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July 8, 2009
Future Shock
Great Leaps Forward
by Kevin Goldstein
As the baseball season has reached the halfway mark, it's a good time to look back at some rankings. However, I'm not going to provide a full re-ranking, the reasons of which I went into detail during a recent interview with the good folks at Phuture Phillies:
PP: As a quick parting question, your current Top 5 Phillies prospects
list would be… ?
KG: I don’t know. I realize that comes off as a crappy answer, so let me explain myself. I’m never comfortable with off-the-cuff rankings because they kind of lessen the value of the real ones I do. When I do the Phillies Top 11 in the offseason, it’s going to involve pages and pages of notes, statistical analysis, as well as somewhere between five and ten phone calls to scouts. It’s important to me to put that much work into them because I really want to get them right, so to just throw five names out right now would be incomplete and sloppy, not to mention six months from now I’d get, “you have this dude here,
but now you’ve moved him there, what changed?” when nothing actually changed with the player as much as I did the work to try to rank him properly
Instead, let's identify the players who have taken the biggest steps forward and those who have seen the largest declines. To start off with today, here are ten from the pre-season Top 100 that have seen the biggest jumps up in their prospect status; we'll look at the bad side of things later this week. Note, these are players who began the year as Top 100 Prospects. I'll cover those who have moved their way into Top 100 consideration later in the week.
Brett Anderson, LHP, Athletics (Pre-season ranking: 24)
While his 4.86 ERA, .277 opponent's average, and 13 home runs in 831/3 innings might fail to impress, Anderson is the real deal, as anyone who saw the 21-year-old on Monday night now knows. If anything, he's learning on the job, and the two-hitter in Boston was a culmination of many steps forward for the southpaw. If anything, he has seen his upside increased considerably with his performance thus far. Often miscast as a command/control lefty, Anderson has that kind of ability to throw strikes, but he's been touching 97 mph with his fastball of late while sitting at 92-94. That's not a finesse pitcher, that's plus stuff and plus command, a formula that usually
equates to stardom.
Daniel Bard, RHP, Red Sox (Pre-season ranking: 97)
Bard was one of those players who ranked low because it was impossible to fully trust his 2008 performance after the Blass-esque nightmare that was 2007. He clearly seems to be over that now, allowing earned runs in just three of 18 big-league performances and being absolutely dominant of late, as he's struck out seven over four perfect innings in his last three appearances. He seems to be slowly gaining more and more of Terry Francona's trust, and could be setting up Jonathan Papelbon by the end of the season.
Gordon Beckham, INF, White Sox (Pre-season ranking: 28)
This is a matter of the quickness of his arrival more than anything else. While most 2008 college draftees are in Double-A at best, Beckham started the year there after a monster spring training, went 13-for-28 in seven Triple-A games, and was in the big leagues by early June. He's done an admirable job defensively while learning to play third base as he goes, and after beginning his major league career by batting .172 in his first 18 games, he's batting .405/.436/.622 since and looks like a not-so-distant future All-Star.
<< Previous Article
Under The Knife: Getti... (07/08)
|
<< Previous Column
Future Shock: Young Bi... (07/07)
|
Next Column >>
Future Shock: Big Step... (07/09)
|
Next Article >>
Transaction Analysis B... (07/09)
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45 comments have been left for this article. 
Team Health Reports: Washington Nationals
Kevin, would you say Neftali Feliz has improved his status? I read recent reports that he was sitting at 98 and touched 101 in a recent outing.
How is that different from last year?
Its not, I was just wondering if he has improved, regressed, or stayed about the same in your eyes?
As a fan. I would say that Feliz has NOT improved from last year, but Derrick Holland has. Holland has been in and out of the Rangers Rotation and bullpen but not been that impressive. Feliz is still hitting 100 on the gun, but his control is still spotty and he's now being tried in relief in AAA to see if he might be called up in a Joba style right-handed power reliever role down the stretch. (though, just like Joba, he'll probably return to the rotation next year).
Just to sum. Up for Feliz is the Rangers Rotation. Down would have been AA. Right now, I'd call it a push. (though putting him at AAA at age 20 was a stretch for him)