Young Prospects In Baseball

Looking back at the 2007 offseason, I think one thing can safely be said, besides the ridiculous amounts of money being spent, most teams are making a movement to protect their young prospects.

The only notable move I can really recall that involved a group of prospects for a vet was the young pitchers of Detroit (including Humberto Sanchez) for Sheffield.

Now lets take a look at the Mets, they have four prospects at the Outfield position, if you include Johnson and Milledge as prospects. The only prospect, or young guy, they got rid of was Bannister and Lindstrom (with someone else) and in both situations, they got prospects back.

The reason I feel that this is going on is the expense of veterans and the shallow pool of good free agents. Teams want to hold on prospects that could potentially become amazing

Now some might argue that this always happen. I have to disagree. Look back at the Mets last year. Two of their top 5 prospects, Petit and Jacobs were traded away, now the Mets did get some serious, serious talent for that trade, but still they gave them up. Actually on the topic of the Marlins, other teams, like the Red Sox, gave up a lot of top ranked prospects for guys like Mike Lowell and players that are around All Star Level or right below, not All Star and above.

Overall, I like this movement. I for one like young kids. Just about all Mets fans would rank either Wright or Reyes in probably their top 2. In a way, baseball made its own “salary cap” Instead of placing a restriction how much a team is willing to pay to get a player in order shift talent everywhere, teams now just put a lot of faith in their farm system. What this means is a lot more eyes looking at the minors, which is always a good thing.

Simul-Posted on Daily Baseball

First off, general baseball post now can be found at:

http://dailybaseball.blogspot.com

Todays post is a continatuont of my earlier post. Not the same at all, has more facts and info, so check it.

Ok on to todays game:

Hitting Doubles today was Delgado and new comer, Ben Johnson, an outfield prospect we received from the Padres, and its nice to see him hitting, however he is an OF as well, which means that OF in Triple A is gonna be really crowded

Johnson actually got 2 hits, Milledge, Franco, and Easily all got hits today as well. Newhan with 2 sac flys, Franco 2 run hit

Overall, with the offense, today was good news for the Mets Bench. The 07 bench had 4 RBI, and a few hits, so good job again Omar.

O and surprise, Reyes stole a base.

Wagner allowed two hits, and a run. One inning

Perez, 2 innings, 4 runs, 5 hits, a walk, a strikeout...so a lot of work to go there.

Everyone else didnt allow a run. I was most happy to see that Soler not allowing any runs because i still feel that he can be a dark horse fro that last position. ANother similar opinion about this can be found at the Brogna Blog as well.

My overall opinion is that Im just happy for baseball!,

Tommorow, my other team, the Orioles plays the Marlins at the Marlins, so that should be an opportunity to look at some division rivalry

And the Mets play a nice, friendly team we all love, the Cardinals, BEAT THEM GO METS

Not much time to talk about it right now, but here are the basics:

Tigers 5, Mets 4

Franco 2 RBI

Newhan 2 RBI

Big story of the day, Perez pitches 2 innings, gives up 4 runs, besides those 4 runs, all the other pitchers were perfect.

More on this game later

Sorry about practically no information yesterday, was out of state for the day. Anyway...while on my trip, I picked up a copy of Daily News From a rest stop yesterday and got some interesting news regarding baseball and the world.

Baseball is going to the holy land.

Starting on June 24th, 6 teams around Tel Aviv will be playing a 45 game scheduel. The players will mostly be from the United States and the Dominican. The league should be the equivelent of a Single A league.

Now instead of seven inning stretches, nine inning games, and extra innings, its going to have a fifth inning stretch, a seven inning length, and after those 7 innings, if the game is still tied, then it goes to a homerun derby.

A former Ambassador to Israel is the league commissioner. Ron Bloomberg (Yankee) and Ken Holtzman (Cub) are two managers. Another manager is MIRICLE MET ART SHAMSKY (a household name cause my father is a big fan).

Well i like this idea just because i like the idea of baseball all over the world, i think its important. More info regarding my opinion and other facts about Israel and Baseball soon.

Matthews Jr. the 50 million dollar man (one of the worst moves this offseason) is linked to a steriods investigation

and thats all i will say regarding that matter

Manny Ramierez says he wants to stay in Boston now for the rest of his carear.

As much as i want to believe this, i have a feeling he will stay in Boston but we will always have at least a few times a year, Manny trade rumors. it just happens in baseball.

Joe Smith

As of now, his story has been sort of a mystery, being very hard to find.

What we know from his high school days is that he had shoulder surgery in his senior year. In fact, he didn’t even play freshman year ball. He was a sophomore at Wright State University when he took the field.

He really didn’t even have a spot either, he walked in for tryouts,

More impressive is his velocity. When he started, he was ¾ armslot that had mid to high 80’s guy. His coach lowered his arm slot to the side and now he is a high 80’s to low 90’s fastballer.

His ERA in college was a .75 which would led division 1 (he didn’t have enough inning in order to qualify)

After the Draft, last year he played for Brooklyn and Binghamton. In Brooklyn his ERA was sub 1 and in Binghamton sub 6.

With no Chad Bradford, he looks to be a crucial spot for the Mets pen this year if he makes the team. One thing he has on his side is his age. At the young age of 22, the Mets hope to train and perfect him into a bullpen machine.

When you look at the long run, a 22 year old Burgos and Smith look to make the Mets formable and deep in years to come.

