Archive for June, 2008

Checking in on the Sleepers

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

Back in December, I picked three sleepers in the Cardinals system, unheralded players in the low minors that I thought would break out this season. Now that the 2008 draft is behind us and the short season teams have started, all three players are assigned to teams and putting up numbers that can be evaluated.

The first of these players was Juan Mosquera, who I liked on the basis of the solid batting eye he showed last year in the DSL. He’s a switch-hitting shortstop who walks a lot but hadn’t shown any power. Figuring he had plenty of room to grow and will be playing in his age-20 season this year, I thought some XBH ability might show up in a hurry this season. He’s still listed at 154 pounds, so there’s no evidence that he’s filled out his frame during the off-season. Assigned to the Gulf Coast League, he’s possibly behind younger middle infielders on the depth chart. He’s yet to record an at-bat or play in the field, although he was used as a pinch runner in the first GCL Cards game of the year. It’s also possible that he’s recovering from some sort of injury that’s relegated him to PR duties. Hopefully he gets into a game soon and stops making me look like a damned fool. (And recovers fully, if he’s injured.)

Too early to say whether this was a bad sleeper pick or not, but early signs are not encouraging. He almost certainly will not move along as quickly as I’d optimistically hoped for. (Make it to the FSL by the end of the season.)

Non-sleeper and Cuban defector Ryde Rodriguez has yet to impress with the bat, but so far in the five games the GCL Cards have played, he’s recorded two outfield assists. That’s something worth noting.

The second pick was Brian Broderick, a tall RHSP drafted in the 21st round last year who had excellent control numbers as a collegian and a rookie in the professional leagues. He’s gotten good results, with a 3.79 ERA through 18 games with Quad Cities. He’s made one start since the tandem system was abandoned at QC, pitching 7 innings of 1-run ball on Wednesday. His strikeout rate has fallen off dramatically this year, from 7.12 per nine over two levels in 2007 to 4.29 strikeouts per nine innings this year. He’s still not walking many batters: 1.36 per nine so far this season. A good number, but not the sparkling 0.94 per nine of 2007. A note I made in the original post was that he’ll need to improve against lefts this season and that hasn’t happened. Against right handers, he’s an extreme groundball pitcher. Lefthanders hit line drives and home runs off him far too easily, something he’s certainly working on improving.

In his start Wednesday against the A’s Class-A team, he faced a lineup featuring six left-handed batters, including Shane Keough, whose mother might be recognizable to any ladies into “reality” television or fellas with a copy of the November 1980 issue of Playboy. He faced those six batters a total 18 times, collecting two strikeouts, five groundouts, three popups, three flyballs (one for a double), and five line drives: three for singles, one for a double, and one caught by Tommy Pham.

Broderick has yet to gain any vocal advocates in Cardinal Nation that I know of, but he’s having a quietly successful campaign and emerged from the tandem portion of the season thought highly enough by his coaches to earn a spot in the rotation. My expectations of him for this season were to “dominate” at Class-A all season and to skip to AA in 2009. He’s got enough season left to bring his strikeout rate up and to continue improving against lefties. A couple outings like his June 10th, 8K performance against the Cubs’ A-ball affiliate would be nice to see. I’ll tentatively call him a successful sleeper pick.

The third sleeper pick was Jameson Maj, the closer at Abilene Christian University drafted in the 45th round of the 2007 draft. He’d only pitched 1 1/3 innings last year after signing a contract to join the Cardinals’ farm system on the last day possible, striking out two. But he was nails in the wooden-bat Texas Collegiate League and in college, although admittedly at the D-II level. Over those three levels of competition in 2007, he struck out 100 batters while walking only seven. He allowed one home run in his last season of college, in one of the first games of the year. The rest of the time, he did almost nothing but get ground ball double-play outs, strikeouts, and pop-ups. Big kid (6’4″, 225), excellent control, excellent balls-in-play tendencies.

I saw him at Spring Training this year, and introduced myself to him as a Jameson Maj fan, something he seemed more than a bit amused by. Nice guy, confused that I knew his amateur peripheral statistics from the 2007 season. Says he doesn’t like walking batters. He told me that his elbow came down with some soreness last year at Batavia, explaining his limited usage there as the season wound down. I didn’t get to see him pitch at all at Jupiter and was worried that his elbow discomfort would spoil opportunities for him this season. He said he’d be assigned to Extended to get the elbow in shape for professional pitching.

