- Adron Chambers lead off and played LF and went 2-3 with a double, a single, a stolen base and 1 of the 2 Surprise runs.
- Zack Cox was at 3B and went 1-2 with a double and 2 walks.
- Pete Kozma was 1-4 from SS.
- Ramon Delgado pitched 1 inning allowed a hit and a walk, but no runs.
- Blake King struck out 2 in his perfect inning.
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23 Responses to “Daily Farm Report 11/15/10”
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Chambers was also hit by a pitch.
Zach is has been hitting well as late After his 1-17 start he is 14-42 .333 in his last 10 games his OPS is .876
Chambers’ performance has surprised me quite a bit, and I am enthused about his prospects. I remember at least someone on the site comparing him to Desmond Jennings. They did not think they were the same, but they did imply that the relative excitement for Jennings and Chambers was disproportionate given their similarities. Having looked at the numbers, I believe Jennings’ greater power numbers at lower levels probably makes him a better prospect. However, I am considering the purchase of a front row seat on the Chambers bandwagon (I do understand that the AFL is an inherently small sample).
Should we be excited about Chambers, or does he still only profile as a spare outfielder? With his speed and OBP skills, wouldn’t he be a viable rightfielder, defense willing, with our lineup (+power in center and ++power in left)? Would he be appealing to another team in a valuable way?
As always, thanks for your time.
I have another question regarding prospect quality. Are there any numbers on the frequency with which marginal prospects or non-prospects greatly exceed expectations? Obviously not every good to very good major leaguer was a star prospect. Of course, most true stars were star prospects. I am looking for a way to quantify the odds, though. With the Marlins having just traded away Maybin and Miller (former top prospects), and considering a trade of Uggla (a rule 5 prospect), I feel like the great variability of even top prospects has been highlighted. Obviously Uggla was not garbage, but he was left off a 40 man roster (consider that DJ Tools still resides on ours, and we are carrying Cox who we hope will be Dan Uggla).
I’d appreciate being pointed in the right direction.
Ted, I don’t think there’s a definitive answer to your question. It’s really up to teams to value their own prospects realistically. The Cards used to be somewhat astute when it came to selling high on prospects who were more highly rated by outside observers. One of the best examples was trading Pablo Ozuna to Florida in the Renteria deal following the ’98 season. Ozuna was a top-10 prospect before everyone realized he was actually 4 years older than he claimed. I don’t know if the Cards knew that, but they seemed to have made a calculation that his value would never be higher.
But the same GM made a disastrous miscalculation of Dan Haren’s value 6 years later.
I don’t know if any organization consistently values its prospects correctly and accurately projects their development. Atlanta, a pretty astute organization, sold low on Wainwright. The Dodgers, who for a while were the best at signing and developing young players from Latin America, completely missed Pedro Martinez’s potential — they thought he was frail and would break down.
The Cards probably missed some opportunities to sell high on Bryan Anderson and Daryl Jones when they were considered top-100 prospects. But Mo appears to have sold high on Brett Wallace. There’s certainly no formula I’ve seen that predicts these things with any accuracy.
We are down to the final week of the AFL and I still believe that the Cardinals farm system has shown as well as any program out there. There were some ups and downs, but overall I think that the Cardinal representatives performed at a very high level considering the competition included in this year’s AFL. This performance in the AFL, coupled with the other “off season” leagues should give the fans a strong sense of security, that the Cardinals organization should be good for several years to come….assuming that they plan to draw from the farm system. Congrats to Miller and Carpenter for their latest well deserved awards.
