Archive for January, 2009

[Edit:  Baseball America, courtesy of Derrick Goold's hard work, releases their top 10 list today.  One of us will toss up another post this afternoon for discussion but don't miss the chat with Derrick at BA.]

Brett Wallace was a beast in the few months he played professional ball after the draft.  He showed the ability to hit for average, hit for power, take a walk and virtually any other offensive skill you could want.  The scouting reports for the draft were glowing and there’s been little to disprove them.  There’s still precious little track record (200 ABs) to go on although that does little to diminish the notion that Brett Wallace may be the only other impact player in the system outside of Colby Rasmus.

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Brian Walton, of Scout.com, has started his own personal Cardinal blog called The Cardinal Nation.  Besides being a fine writer, Walton often gets some good scoops from the Cardinal front office so there’s another reason to keep an eye on his blog.

Two posts to point you to specifically.  The first, which may become invaluable during the season, is a roster matrix for the ENTIRE farm system.  I’m a huge fan of other people doing work that makes my life easier and this certainly falls into that category.  The second post details some releases that the Cardinals made in the low minors — no real prospect of note.

Consider it the anti-breakout season.  When a MLB player gets injured, there’s some collective breath holding — or if it’s Albert pulling up lame on the basepaths, heart stoppage.  When a prospect gets injured, it can quickly become a death knell.  They lose out on critical development time, someone else swoops in and takes their job and they can get labeled “injury prone”.  How do we reconcile obvious talent and past performance with a current breakdown?

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Hat tip to Driveline Mechanics for pointing this out- Introducing Prospect Tube.

And it should only get better. Oh, thank you God.

A meandering conversation ensues about the ranking of Jess Todd and Mitchell Boggs, their past, their future and the state of starting pitching in the Cardinals’ farm system.

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If you don’t know anything about positional adjustments, stop reading now.  Go to Fangraphs and read this primer on defensive based positional adjustments.  You’d be well served to read some of the more specific examples like this 2B/3B comparison or the CF discussion.   If you were unaware of the differences between offensive and defensive positional adjustments, you may enjoy this conversation but it’s unnecessary to understand the rest of the post.

The short version is that it is more difficult to find a capable catcher or shortstop than it is to find a capable 1B or DH.  Supply and demand dictates that those scarcer commodities should be valued higher accordingly.

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This week must be prospect ranking week. Monday we had Sickels,  now it’s Kevin Goldstein’s turn.

Five-Star Prospects
1. Colby Rasmus, CF
2. Brett Wallace, 3B
Four-Star Prospects
3. Chris Perez, RHP
4. Daryl Jones, LF
Three-Star Prospects
5. Jess Todd, RHP
6. Adam Reifer, RHP
7. Bryan Anderson, C
8. Jamie Garcia, LHP
9. Lance Lynn, RHP
10. Jason Motte, RHP
Two-Star Prospects
11. Niko Vasquez, SS

Just Missed: Mitch Boggs, RHP; Jon Jay, OF; Peter Kozma, SS

See! I told you that I could not the only person that has a man crush on Adam Reifer. Be sure not miss BP’s podcast interview with Jeff Luhnow.

Discuss away.

We’re introducing a new format to some of our posts.  In an effort to further clarify and explore some of the different prospect rankings, we’ll bring you more opinion-oriented posts where erik, roarke and myself discuss prospects from a variety of angles.  Today we unveil the first of this irregular and unplanned series with Allen Craig and David Freese.

[edit: Kevin Goldstein's Top 11 may come out today.  Feel free to discuss that in this thread as well.]

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We had another post scheduled for today but the esteemed Mr. Sickels threw a monkey wrench our way.  No fear; it’s a happy monkey wrench.  I assume there will be some disagreements and discussion, which can all take place here.

(PS – comments on the post that was originally up still exist and have been moved to post purgatory along with the actual post itself.  Those of you who didn’t stay up till midnight to see the post should be ashamed.)

If you’ve never tried to make a list of the top Cardinal prospects, it’s easy to understate the difficulty and time needed to create one.  I’d encourage everyone to sit down and try it once.  There are a host of philosophical questions to confound and too many stats to try and take in.  After making the list, you can either never look at it again or brace yourself to make changes on a regular basis.

One issue that is particularly troublesome for me is single season performance.

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