Three days until pitchers and catchers report. AWESOME.
Didi Gregorius took home some hardware (assuming there was an actual piece of hardware given out) in the Australian Baseball League for the leagues best defensive player. He can pick it and throw it pretty well. He has all the tools you want to see out of a shortstop and if his bat comes around even a little bit, he could become a very good prospect.
The Louisville Bats have up a Front Office Blog now, which is called The Bat Signal and is being run by Nick Evans, Danny Steele, Matt Andrews and the interns (Danny Steele used to intern with the Bats, then with the Reds…. glad to see that he got his feet back in the door with the Bats). Right now there are only a few posts up, but one of them is of a recent Press Conference with Rick Sweet that has some video to watch, so go check it out and be sure to subscribe to the site. I am sure there will be some good content there throughout the season.
Jonathan Mayo is going to be doing a Top 10 prospects list for each organization soon. This will be a first for Milb.com/MLB.com, but Mayo does some good work and knows the systems well. Should be interesting to see what he has as the Reds Top 10 when it comes out.
Not all minor leaguers get a large signing bonus and can actually take off during the “offseason”. You guys know that of course, but I found this story up on Milb.com about a Padres prospect who took an interesting job while recovering from knee surgery this offseason. I know that we are all huge baseball guys, but I found this part of his story pretty interesting:
“People are absolutely clueless about how Minor League Baseball works,” he said. “I’ll tell them I play in the Minors for Oakland, and they’ll then ask ‘Well, when are you getting drafted?’ So many [of my customers] seem to think that the Minors are some sort of semi-pro league.”
Maybe I have always just followed baseball more in depth, but even as a young kid I knew that players were in the minor leagues after they got drafted (maybe because of baseball cards as a young kid, but who didn’t collect baseball cards as a kid?).