Well, I’ve been absent from the site lately. Erik has like 12,000 posts in a row (all of which you should read) and I can barely even manage to type a comment. Anyway, I’m getting ready to start work on the Visualizing Hitters and Pitchers series in the next few days or so. So apologies for my absence, grad school has been consuming my life the last two weeks.
In other news, the new movie Halloween is not for those who are squeamish or religious. Perhaps the worst movie I’ve seen in a theater in recent memory.
I’m not sure I can dedicate enough words over how impressive it is to see Pop Warner sitting Cody Haerther because a LH pitcher was starting. There are far to many managers in the major leagues that don’t recognize the value of a platoon and late inning matchups. For the most part, a manager doesn’t have a massive impact on each game but bullpen usage, platoon matchups and defensive replacements are a good place to start when evaluating a manager.
You might be a robot if: this doesn’t bring a tear to your eye.
Here’s an article about Mitchell Boggs as the staff ace of Springfield. His stats are underwhelming. He’s a moderate groundball pitcher who strikes out a slightly above average number of batters, walks a few more than average and does a respectable job of preventing the longball. His xFIP (FIP corrected for average HR rates) would be around 4.75 which isn’t that impressive. He’s probably a 4th-5th starter upside.
Kevin Goldstein assesses players that took a leap forward in AL farm systems.
Quad Cities loses the first of a three game series — game two will be at Beloit. Boom goes Allen Craig. And the news is good for Springfield. It’s your playoff-edition DPR.
- Colby Rasmus goes 1-for-3 with a walk and an outfield assist.
- Amaury Cazana Marti went 2-for-3 scoring 2 runs.
- Allen Craig went yard. Can we please get someone to fix his defense. If he can be a neutral defender at third, he’ll be a very valuable prospect.
- Reid Gorecki drew 3 walks.
- Mitchell Boggs threw 6 strong innings allowing 3 runs (1 earned) on 5 hits while striking out 3. Errors by Jose Martinez in the first and Allen Craig in the 5th accounted for the unearned runs — although the runner in the 5th would actually score on a wild pitch.
- Pop Warner didn’t mess around with his bullpen calling on (arguably) his three top relievers in Kyle McClellan, Jason Motte and Luke Gregerson. Each threw a scoreless inning of relief.
- Jose Ramirez went 2-for-4 and stole a base.
- Jaime Landin went 1-for-3 with a BB.
- An inauspicious start for Tyler Herron who only lasted 3.1 innings. He allowed 5 hits, 4 BBs and 1 K for 3 ER. If you want to blame it on something, the 46 minute rain-delay that interrupted his start is a likely candidate.
- The bullpen did their part with Michael Schellinger throwing 4.2 scoreless innings and Kyle Mura finishing the game with a scoreless frame as well but the offense just never showed up.
- Mike Folli went 2-for-5 with a triple.
- Nick Additon threw 2 scoreless innings striking out 1.
- Thomas Eager tossed 3 innings allowing 2 hits, 1 BB and striking out 3.
- The Mountain Dew allowed a hit and struck out a batter while recording his 15th save. In a horribly limited sample-size, he has little-to-no platoon split.
- Maybe this is wrong of me but I absolutely love watching managers get tossed from the baseball game. As the umpire’s hand moves in it’s upward trajectory and they yell “You’re out of here” I’m invariably cheering the ejection from my viewing seat. Batavia Muckdogs manager Mark Dejohn was ejected in the 4th. This Bud’s for you, Mark.
Filed under: Daily Farm Reports
erik
azruavatar
fewgoodcards
roarke49
theredbaaron
You hit the nail on Craig. I would love to see him become a good defender and top prospect.
Who is starting today for QC? It looks like Dickson from their website but I don’t know very much about him and he got shelled his last outing and it was against the same team. (5.0IP 8H 5ER 3BB 4SO was his line from that game)
dickson has been decent this year. he doesn’t get very many k’s, but gets gb’s by the truckload and doesn’t walk very many batters.
az, i agree that boggs’s stats don’t project him as a future ace, but i wouldn’t call them underwhelming. his 4.38 FIP is better then that of troy patton and jaime garcia, and a hair higher then franklin morales’s. his k% is not awesome, but it’s still good for 11th in the league. and last season his fip was .61 better then adam ottavino’s. i wasn’t sure about boggs going into the season with his unusually high hit rate in the FSL and thought the TL would make or break him. So far it seems to me it’s made him. even if he is only a 4th/5th starter, he projects to me to be better then the continual crap the big club has been trotting out there this year. 4th starters haven’t proved to be cheap the last few winters, so i think he’s worth getting at least a little excited about.
