Baseball America released their Cincinnati Reds draft report card today, and you will need to be a Baseball America subscriber to read it, but John Manuel seems to like the group quite a bit as he had plenty of good things to say about the 2014 class.
I missed this one last week but it’s better late than never. Mark Sheldon had up an article at Reds.com on Pedro Villarreal making it back to the Majors. After making his debut in 2012 and getting a few innings in 2013 he wasn’t even invited to spring training in 2014.
“It was a big disappointment to me, personally, getting taken off of the roster,” Villarreal said recently. “Reality set in. I had to earn it back. That’s what I focused on this year — going out there, having a good year and let the cards fall where they fall and see what happens.
“Luckily, I got another opportunity to come back up here and help the team.”
Georgetown’s official athletics site has up an article on Tim Adleman and his return to professional baseball with the Reds. Adleman pitched for the Hoyas from 2007-10 and left leading the Hoyas in career strikeouts. I wrote a little about him back in August and how the Reds did a great job of finding him in independent league ball and bringing him into the organization. Go give the article a read, there is some good stuff in there from Adleman on his season and what he is looking forward to next year.
Prospect Rankings
This is my last week of preparation for the end of the year prospect rankings. I have each player ranked by their position right now and am out gathering some information on some of the guys just to help me with all of my rankings and to double/triple check everything or get different thoughts on some guys. Things will go through next week with five spots per day, but unlike in past years I am going to start with 1-5 and work my way through 25. Then on Friday I plan on having a chat/AQA kind of thing for all of the rankings, though I will be out of town next week and my schedule for when I will be back isn’t set in stone so there is a chance that the chat could be moved to Monday. I will know more about that next week. Should be a fun week.
Raisel Iglesias debuts this afternoon
The Reds agreed to a 7-year and $27M deal with the Cuban pitcher in June and it became official in August once all of his paperwork came through. Today will be the first day he wears a Reds jersey in a sanctioned game.