Archive for January, 2011

The next few minor league free agents we will take a look at here  all have non roster invitations to Spring Training, so other places like Viva El Birdos have picked up the coverage of these players.  But, hey, they are minor league free agents, so they might be ours for part of the year at least.  Let’s look at Ian Snell, the most promising “name” player picked up this month.

Snell is probably best remembered for his good early years with Pittsburgh in 2006 and 2007 when he pitched 180+ and 200+ innings respectively.    In 2008, he had slightly less control and slightly worse luck with a .350 BABIP.  Gotta love that Pittsburgh defense.  But, he allowed more line drives, which the defense had little chance of stopping.  That is where Snell’s decent begins.  He was traded in 2009 to Seattle with Jack Wilson and did not have quite a good conversion to the American League.  His strikeouts and walks were almost equal at around 5/9 innings.

By the time he made his 2010 debut with the Mariners, his decent was already in full swing even though he still had the ability to induce an above average amount of swinging strikes. Tom at Viva El Birdos points out Snell’s velocity graph at Fangraphs, which has his average fastball velocity dropped a whole MPH between 2007 and 2010.  Another bad set of numbers is that his slider and curve ball velocities have not declined either.  With the fastball and offspeed pitches at closer velocities, it is understandable how Snell has become more hittable.

However, one positive for Snell is that Bill James’s 2011 projection thinks well of Snell.  (I totally didn’t mean to rhyme that, I swear.)  James thinks his K/9 will pop back up to over 7 per 9 innings, where it has not been since 2007.

Snell has never been much of a ground ball pitcher, but who knows what a little bit of Dave Duncan Spring Training pixie dust will do for him.  Duncan won’t mind the lower velocity or the low strikeout totals, but the low ground ball percentage will not do.

With the Cardinals having a full stable of starting pitchers, Snell will hang with us in the DFRs in Memphis until an injury or bullpen call up.  He has put up good numbers in the minor when he was returned there, so do not read much into any great numbers from Memphis.  Snell may be lining up to be this year’s Ruben Gotay.

The Cardinals are really serious about adding to their middle and left-sided infield defense.  They added Freddie Bynum who played in MLB last in 2008 with the Orioles and he has been in Japan with the Orix Blue Wave.  Per Matt Eddy on Twitter.

His last season in MLB he OPS’ed .444 and his career OPS is .654, so don’t think too much of him.

I apologize to those of you looking for a post today. My life seems two steps ahead of me lately. If you hadn’t seen these, however, I recommend you watch the video that Derrick Goold tweeted about from the Winter Warmup.

Zach Cox

Shelby Miller

I’ll be around from 1-2pm to answer any questions you want to ask for a live chat.

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I’ll be in meetings all day Friday so this is your BA discussion post. I’ll update it with the link when I have a chance but it will appear here eventually.

Process of elimination probably tells who you is here but, still, these should be the most important prospects in the system.  We’ll have more ranking discussions next week as Baseball America releases their rankings tomorrow. I also intend to do a live chat on Monday around 1pm to answer any questions you may have about the 2011 list and Cardinal prospects in general.

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The top of the Cardinals prospect lists will all be pitching heavy this year and ours is no exception. There’s some new faces following the jump and two of my particularly favorite prospects.

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This is an interesting group for me. We’ve got a trio of long time prospects and two new faces from 2010. You’ll remember that we left #16 with Cody Stanley and start #15 with …

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I’ll skip the fanfare for this first post. Suffice to say we’ve compiled our top 20 list for this year. It is, noticeably, the least homogeneous rankings that I’ve seen since I started writing here.

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I’m going to run the companion piece to yesterday “Breakout” thread and today we are going to talk about the players that are on the edge and poised to break down.  Some players are already in the doldrums and will drop further.  Other were playing above their heads last season and will drop down from their lofty heights.

Here’s my three candidates:

Daryl Jones – The further Jones gets away from his breakout 2008 season, the more trouble he will be in.  If Jones continues on his path from the past two seasons, he is going to simply break down.  There is only so much ~700 OPS we can get from Jones in Springfield.

Robert Stock – Stock’s potential break down might not be the worst thing for the Cardinals as it will drive him back to the mound where a lot of prospect watchers think he will end up anyway.  Stock hit like a pitcher in 2010 in Quad Cities after a good rookie level season in 2009 at Johnson City.

Arquimedes Nieto – As much as it pains me to say this (Nieto is one of my pet prospects) he has been living on the edge for a few seasons here.  Nieto is basically a junkballer and has been on the shuttle between Palm Beach and Springfield.  Since he does not have overpowering stuff, he is always a candidate to hit the wall and break down.

Who are your candidates to break down this season?