It was a slow news day, so there isn’t much for today. There is a short, 2 inning scrimmage against themselves today. The real exhibition games begin this weekend. What a strange sentence that was to type… real exhibition?
Baseball Prospectus began its NL Central Preview yesterday. The projection has the Reds finishing at 87-75. The article doesn’t look at the Cardinals, Brewers or Pirates, so that doesn’t tell us where the Reds are projected to finish. Go check out the article, the two writers give some insights into their opinions on some of the players.
The Texas Rangers continue to spend like they have unlimited amounts of money for scouting/developing players. They recently signed a 17-year-old prospect for $4.5M. That is rather significant given that next year teams can’t spend that much on every player combined that they sign. This signing adds up to just over $13M spent since July for the Rangers on prospects. If this is the last year of a free and open market for international prospects, they are certainly doing everything they can to take full advantage of it.
Mike Newman held a prospect chat over at Fangraphs yesterday. He had this on the Reds:
Comment From MattWhat do you think of the SS situation in Cincinnati for 2012? Think Zack Cozart will keep his job, or does Billy Hamilton stand a chance for playing time?
Mike Newman:No offense to Billy Hamilton, but he would be embarrassed if he were in the bigs at any point next season. Jumping from full season A baseball to the bigs is bordering on insanity. Cozart will be a solid all-around SS who may very well post a very quiet 4-win season.
The question of course was a little out there, even for the biggest Billy Hamilton fans…. but what stood out to me was how good that Newman thinks Cozart could be this season. To be fair, it wouldn’t surprise me if he turned out to be correct. To look a little further into that, let’s look into projections for Cozart in 2012. What I did was head over to fangraphs.com and find Cozart’s player page which has projections from Bill James, RotoChamp, Steamer and Zips. His average projection was for a line of .261/.309/.413. That line would make him a slightly above-average hitter. Scouting reports also suggest he should be a little above-average defensively. Overall, I would say he is likely to fall into that 2-3 win range, but I could also see him going out and performing better offensively than the projection systems think he will do which would boost up his value too.