whiff.

And then location

Unsurprisingly the lower the better.
Final Thoughts:

Given Gorgen’s repertoire and usage data I’d lean towards pegging him as a future middle reliever. There aren’t many MLB starters that can rely solely on a below average fastball and a plus change-up. That isn’t to say the he can’t improve his breaking ball some to the point where it could serve as a decent complimentary 3rd pitch, at which point I’d be more inclined to see him as a starter. And finally, even if he doesn’t improve his breaking ball, he could still have value as a middle reliever that could get out both LHB and RHB.

Next up on the agenda are the reliever’s the Cards sent to the AFL. Stay tuned.