The Next Opening Days
I’m not a huge fan of just passing along information someone else worked hard to write, but that’s mostly what I’ve got, courtesy of MASN’s Steve Melewski. I highly recommend you all go and read Melewski’s blog.
The Norfolk Tides season begins on Thursday at Durham (TB). The Tides’ rotation looks like this:
David Pauley, Chris Waters, Brad Bergesen, Chris Tillman, and David Hernandez
Norfolk is looking to improve immensely off of last year’s underwhelming 64-78 team. They’re basically getting Bowie’s highly successful rotation from last year, and they shouldn’t struggle in the International League, especially with Nolan Reimold and Matt Wieters (briefly) leading an offensive punch. I’m not sure why Chris Waters is a starter, though – I thought he was a reliever now? One interesting side note: the Tides get to show off their stuff at Fenway Park against the PawSox in August.
The Bowie Baysox kick things off on Wednesday at Akron (CLE). The Baysox will try to defend their 84-58 record with:
Jason Berken, Jake Arrieta, Brandon Erbe, Troy Patton, and Bobby Livingston
That’s a good rotation that will get better when Brian Matusz gets called up (it won’t be long). Outside of Livingston, I want to keep my eye on all these guys. Bowie should also be pretty darn good again – I’m already looking forward to getting down there. Bowie will also play in Fenway Park in August against Portland.
The Frederick Keys are in Salem (HOU) on Thursday with:
Brian Matusz, Tim Bascom, Pedro Beato, Zach Britton, and Sean Gleason
This looks weak after Matusz, who will dominate and shouldn’t even be in Frederick. I’m particularly worried about Beato. Hopefully the Orioles can draft someone like Aaron Crow, sign him fast, and then stick him in Frederick in July to save them from Post-Matusz depression. The Keys went 63-76 last year and I don’t see them recovering from that much in 2009.
The Delmarva Shorebirds also get to open on the road against Lakewood (PHI):
Rick Zagone, Oliver Drake, Cole McCurry, Nate Nery, and Ryan O’Shea
Delmarva was actually pretty good last year at 78-61. They have a good rotation fronted by personal favorite Drake as well as Zagone and McCurry, who was very good with Aberdeen last year. I’m excited to see more Shorebird talk around here.
One last important date to keep in mind, as I will be devoting a lot of attention to it: June 9-10th is the First Year Player Draft, otherwise known as The Draft.
the young pitching corps looks very promising at all levels. bodes well for the future.
McPhail said this draft is going to focus on middle infielders in addition to pitchers.
“grow pitchers, buy hitters” was his mantra. makes sense to me.
Unlike you, Andrew, I really like Gleason and Britton.
@Greg – That’s fair. It’s a big jump to Frederick, though, and there aren’t a lot of quality position players in Frederick this year…it’s going to hurt them.
Aaron Crow will be well beneath where we draft, and given his treatment of the Nationals, I don’t really want him. It looks like if we are doing best available pick for the first round, we’ll be stuck with a prep pitcher, which I hate.
Real Baseball Intelligence (RBI), a leading resource in the evaluation of amateur baseball talent and draft coverage, has ranked Aaron Crow the #41 prospect in the 2009 MLB Draft. View his free scouting report (with video) at withthefirstpick.net/aaron-crow
Take that!
All I mean is someone with some desire to sign quickly. I’d imagine that Crow wouldn’t want to drag things out for a second straight year. Just a hypothetical.
How can Crow be considered #41 when he was easily top 10 last year? The debate was whether Matusz or Crow was a better bet for a college pitcher. Would we assume that if Brian Matusz were in the draft this year, he’d be top 50 instead of top 10, too?
Sounds fishy to me. But again, I haven’t put too much thought into the draft yet. Of course, I’ve heard who the top 10 or so guys are likely to be, but I haven’t looekd into it.
In regards to the prep pitcher thing – I believe Bill James once looked at prep versus college in the draft and basically said the success rate is roughly even as long as you don’t foolishly give a prep pitcher a major league contract (cough…Loewen…cough). Naturally, prep players take longer to develop though. I’ll try to find that article he wrote, it’s in a book I have somewhere around here…