I say underwhelming because it seems that the organization has a ton of these guys who are all pitching slightly above average but don’t project beyond the back of the rotation. There’s this idea, and it’s not you erik, that calling a pitcher a 4th/5th starter is some kind of slight. Back of the rotation starters are valuable if you can get them for league minimum as you said and that’s not a slam on the individual it’s just an evaluation of a commodity.
After watching Carpenter go down, we’ve been lucky that Adam Wainwright has emerged as something of a front-of-the-rotation starter because our system doesn’t have a Clay Bucholz or Phillip Hughes. Maybe I didn’t contextualize it properly but I found his stats underwhelming in the sense that he’s the “ace” for Springfield. He’s a good young pitcher that may have a future in the majors but there’s nothing eye-popping about his performance to date.
AZ-very true there when you look at the system on a whole, no one jumps out as more then back end starter or middle reliever, save maybe garcia (if healthy) and maybe tyler herron. meanwhile, we’ve taking lambert over phil hughes and ottavino over joba chamberlain. there’s an obvious defiency in the scouting dept. in that regard.
there aren’t a whole lot of pitchers in the minor leagues that have true top of the rotation potential. i know phil hughes is commonly referred to as one of the top young pitchers in the game and a future ace, but has anyone actually watched him? he only throws 91-92 and will touch 94 every once in a while with a very straight fastball. i think he is going to have a tough time ever dominating at the major league level.
guys that i would say have ace potential that are either in the minors or first year in the bigs
tim lincecum
clayton kershaw
joba chamberlain
clay buccholz
david price
jake mcgee
I know it is only this year but where does Mortensen project to you two? Does he have enough upside to be 2-3 starter type or will he be the back end? Man I am starting to love following prospects, there is so much more to baseball then I ever thought.
The Cards system was so bare a few years ago that they had to fill their drafts with “safe” college players. I really feel that our minors are now full of really the same type of players. I think that is why so many of us have were upset with the Kozma pick. Granted he was a high school player, but all you heard was he was safe. Meanwhile there were a couple very high ceiling high school pitchers left on the board. That is frustrating.
With all that said, I really did like the Mortenson pick. To me he seems like a solid #3 type. I don’t think he has ability to strike out a lof of hitters that you see the MLB level #1/#2 starters have, but I believe he could be the type to consistently put up a 3.95/4.20 ERA with 120k and a real good groundball ratio. Unfortunately by that time Kozma will be booting balls all over the infield (couldn’t help myself).
Erik
30 teams passed on Joba. he was not in the 1st round. It was for health reasons. you cant say we have a bad scouting dept because of Joba. if that is the case then there are 29 bad scouting depts. Jake Mcgee might be the best pitching prospect in the minors and I think he was a 4th rounder. you never know with scouting.
FGC, Gallardo and Porcello? Also, Guerra has ace potential although I would like to see better numbers out of him.
gallardo is the exact type of pitcher i would call a #2. he is very good, and i would love to have him but he just doesn’t look like an ace to me.
i have heard enough about guerra. that guy is all hype and no results. sure he is young for his level and blah, blah, blah, but if his stuff is as good as they say and he truly has ace potential he should be at least striking some people out. he only struck out 66 in 89.2 innings this year and that is almost exactly what he did last year. a guy with ace potential is going to miss a lot more bats than that. when felix hernandez was 18 he struck out 172 in 149.1 innigns between high A and AA. that is what a guy with ace type stuff does, not 6.7 strikeouts per 9 like guerra.
porcello does have ace potential, but i want to see how his stuff holds up before i put him in the class with those other guys. i know price hasn’t pitched in pro ball yet either, but he has shown it in the SEC for 3 years and with team USA.
I would love to see a high ceiling guy drafted—-oh wait—-Mark McKormick! Then there is Gary Daley. We have tried to get our Hughes/Chamberlain (of course Yankee prospects are always grossly overrated), but they have not panned out as well as we would have liked. I like an occasional flyer (Herron), but prefer the safe low ceiling guys as a rule (Mortensen, Ottavino—if you consider him a low ceiling guy).
If anyone is interested here are the live box scores for our two playoff games tonight:
http://web.minorleaguebaseball.com/milb/stats/stats.jsp?sid=milb&t=g_box&gid=2007_09_06_tulaax_spraax_1
http://web.minorleaguebaseball.com/milb/stats/stats.jsp?sid=milb&t=g_box&gid=2007_09_06_qcsafx_belafx_1