Archive for the “Pete Kozma” Category

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.

Matt Baker has a really well written article up on Pete Kozma.  To a lot of us, this probably seems like a dead horse, but remember that he’s writing for Springfield where Pete Kozma was recently called up.  For the casual S-Cardinal fan, the 2007 draft was probably just another day in their work week.

There’s been a lot of back and forth on this site about Kozmanaut and Rick Porcello.  I’ve tried to stay in a middle ground of sorts — Kozma was never the worst draft choice but I was never excited by his talent or thought it was first round caliber talent.  It’s not a pleasant position to take because it leaves both flanks open for assault.  The Kozma-lovers say I’m underrating his tools/overall package and the Kozma-haters say that I’m not coming down hard enough on a guy who looks like a utility player right now.

One things for sure, Pete Kozma and Rick Porcello are inextricably linked in the minds of Cardinal prospect followers.  I think the reason for that linkage is important to decipher.  It’s about more than just those two prospects; it’s about the often underwhelming nature of the Cardinal drafts.  Jeff Luhnow and Co. operate from a different playbook than we might like.  They aren’t going to pick the flashy draftee to appease the hardcore fanbase and I’m certain they have good reasons for the picks that they’re making.  That doesn’t make it any less frustrating for us fans though.  When an instance comes along that so precisely mimics the macrocosm in micro, well, Pete Porcello and Rick Kozma is born.

After the jump there’s a few quotes from Baker’s piece I want to look at.

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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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Matt Baker, following in Kary Booher’s excellent Springfield Sports blogging shoes, has all the details of the minor league fall out from Brendan Ryan/Khalil Greene’s injuries:

• Pete Kozma from Palm Beach to Springfield
• Donovan Solano from Springfield to Memphis
• Kyle Mura to the DL
• Trey Hearne from bullpen to rotation
• Marco Gonzalez demoted from Memphis to Springfield
• Fernando Salas off the DL(?)

AZ decided to start the painful process of auditing his rankings of last year, something I think most prospect “rankers” would rather not do. Thinking of doing it myself makes me think about that dream you have where you are in the middle of class and suddenly you realize you are the only one in your boxer shorts. Really though, it’s a great idea and I’m looking forward to patting myself on the back/embarrassing myself in a future post by going over my list in a later post. (Brad Furnish…really? What was I smoking?)

I’ve been thinking about Pete Kozma controversy for a while lately, what with Bird Land’s Reader Top 30 ignoring him every week. I think AZ perfectly encapsulates how many fans feel about Kozma.

#16: Right where he should have been. Great start to the season earned him much acclaim in the blogosphere and much finger pointing at detractors. Things evened out by the end of the season to show that he’s a decent prospect but still not a great choice for a first round pick.

I’ve waffled back and forth on Kozma, but now I have to respectfully disagree.  It’s true, he started hot this season, fizzled, came back strong enough to earn a promotion to FSL, and there proceeded to lay a big, fat stinky egg over 94 plate appearances.

Allow me to cherry pick a little and throw out the aforementioned doorknob. What happened in Florida will stay in Florida, after all, it was the end of a long season. Let’s look at the bigger picture of his MWL season. If I butcher some numbers, then tell me so.

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Baseball America continues to roll out it’s top twenty prospects in each league, and this time the Midwest League is up to bat. Brett Wallace came behind Mike Moustakas, Neftali Feliz, Jarrod Parker and Ben Revere to be ranked the 5th best prospect in the league, and Kozma ranked 15th overall.

Pete Kozma ranked a spot behind Justin Jackson, who also plays shortstop and was the 45th pick overall in the same 2007 draft. Kozma had better numbers, but the scouts whom BA talked to took to Jackson’s overall tools. While scouts do like Kozma, he’s more of an acquired taste. In a nutshell, BA’s synopsis on Kozma is that he remains spectacularly unspectacular, but the tools that he does possess play so free and easy that he can and at times does play above them.

Their synopsis on Wallace is pretty much the same types of things we’ve been hearing: Great hitter, iffy range. Will hit well enough to make up for iffy range. I am tempted to debate that he belongs above Revere, but when you hit nearly .400 as a 19 year old for an entire season, it sort of takes away that argument.

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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We continue our way around the infield with a look at the shortstops in the Cardinals system. As with second base, shortstop has been a weak spot in recent years – the last shortstop of any signifigance that came through the system was Jack Wilson, who made his major league debut in 2001 with the Pirates. Brendan Ryan was with the big league club for most of the season and many hoped that he could become the everyday shortstop for the Cardinals, but his performance this season has made that possibility seem remote.

Unlike the keystone, however, the minor league system currently has talent at the position sprinkled throughout the levels. We’ve got a minor league trade acquisition playing at a high level in AAA (and now the Olympics), a first round draftee that has regained some luster in AA (and hopefully will continue to do so at AAA), a recent first round draftee that has been proving that he deserved such a high pick in A ball, and a 2008 high school draftee that has been tearing up rookie ball. We’ll take a look at them all after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

Before we get to the meat of this post, let’s start off with some good news: neither Tommy Pham or Daryl Jones have any lasting injuries as a result of the outfield collision last night. Jones is going to be put on the DL because he had some swelling in his calf and he was expected to miss around a week, so the club went the safe route and used the DL. [Thanks to John Vuch for the inside scoop]

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A few days ago I was chastised in the comments for having unrealistic expectations for Pete Kozma. The commentor was correct – hoping that Kozma can raise his slugging percent to .450 while maintaining his high OBP is setting the bar pretty high at this point in his career. It made me wonder, though, what a realistic expectation for a player in Kozma’s position would be. So I went back and took a look at every high school shortstop taken in the first round since 2000. A breakdown of their performances as nineteen year-olds is after jump, along with the details from tonight’s games. Read the rest of this entry »

One last post about my trip to Spring Training and then I swear I’ll shut up about it.  This one will be more observational and less photo-riffic (although I can’t resist throwing a few more pictures out there).  So, after the jump I’ll list the guys that made positive and negative impressions during my time in Florida. Read the rest of this entry »