At the time I wrote the sleeper post, I had hopes that he’d start off as closer for QC and be promoted as high as AA before the end of the season if he performed as well as I expect he can. He was assigned to short-season Class-A Batavia again and has found himself pitching in a tandem with Ramon Delgado. He’s pitched in two games, starting on June 18th, putting up a line of 4IP, 2K, 1BB!, 6H, and 6R, four earned. He induced two flyballs: one caught, the other went for a single; twelve balls on the ground: one a double-play ball to end a poorly defended third inning, six more fielded cleanly, one thrown away by the 3B, and four that got through the infield defense; and one line drive for a single.

In his second outing on Monday, he pitched the last five innings, allowing no runs on three hits, striking out five and walking none. In that game, he allowed three fly balls, two of which were caught and one that went for a double; four grounders, two for singles and two that were fielded cleanly; two pop-ups on the infield; and three line-drives fielded cleanly by infielders. A very strong outing.

The coaches obviously think highly enough of Maj to put him in a tandem. I’m guessing they’re keen to get him plenty of innings to evaluate what they’ve got in his arm instead of doing it to convert him to a starting. So far, so good. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if he’s promoted to the QC bullpen very soon.

Update: Way to make me look good, guys. Maj’s next outing featured far too many line drives again (and another walk), Broderick threw the worst game of his career (I’m guessing), and Mosquera still has yet to play. Fortunately, I’ve got a day job.

Posted in minor leaguers | No Comments »

Finally, a Little Exercise

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

I got to sub in for the Embassy Tavern softall team last night in a double-header double-asskicking, batting tenth and playing catcher. (Check out the band schedule at their website. They’ve got music booked every night of the week but Sunday now. [If you generously characterize my caterwauling at Wednesday karaoke as music.])

I batted the weakest 3-4 you’ll ever see. The first pitch I saw was a ball that would’ve landed a few inches in front of the plate, but I chopped at it and hit a soft grounder to the firstbaseman, who picked up the ball a second after I ran past him to reach safely. The second pitch I saw a half-hour later was slapped under the first baseman’s glove and the second baseman couldn’t field it cleanly so I reached safely again on my second infield single. I took a pitch in my third plate appearance then lined softly in front of the right fielder for another single. In my fourth and final PA, I wanted to continue the incremental increase in distance I was hitting the ball and put a hard swing on a 3-2 pitch, but took my eyes off the ball and struck out. Shameful, man. I scored at least one run in there.

Defensively, I caught all two or three pop-ups to my zone and had two plays at the plate. Blue said the runner slid under the tag on the first one, but I got a quick tag on the runner for the second play. The first play shouldn’t have even happened, but I foolishly threw down to 2nd with runners on first and third to try to get a basestealer. The runner on 3rd stole home after the throw. The shortstop’s throw back to me was perfect, just didn’t make the play.

Had a ton of fun playing, though. Unfortunately, one of our players dislocated his shoulder sliding safely in to second. His pinch-runner scored and his shoulder was re-located at the hospital and he’ll be fine, so that worked out about as well as it could’ve.

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Way to Go, Comcast, Ya Jerks!

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

My cable provider, Comcast, is on the verge of picking up the Big Ten Network, which will allow me to watch all sorts of Illini basketball, football, volleyball, etc., at home instead of needing to go to satellite-equipped bars (two of which are in my top three bars in town, anyways). That’s outstanding.

I understood both sides of the stand-off. The BTN didn’t want their channel shunted off to an extra sports-tier package where it wouldn’t be seen by most of the fans and Comcast didn’t want to pay through the nose for the programming. The prolonged negotiations dropped the price Comcast is paying almost in half which would certainly be passed on to the customer—and then some. The thinking around here was that no deal would get done after the football season came and went—that Comcast had weathered the storm and the BTN would fold. That would’ve been a lousy outcome. The network’s going to be a great success now that it’ll actually be seen.

Of course, at about the same time, I find out that my cable internet provider, Comcast, is considering going to a monthly 250GB cap on bandwidth usage with big charges for going over. If the big ISPs do this, I could see a serious chilling effect on content providers, with webpages scaling back on the multimedia delivered on their pages, not to mention what it could do to distance education and such that I work on professionally. They’d need to provide some kind of method for customers to check how much bandwidth they’ve used so far each month. I’d guess they’d implement that with some kind of shoddy spyware. If it were my job, I’d just put a section on their billing website where you could check and offer a desktop tool to monitor a secure feed from it or something.

