Archive for February, 2011

(I’m indisposed with work and home buying activities. Apologies for spotting posting lately.)

Carlos Martinez threw in Jupiter on Saturday.  Joe Strauss has a quick historical synopsis at the P-D.  Some fun quotes at the end:

But even before Martinez took the mound, Mozeliak saw the new man in camp throwing in the outfield and uttered “wow.”"These kind of days are always great,” Mozeliak said. “It’s a little bit like the anticipation before Christmas.”

There’s also some (limited) video of Martinez from Saturday via the Cardinals homepage.

This comment by Cariocacardinal got me thinking about a prospect stock market for Cardinals prospects.  I’ll revisit this throughout the year, but who do you think has their stock up to start the season?  Shelby Miller (code: SHEL) and Tyrell Jenkins (code:TYRE) look to have their stock way up.  Whose stock is down?  Daryl Jones (code: DJON) is plummeting.  Is it a good time to buy DJON stock or are we talking about a continued free fall?  Pete Kozma (code: KOZM) stock has been in a slow decline since draft day.

Who would you buy low?  Who would you sell high?  Whose stock would you short? (betting on a decrease in stock value)  I’ll hold you to your answers in the comments!

(No, Adam Wainwright is not Jacob, but some hot August nights when he pitched a complete game 1-hitter… it did feel like it.)

With the potentially devastating news from Cardinals camp that Adam Wainwright has a “serious” elbow injury; the next thoughts are always about replacements whether externally or internally.  In the Cardinals case, they said right now that they will try to replace Wainwright internally and that’s where we come in.  Let’s take a look at who can step up internally from the minor leagues from the preseason projections and some scouting reports.

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It’s still incredibly early to be talking about this year’s draft but I’m more interested than I’ve been in the past couple years and Keith Law recently released his top 50 list for the draft.  As much as this draft is billed as having top talent, it doesn’t mesh well with the Cardinals overall needs and it looks very pitching heavy to me.

I can’t recall where I read the interview or even who it was really with but I have in my head a recent transcript of a conversation with a Rays executive. They made some comments about the need to develop up the middle talent and frontline starters via the minor league system given the difficulty and expense of acquiring those types of players in the free agency process. This struck me as incredibly poignant and something the Cardinals have had some success with (Adam Wainwright, Colby Rasmus, Yadier Molina).  It’s also the first thing I went looking for in the 2011 draft.

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We often forget the prospect that fails for the next tantalizing kid to come along. This is even more true when the prospect gets traded. John Mozeliak and company deserve huge kudos for selling high on Brett Wallace and this interesting tidbit from Keith Law helps explain way.

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Nothing is better this time of the year than a little shaky cam footage of prospects live on site in Jupiter. Nothing against Derrick Goold or the P-D staff, because I love seeing these videos, but both this fielding video and this batting practice video both give me a quick headache.  PS P-D team- here’s a iPhone steadycam that costs less than $200. Also, I did not chose the photo above to criticize Cox’s fielding ability.

All of those caveats out of the way, let’s think a little bit about Zach Cox’s fielding and his place in the infield.

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Erik pointed out a great post on Royal Review by Scott McKinney in which Scott takes a look at a Success and Bust rates for Baseball America’s top 100 prospects over 13 years to see how they turned out.  And I thought that on the eve of spring training, this was a good check on the “hope springs eternal” optimism of Spring Training.

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I remember when Colby got started in the bigs in 2009.  Part of the reason I remember that is that I was feverishly waiting to claim sponsorship of his Baseball-Reference.com page.

I stumbled on this page this morning only to find that Colby is the 86th most visited player page on Baseball-Reference.  There’s really no point to this story other than the fact that it brought me a little smile. Outside of the recently re-signed Jim Edmonds (#78) and the eminent Albert Pujols (#4), Rasmus’s page is the most viewed among active Cardinals players.

I actually think the results for Miller came out to be very plausible. We had someone people who thought he’d do quite well and others who thought he’d have a bit of a rockier year. I’m personally a touch average on his FIP but overall it was a relatively clustered group of FIPs. Now, Miller could also completely bomb out in a full season of Double A but if he performs to these projections, he’ll be a top-10 or top-5 prospect in baseball entering 2011.

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This time it’s a SS from Venezuala:

#Cardinals get approval from MLB for deal with Venezuelan SS Leobaldo Pina. He received bonus around $300,000. More deals pending. #stlcards

per Derrick Goold