From Baseball America and milb.com

A while ago i determined that since Billy Wagners K/9 was 11.70 he had a KAVG of .433 that meant he had the probabilyt of 83% of getting at least one strikeout per game based upon binomial probabilty.

Now i will demonstrate why that means nothing.

Lets say that Billy Wagner pitched the ninth inning every game. And every game he recorded one strikeout. that would make his K/9  = 9.00

Now a 9.00 would lead to a KAVG of .333

when put into the calculation

1-binomcdf(3,.33,0) to find out the probabilyt of at least one strikeout per three outs, the anser is 70%

So 70% of the time he would have at least one strikeout. However in this scenario, we said that he had one strikeout per inning anyway.

What this proves is actually the point of statistics. As my statistics teacher said, if we were assure that all the answers we got were 100% def. true, then there would be no statistics. Statistics is the look into the chance that things will happen and this test shows that flaw in the hypothesis theorem that even though the stats suggest that billy should be getting 1 or more strikeouts in 70% of the games, by his stats he easily could just get 1 per game meaning 100% of the time

Thus is the magic of baseball, that we can sit here and destroy graphs of stats and liklyhoods of this and that happening, but still anything can happen that is 100% justified by math.

pretty deep

Gavin Floyd, now on the Chicago White Sox, has a mild strain on his right ankle from an intra squad game today. Its minor and he'll be out a matter of days.

In the first edition of funny numbers, i found a funny thing about David Wright

David Wright hit 40 doubles last year.

Well when messing around with numbers, i added up all the letters in DAVID, (for example D=4, A=1 etc)

Well DAVID = 40

Weird

In Blog News: a while ago i did a K/9 look at Billy Wagner, Im going to have in the next few days an article that describes why that anaylsis can be considered bogus.

Furthermore, this week I am very busy on expanding. I seem to post about 45/55 mets to everything else baseball, to make things more organized, i set up another blog that will have all my general baseball stuff, once its up, I'll have links to it. This will still be the home of all the mets information tho, and when i update the other blog, i will post that information on here. Further more, as a connection, (wow ive used furthermore twice now) I am setting up another blog for prospect information as well, because i am in the middle of a lot of prospect previews, there will be alos links to that site here.

Overall, I am creating the Gomez Lopez's Baseball Sites system, that will include around 6 blogs when complete to break things up and make them specific, everything can be accessed from this blog, To everyone who reads this blog, thanks for the support to allow me to feel that splitting will enhance the experiece of readers from those who want Mets news to those who want General Baseball news

As reported a few days ago, Pavano got hit in the foot by a linedrive. Today he continued to go through a battery of tests to see if he is ok to play.

Abreu on the Yanks got injured today. He hurt is obligue and could be out for 2 weeks at least. We all know though that the obligue can get better and still nag the entire season , due to its importance in the batting swing.

Manny reported to Red Sox camp today.

All from ESPN

The Rangers are really trying to lock up a youth movement. Although terms of the contract that is being negotiated are unknown, it is known that the Rangers do want to lock up Kinsler to a long term deal as well, to keep a strong middle infield of Kinsler and Young.

If the rangers keep Texaria after this year as well, for a long range deal, Texas could have a very good infield, if the numbers grow as they are right now of course.

Many people remeber last year when the San Fran Giants had their idol competition. Barry Bonds was Paula Abdul in the rookie and charity event. They had it again yesterday, this time Barry Zito was Paula Abudl.

The Mets yesterday had a media photoshoot that involved...cooking stuff. They all had cooking tools and ingrediants for the New York Papers

Um...i dont know what is worse...this public relations photo shoot, or the public relatiosn slogan...and im pretty sure ive seen a picture of ozzy guillen of the white sox recently with cooking stuff too, to say like a pinch of a bench or stir with bull pen and stuff....wierd

Miguel Batista is working on his first year on his three year contract. But apparently he has another talent as well. Miguel Batista is now working on his third novel, pretty nifty.

Micheal Young, All Star MVP (since Trevor Hoffman blew the game for the NL in the ninth) and the shortstop of the Rangers, is close to be locked up for another five years with Texas. The basis for this deal is the Chase Utly deal.

All from MLB.com

Yesterday I saw the Number 23, so I thought i would do a series about the number 23 in baseball.

Now in the movie they contort numbers in really strange ways in order to make the number 23, so i will do the same, and some might not make sense until u see the movie

Todays 23 target will be the catcher of the Yankees, Jorge Posada

Jorge Posada hit 23 homeruns last year.

He walked 64 times, half of that is 32, which reveresed is 23.

He made his major League Debut on 9/4/95. so lets take 5x9-4-9, that gives the answer of 32, which reversed is 23

Finally, his full name Jorge Rafael Posada, which equals up to 154 when all the letters get their number values. Take 154, and do this (1+5)4, that gives you 64. 64 divided by 2 is 32, 32 reversed is 23.

When doing this i also found some funny numbers, that i will post later.

So in the first installment of looking back to this time last year, lets looking at the 2006 Spring Training Guide from Sporting News. As an overall reaction, they got somethings right, and others very wrong. Here are some outstanding standouts:

Sporting News Spring Training Preview 2006

In the Top 5 off season moves that deserve more attention, they said that #1 was the Mets signing Paul Lo Duca. They said he would give the team more soul and pulse in the post season.