I’ve been on the Chambers bandwagon since I saw him in Springfield last year. He’s got very solid speed, raw power, ability to hit for a nice average, great range defensively, etc. He’s a really good athlete with all the tools to make people forget about the great flop that was D.J. Tools. One thing I also noticed that surprised me was his absolute cannon of an arm he showed. He made two great throws from LF and on one he chased down a ball in the gap that easily should have been a double, but he ended up hosing the guy at 2B, it was a really impressive play. I think defensively he can play any position in the OF and projects to hit around .280-.285 with 15-20 HR’s and has the ability to swipe some bases as well. That’s a complete guess on his ceiling, but with a guy who is athletically gifted like he is, the sky is really the limit. The fact that he has been able to validate his great season in AA and AAA, with a strong showing in the AFL is very encouraging. Keep an eye on him, and there’s plenty of room to jump on the bandwagon with me..
my read on chambers’ AFL stintis this: the best thing he’s done for himself is to make jon jay look replaceable. if the club wants to put jay in a trade, mo has to feel better about doing it knowing that chambers is around. i don’t think he’s made a case as an everyday starter, but he definitely makes a good case for a platoon. if jay sticks around, chambers might be making a good case for himself as fifth OF.
+1 Trading Jon Jay this winter would be a sell high move. The advancement of Chambers makes losing Jay less painful.
I don’t really know that we can sell Jay high. No opposing GM thinks he’s a .390 hitter and noone was surprised by the correction he went through later on. I think he proved that he can be a useful though limited player particularly for a team like the Cardinals that has an unfilled outfield spot and a potentially good platoon partner. If we can trade him for equal value at another postion we need help at then I’m fine with trading him but I don’t really think we should be shopping him with the idea that he can’t be useful for us. Adron is at least a year away from being as useful as Jay is right now.
Well he did play about 40 games at AAA last year and with these 20+ extra games that are considered to be pretty decently competitive i would say he is closer than you think, but most likley not ready to fullfill the jon J role by the start of the season i would say.
Great OBP. Even with the bad year in 08 at QC. We could use a leadoff hitter…hope he pans out and soon.
While Chambers and Cruz have done well they haven’t exactly been the talk of the AFL. They are only slightly above average in league OPS. Kozma and Coz are in the lower half. Whoever above said that our group has shown as well as any other I think is looking through rose colored glasses.
Just curious, which team(s)’ prospects would you say have exceeded those of the Cards? Again curious, not disagreeing.
I don’t know enough of the prospects well enough to simply look at the stats and know what team they are on so I don’t have the time to compile your lsit but any team with 2 prospects in the top 3rd of batting (since we have none) probably would qualify. at quick glance the Angels would qualify here. SF has 2 of the top hitters and 1 of the top pitchers. Washington and Baltimore each have 2 of the top pitchers. (note: I used WHIP vice ERA though both are pretty imprecise measures.) Bottom line, when you only have one player in the top 1/3 of either pitching or the hitting stats (Delgado) it is pretty hard to be the best performing organization.
I don’t think anyone has mentioned that the Cardinals were the “best performing organization” this year in the AFL. The comment was that the cardinals farm team showed as well as any team represented and that would include from top to bottom of the players that were sent to the AFL. This was a positive statement that I feel to be true and you have to focus on the negative for the cardinal players that participated. Every team sent seven or eight players, and my observation was that the cardinals played or showed as well as any of them….nothing was said about the cardinals being the best performers. I didn’t check the stats on every player either, but that was my general observation and comment and at least it was positive.
Sorry if I didn’t bring you enough flowers (actually I did, just some of them were either wilting or haven’t fully bloomed yet). The rest is just semantics.
I would think that since you are a regular on this daily farm report that you might be interested in posting the positive things about the cardinal farm system and not focus on arguing and negative issues. First of all there are 119 pitchers in this years AFL (only 57 are listed with enough innings to qualify for posting) and there are 98 position players (73 listed with enough innings to qualify for posting)…..Delgado is 19th and Broderick is 30th and King didn’t have enough innings to qualify….that makes for two in the top 25% and one not posted. The surprise pitching staff is rated #2 in pitching to date. Secondly. there are 98 position players in this years AFL (only 73 are listed with enough innings to qualify for posting)….Chambers is 15th…Cruz is 22nd….Cox is 55th and coming on strong…and Kozma is 60th…that makes for two in the top 22% and two within the top 60%….and that is a little better than your posted comment that the cardinals only had one player (Delgado in the top 1/3 period). I still stand by my posted comment that these cardinal minor league players assigned to the AFL played or showed as well as any team, and maybe I do look through rose colored glasses and the view is not bad.
