The prospects we hear the most about these days have little relevance to a season-ticket holder at Wrigley this season, unless that fan also plans to take in games at Fifth Third Stadium in Geneva, IL, where the Kane County Cougars, the Cubs’ new Midwest League affiliate, will play their home games. Almora and Vogelbach [...]
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Posted 18 February 2013
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Tagged: austin kirk, brett jackson, brooks raley, chris rusin, dae-eun rhee, dave sappelt, frank batista, garrett jones, geovany soto, jae-hoon ha, jay jackson, jeffrey antigua, josh vitters, junior lake, logan watkins, nick struck, rob whitenack, trey mcnutt, ty'relle harris
Cub fans, take heart! The days of a Mather or a Vitters hitting in the 1- or 2-hole may soon be over. Notable in the Top Ten list of 2012 hitting prospects are the players who made it based on their walks and steals more than on their total bases. Here is a quick ranking [...]
These are the final regular-season numbers for Cub hitting prospects in 2012. Rizzo is the starting 1B on the major-league team for the foreseeable future, and is kept on this list for historical purposes. (He did spend half the season at Iowa.) I exclude him from the top-ten list of hitting prospects, which, based on [...]
We hear a lot lately about the Cub minor leagues being barren of talent except at the lower levels. This note is struck mainly in the blogosphere but it really started in Boston when the Red Sox and Cubs were negotiating compensation for Theo Epstein. This was Nick Cafardo in the Boston Globe last October: [...]
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Posted 22 August 2012
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Tagged: andrew cashner, brett jackson, chris carpenter, chris rusin, dj lemahieu, hayden simpson, javier baez, jeff samardzifa, john stockstill, josh donaldson, josh vitters, ryan flaherty, tim wilken, tyler colvin
Greg Rohan was a 26-year-old corner infielder and occasional left fielder when he began the 2012 season at Daytona, where he had already played during the previous two seasons. The Cubs must have thought of him as pretty fringe-y at this point, given his age and level, and when they finally promoted him to Tennessee [...]
This old Colvin watcher picked a good night to take in a Nats game. If you watch Colvin nowadays, you get an answer to the question, what could he do if he had an approach? It looks like somebody with his new team advised him to stop “protecting the plate,” or whatever euphemism you like [...]
Players in the organization are ranked according to steals per game times success rate. Everyone with six or more steals as of the close of business on June 25 is shown here. Lake may not have been 100% after a month on the DL with a back injury. This would account for his lower-than-usual success [...]
This is a ranking system that considers a base that is stolen to be as valid a unit of offensive production as a base that is attained any other way. It takes the sum of total bases + walks + SBs, adjusts it slightly, and divides by games played to arrive at a score, according [...]
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Posted 25 June 2012
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This is our first compilation of the Marmol Index for 2012. Here we use an adjustment to the original Marmol Index, which was simply K’s per 9 innings minus hits per 9 innings. Marmol deserved to have the index named for him since he always had the widest possible spread between strikeouts and hits-allowed. (We [...]
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Posted 21 June 2012
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Over three seasons I have ranked Cub pitching prospects according to the Marmol Index, or strikeouts per nine innings minus hits per nine. This has been a good predictor of success for pitchers likely to join Marmol in the Cub bullpen, such as Maine, Gaub and Beliveau, three lefties on the current 40-man who have [...]
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Posted 21 February 2012
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Tagged: andrew cashner, austin kirk, cameron greathouse, casey coleman, casey weathers, chris archer, dae-eun rhee, eric jokisch, jeff beliveau, john gaub, luis liria, matt loosen, rob whitenack, scott maine, trey mcnutt, zach cates, zachary rosscup