Archive for the “Daryl Jones” Category

The Cardinals have seven minor league free agents and the highest profile of them all, DJ Tools, Daryl Jones has already been claimed by the Cincinnati Reds. Check out the minor league free agent tracker here at Baseball America.

Jones’s OPS by year: .597 (2005), .745 (2006), .600 (2007), .889 (2008), .738 (2009), .696 (2010), .760 (2011).

One of these things is not like the others…

The full list of Cardinals minor league free agents are:
Freddie Bynum, Eric Duncan, Daryl Jones, Jeff Lyman, Rich Rundles, Donovan Solano, Nick Stavinoha

Daryl Jones is back in Springfield as a 24 year old, 3 years after his breakout season there in 2008 as a 21 year old.  What’s eating the DJ?  Let’s take a look inside the numbers.

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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?

With a downright awful 2010, Daryl Jones continues to be one of the more frustrating prospects in St. Louis’ system. What at times has been seen as a toolsy, athletic, above-average corner outfielder, is starting to look like an average fourth who doesn’t have the outfield instincts to stay at center, the arm for right, or the power for left.

Jones, an extremely athletic three-sport athlete in high school, was selected in the third round of the 2005 draft. After struggling to translate his tools to results in his first full two years of pro ball, Jones broke out in 2008, posting a .316/.407/.483 line with Palm Beach, and Springfield.

While he did hold on to a steady 21.5 LD% in 2009, his first full attempt at AA was hampered by a quad strain, and he’s never been the same since. While Jones has never been expected to hit for plus-power with his linear swing, he hasn’t even been capable of posting average power numbers lately, topping a .400 SLG in just one of his past nine months of ball. In ’10, his LD% trailed off to 19.7%. With a .292 BABIP, Jones posted a park-adjusted line of .241/.332/.345.

I had previously thought that if Jones could carry his success from ’08, and the first half of ’09, he could have a legitimate shot at earning a spot with the big league club in the 2011 Spring Training. That appears to be a long-shot now. And while Jones is still just 23-years-old, this stunt in progression is startling, and something to note, in my opinion.

What say you, readers? Is the injury still hampering him? Is it too early to give up on a 23-year-old? Has your projection of his upside been changed considerably with his awful ’10 season?

This will be a regular feature each week collecting the pertinent links for the minor league teams from their disparate sources.

Brian Walton has a lengthy post at the Globe-Democrat regarding Evan MacLane. MacLane is great for organizational depth but it’s unclear to me that he figures into any potential callups should the major league rotation suffer an injury.  For Memphis, he’s a welcome stalwart of the rotation though.

At the bottom of the article, Walton notes the sad news of PJ Walters’ daughter passing away. A very sad situation to which I can’t fathom the tragedy and can only offer condolences to the family.

Kary Booher is back at the Springfield News-Leader after spending some time with Baseball America.  He’s a top notch reporter and I’m thrilled to see him chronicling the S-Cards again. (Matt Baker, who was a good guy that I had the opportunity to meet, departed after covering the team last season.) Booher notes that Francisco Samuel is out for three weeks with shoulder pain. No reason to panic yet but if three weeks become four. . . well we’ve seen this injury progress in unfortunate ways before.

Booher: Can Daryl Jones breakout this year? Goodness, I hope so.

Booher: Kozma at AA and working with Pop Warner. We’ve seen several players in the past have real success at AA (Joe Mather, Jarrett Hoffpauir) and while some of that is park effects, the coaching staff at Springfield is the best in the system, imo.

Be sure to drop your draft questions in the thread below.

The system for the night: shutout loss, shutout loss, victory, loss.

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Matt Bakers covers the S-Cards for the Springfield News-Leader, and has stepped right in where Kary Booher has left off in putting together some great coverage for the team. You just don’t get the sort of coverage he brings from most AA teams, and he was kind enough to take some time out of his schedule and answer some of my questions about the team and his impressions of the players.