1.) you cant assume that the players who are not qualified are all worse than the all the qualified players (of our non qualified’s for example Swaggerty was better than most and King was worse than most.) Therefore you can not take a player’s ranking off the qualified list and use the total players (qualified and non qualified) in determining the percentile. I dont know if you made an error or were being disingenuous but it doesn’t work like that. You can only use qualified players and where they rank against other qualified players or use all players and where they rank against all players.
2) Why would you look at BA for hitters over the more robust and more encompassing OPS stat? In that, Cruz is 31 and Chambers is 34 (neither top 3rd for ranked players.) With cox at #48 and Kozma at #55 that gives us an average for our ranked players of #42 — An average in the bottom half! And we are as good as any org?
3) In pitching, we are only slightly better Using ERA (not a very telling stat but I cant say there is anything better easily calculable; though if given the choice I would take WHIP – also not good but maybe better) the 19th and 30th ranking. That its one at the 1/3 mark and the other below the 50% mark. Averaged together these players rank 24.5. that puts them just slightly in the top half. And we are as good as any org?
4) Simple random chance would seem that we would have someone in the top 25% of ranked players if we were doing as good as any other organization. Particularly when 2 of our hitters rank in the bottom 3rd. Overall we appear to be about average. Nothing wrong with that. Probably not “showing as well as any program out there” but certainly not the worst either.
5) It is hard for me to compare our players to toher teams as I don’t know enough about the other teams and there players. Given that, all I can look at are the stats of our players and where they rank. And the dont rank highly nor do they rank poorly. I’m sure there were several teams that did much better than our players (as well as some that did much worse).
6) I’m not a negative nancy when it comes to our farm system. I’m probably way above average in my thinking about how good our farm system is. I go through lots of paper bags. I’m not necessarily high on all the players we sent but on others I’m extremely high (it is me who has been comparing Chambers to Desmond Jennings ( atop 25 prospect in all of baseball) and have been doing so for months – long before the AFL) But realistically our contingent in the AFL was only so-so. This was a combination of who we sent and some players who dissapointed a little, mixed in with a couple that did OK. But good or bad, I will call it like I see it and without many first hand reports I’ll use stats to do that (and I think I;ve made my case well with them).
7) See riotmute’s post below!
Thanks for clearing that up….I see my mistake in my calculations, but I agree with riotmute’s observation that he AFL calculations to mean much in the big picture. My original statement that you took issue with was that I stated that the players sent to the AFL from the Cardinals farm system showed or played as well as the other teams be represented… I didn’t say, nor do I feel like, we had the best player performance of the entire group in the AFL. My comment meant that we were not the best team represented nor were we the worst team represented as stated by you above. The Surprise team is ranked third today and that pretty much sums up where we fit into the overall mix in my opinion. My earlier comment never was intended to reference the Cardinal players played as well as the best players attending…some were better and some worse. Again in my opinion, the Cardinal fans should be able to take a positive feeling away form this AFL as it relates to how our players compared with the overall league.
Fair enough. One thing of note, it appears that The Surprise’s stadium may play tougher offensively than most. I notice that they seem to be worse hitters on avg than the league and better pitchers. It could be the stadium or it could be the make up of the team.
Honestly, do AFL stats even matter at all? It’s a crapshoot, miscellaneous grouping of talented players playing together for a few weeks, after playing full season ball. Unless you are amazing or horrific, I don’t think we can tell anything at all.
I am in agreement, it’s a few weeks with some at bats and some innings pitched, tired bodies and arms as well for many. I don’t know how everyone in general did, but I see this as a showcase, and what is important is how the player viewed hmiself against others he faced.
I also think that players “stuff” is more of a consideration than his stats.
The AFL is what it is, and should be taken for it as well. Doing good or bad isn’t much of an indication but I do think in some instances it can help and in others hurt.
Chambers probably made the most of the opportunity, but not surprised, have seen him play in 3 levels and he is getting it done, for sure.