Fortunately, most of my work from home involves nothing more than a plain-text ssh connection. I doubt I use 250GB… That’d probably mostly effect people with lots of roommates sharing a connection more than anything else. I could see the next generation of consumer routers implement caching.

Posted in illini baseball, Illini basketball, illini football, tech | No Comments »

Been Busy

Friday, June 13th, 2008

Lots of projects keeping me too busy to write anything interesting here, although plenty of things have been happening lately.

I’m very pleased with the 2008 draft that the Cardinals put together. Brett Wallace was a solid pick at 13 and he looks ready to sign. Can’t wait for the short season teams to start playing, although I’d expect Wallace to start at Palm Beach once he signs.

I’m a big fan of the Jason Buursma pick at 755. He was Bucknell’s best player both at the plate and on the mound in 2008. He was the closer his first three years at Bucknell but started 8 games last season in 20 total pitching appearances. He pitches from a submariner delivery. I imagine he’ll be part of a tandem in his first couple of years. Here’s hoping he shows enough durability and an ability to get lefthanders out to stick as a starter as he advances to get the most out of his two-way prowess.

As they did last year, the researchers at College Splits posted their play-by-play derived situational numbers for all NCAA players drafted in the first six rounds. Our sandwich-round pick, Lance Lynn shows significant splits against lefthanders, walking almost 5 of every 27 he saw last season while giving free passes to rights very rarely. That’s to be expected, given that his changeup and curve rate average right now. I imagine he’ll improve against lefties as a pro when he’ll be spending more time working on the secondary pitches and facing lefthanded batters more frequently. I like the pick and expect him to follow 2007 draftees Mortenson and Todd up the ladder as his fastball and maturity are both advanced.

I’ve got to say, I’m a little annoyed at the reaction among many Cardinals fan of the news that the Navy expects Mitch Harris to report for duty. Much of the confusion and misinterpretation relates to the news coverage, typically lacking in matters like this. As Jason van Steenwyck is fond of asking, “Editors, when are you going to get some veterans in the newsroom so you don’t embarrass yourselves like this?” Fortunately, the Cardinals have John Abbamondi in the front office, who is perhaps the executive in baseball best equipped to deal with the situation in some way that produces an outcome favorable to Ens. Harris, RHSP Harris, the Cardinals, the USN, and the nation.

Posted in mlb draft | No Comments »

Good Line

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008

While reading this essay on anti-intellectualism, I encountered this sentence:

Intellectuals spray polysyllables like squid ink, to evade the democratic decencies of conversation.

Lovely prose, that.

One of my goals for the dissertation is to make it accessible. The chapter I’m almost finished struggling to complete attempts to make accessible a fairly rich body of work dating back to Aristotle… A very limited, but representative subset of it, at least.

One of my advisors is particularly skilled at making extremely dense and esoteric writing plainly understandable. It’s a marvelous skill.

Posted in personal nonsense | No Comments »

Little Notes

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

I cleaned up some of the links in the sidebar, taking down cardinals blogs that no longer exist or are inactive like the once-promising Birdwatch and the sadly, mysteriously retired Cardnilly. Added two new ones that are off to excellent starts.

I hate carpenter bees. There’s already a nest started in the cedar fascia board of my shed. I really like the way it looks unpainted, so I’m going to finish it with clear Thompson’s water seal. Once it stops raining for a few days, if it stops raining for a few days.

I was on the annual weekend-after-Memorial-Day camping trip this past weekend, camping in Round Spring Park and canoing the Current River 11 miles from Aker’s Ferry to Pulltite on Friday and 11 miles from Pulltite to the campground on Saturday. Not many people were down there—we saw only one other group on Friday and not many more on Saturday. Did some cave exploration and had a blast overall. There was a biblical thunderstorm on Saturday night that I somehow slept right through. Great times.

Checking to see if there were any reviews out about Nick’s trip out West, I ran into this clip that’s got quite a few of his bits in it. Hilarious.

Your productivity at work stands a high chance of going down due to VirtualNES.

Posted in home improvements, vacation | No Comments »