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As an addendum to the inital ZiPS post, Dan S. added two more players to the projection at the behest of commenters: Brett Wallace & Daryl Jones.

Wallace projects as something near to an average first baseman already (he’s likely above replacement level by a win or so) leaving him about 6-7 projected wins behind Pujols.  At third, he’s slightly above average but the loss in defense would probably be a push and keep him near the same value he’d have at first.  He projects to be better than Allen Craig and David Freese at this point, which should serve as further indication how expendable one of those two prospects are.  (You’re still my favorite 3B prospect, Allen!!!11!!1)

ZiPS trips Daryl Jones and then kicks him while he’s down.  A projected line of .235/.299/.351 is downright terrible (Braves fans should choke on that Francouer-ian line).  I suspect (ALERT: ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT PROJECTION MODEL AHEAD) a significant portion of that is a ZiPS regressing his BABIP from last season.  That’s not an unreasonable thing to do — it was high — and while Jones’s speed is an asset he needs to show more power to indicate that the line drives are sustainable at higher levels.  As promising as Jones’s season was last year, we’re still talking about 150 PAs above A-ball.  His upside as an outfielder is second only to Rasmus (apologies to Jon Jay) among Cardinal prospects but there’s still a significant gap between what he’s done thus far and a real live boy major league player.  To complete Goold’s SAT on Jones, I’d suggest Brian Barton as a reasonable floor to the Carl Crawford ceiling.

P.S. TOLAXOR makes an appearance in the ZiPS comments.  I subscribe to the objectivist school of thought with probability if you were wondering.

In what appears to me to be a bit of a down year for the Texas League, four Cardinal prospects ranked in Baseball America’s top twenty. Jess Todd ranked 7th, Daryl Jones 13th, Jon Jay 16th, and Fernando Salas 18th.

For whatever hand-wringing we were doing about Todd’s velocity, BA’s scouting report has him topping at 94. They seem to be fairly sold on him becoming a starting pitcher in the big leagues despite his size and they praise his strike-throwing ability and how he does a good job of keeping the ball down. Four pitch mix with fastball, slider, sinker, and a “squirrely” circle change. Todd was the third starting pitcher in the top twenty, with Vin Mazzaro (A’s) and Daniel Cortes (Royals) ranking just ahead of him.

Jones was omitted from the FSL top twenty, but again he came in 13th overall here. They praise the strides he has made in patience, power and base-stealing ability, but knock him for having a noodle of an arm and lack of instincts to play center field.

What BA liked about Jon Jay is his hands and ability to get the bat through the zone quickly, along with his solid center field defense. They again bring up his unorthodox approach but don’t seem to be concerned. With Colby and Ankiel ahead of him in the depth chart, he may need to move over to left field, where his power (or lack thereof) doesn’t profile well.

I was somewhat pleasantly surprised to see Salas at the back of the list, but I think I like Allen Craig better as a prospect. They say Salas gets by more by being a strike thrower then by being overpowering, although with his short arm delivery his 91-92 MPH fastball can sneak up on hitters. His curve is also an effective weapon, but certainly not isn’t a devastating pitch. He ranked sandwiched between Kevin Jepsen, who is on the Angels playoff roster, and Casey Weathers, the 8th overall pick in 2007.

While I’ve belly ached about some of the rankings this year, I do look forward to reading them as they come out. Agree or disagree with them, they do get us talking.

Cardinal70 recently asked me to participate in the latest “United Cardinal Blogger” collaboration, a project that I could not say no to. The project: Name your Top 7 Prospects, as inspired by our esteemed beat writer Mr. Derrick Goold. The regular minor league season just finished and it seems like it wasn’t long ago we were talking draft, and here we are already ranking players. Time flies.

NOTE: This is NOT our official list that we will be rolling out later. This is more or less my off the cuff rankings as things stand at the moment, and it’s still pretty fluid right now.

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