Archive for the “Pete Kozma” Category

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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]

***

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 »

My father and I got an almost-private showing of morning practice for the minor league squads on Monday. We were lucky enough to run into Brandon Dickson‘s father outside the gates to the minor league side of camp. He got a guard to let him and us into the practice facilities at about 10:00am. Brandon was undrafted out of Tusculum College and was Quad Cities Pitcher of the Year in 2007 (according to his father). His numbers look pretty good, with a nice K rate, although his father said he was more of a grounball pitcher than a strikeout pitcher.

More observations from Monday after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »