Archive for March, 2011

The Cardinals fielded three teams against the Marlins minor leaguers today.  Some interesting names make the list tonight with both good outings and less good ones. The system still seems to be sorting itself out as the pitchers are all throwing a couple innings and there are some less known names getting playing time. This kind of stuff shakes out as players trickle down from the upper levels and others get released.

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Derrick Goold has the story.

Diapoules was somewhat interesting given some strong groundball rates but a rosy projection for him is a fringe bullpen arm. Houston Summers also had limited projection for long term success. Ultimately, the Cardinals have a crunch of A+/AA level pitchers and these two were squeezed out as a result.

Best of luck to Mark and Houston.

Also, in the same story, comes news that Francisco Samuel was being shut down with a lat strain.  Could be a couple weeks, could be a lot longer.

The Cardinals minor league squads faced off against the Mets. (Aside: The Mets look like a truly terrible major league club this year.) None of the Cardinals high profile pitching prospects were on display but there were some nice performances among the position players.

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Andrew Moses is down in Jupiter watching the minor league teams. Lucky for us he sent along some video of Carlos Martinez. I’ve got three clips after the jump of Martinez throwing to live hitters.

Class, can we say “thank you, Andrew”? Thanks, Andrew.

The second video is the best, in my opinion. One thing to watch is how little the catcher’s mitt is moving. That’s usually a sign that the pitcher is hitting spots (and that the catcher is decent at receiving pitches). You don’t see the backstop stabbing wildly at pitches in these clips.

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One name that stuck out for me in yesterday’s Vuch Report was Kevin Thomas with 3 strikeouts in 2 innings.  The scrimmages during Spring Training are not gospel, but if something does not match what a player has done in the past, I take a look back at the stats.  Thomas has been in the system for 3 years and his last year at the pitcher friendly Palm Beach was his best.

In Palm Beach he was able to strike out 7.9 batters per 9 innings, which is not a stellar rate, but it is solid.  However, the fact that he has averaged only 3 walks per 9 innings in his career helps his strikeout rate stand up.  But, Thomas’s strength does not appear to be with the strikeout, instead forcing ground balls.  Thomas averaged around 60% ground balls last year in Palm Beach and regardless of the park, that will get outs.

I’ll be curious to see what Thomas does in Springfield against better competition in a park more suited to the hitters than the pitchers.

For the last several spring trainings, Farm Director John Vuch has been kind enough to pass along some notes from the minor league action that happens in relative obscurity down in Florida. While the major league camp gets the most focus, this is your small window of insight into the group of players that are still toiling away chasing their dreams.

Welcome back the Vuch Reports.

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Kyle McClellan has basically won the 5th starter competition, holding off all other comers in just two weeks.  Over at Gas House Graphs, Andy takes a perfect look at visualizing what type of contact each pitcher has allowed during the spring training games. I’m not going to steal the graph, so stop by and take a look at it.

Small sample size warning obviously, but it gives us some reinforcement of the information we had already on these guys.  Lynn is not a pure groundball pitcher but that’s not necessarily a bad thing and Dickson can get groundballs out of anyone.

Now that both look to be headed back to Memphis for the season, how has Spring Training changed your mind about these two hurlers if at all?

Thanks to reader Jim I’ve got some more spring training photos. I’ve also got veteran pictures that will probably be posted on VEB and some more pictures from reader James that may wind up on both.

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I was pretty tepid with regards to the John Gast pick. A lefty with control issues, Gast was uninspiring to me. His velocity was inconsistent in college but he was generally regarded as having a 90-91mph fastball.

Gast had a great start to his pro career at Batavia last season striking out better than a batter an inning with a 4:1 K:BB rate.  I’ve read several glowing reports of his work in Spring Training and he’s a name that’s popped up in my e-mail box on a couple occasions now.

Developing some mechanical consistency has improved his control and allowed him to more reliably throw strikes. While I’d temper expectations of him long term (he looks like a mid-to-back of the rotation pitcher best case) I still wonder if there isn’t the opportunity for him to make some noise this year. If he starts out in Quad Cities, with limited exposure via the tandem rotation, he could see an early bump to Palm Beach.

John Gast is someone I’m keeping my eye on in early 2011. Don’t tell the June 2010 version of me that; he’d be appalled.