Daniel Cortes: Will He Play in the Majors in 2008

1.  He is only 20 years old and hasn't pitched above High A in Wilmington.  Last year, he didn't even pitch the whole season.  It was a helium year for Cortes but AA will be a big step.
2.  Unlike previous years, KC has much better pitching depth so the Royals don't have to dig into the lower ranks.  The Omaha rotation in 2008 could have Hochevar, Davies, Dusty Hughes, Carlos Rosa, Tyler Lumsden, Matt Wright and Ben Hendrickson.  That doesn't include reliever either - only starters.
3.  Don't think GMDM likes to have prospects skip levels.  

Once you get past Verducci, who is still putting out a great product, there's not much good baseball writing at SI.

Seperate note, I have on three occaisions over the years e-mailed Peter King with glaring factual errors in his NFL column for SI---obvious embarrassing stuff---and never gotten a response.

EX:

When Al Saunders went to Washington as offensive coordinator and became the highest paid non-head coach in the league, King gushed for pages about the genius of this move.  Among his tidbits was the assertion that Saunders never called the same play twice in any four game span.  Italics were added for emphasis.  

Somebody told King this and he printed it as fact.  Period.  No follow-up, fact-checking or documentation, just from source to ear to scribe's pen.

For anybody who had watched the Chiefs offense under Saunders [which granted was highly effective] this was obviously nonsense, but there it was in black and white.

Four months later ESPN the mag did a cover story on Larry Johnson who mentioned that once he became the starter, the Chiefs only had about five running plays and just executed them over and over---running each one as many as three or four times in a single half.  

Dick Vermeil offered that by the end of the first quarter everybody knew what was coming but it didn't matter because they couldn't stop it anyway.

I followed up to King with a note including attachments to his original column and its refutation by actual research done by a staffer at ESPN the mag and first-hand on the record quotes from the star player and head coach.  

Asked for a retraction, mention, something.  

Nada.

Instead, Frank from New Haven who writes about the coffee on I-95 rest stops gets featured.  

I stopped bothering two years ago.  Unreadable.

Then NBC took over Sunday Night NFL and insisted that the NFL goons shut down ESPN's fabulous "Primetime" show so we could be subjected to PK's celebrity journalism across another platform.

The season highlight for me was the smug first-hand account of how he had spoken "personally" to Nick Saban and there was no chance he was bolting the Dolphins and that Saban was hurt people wouldn't take him at his word that he was committed to Miami.

Four full days after the press conference announcing Saban in Alabama, the video of Peter King offering this denial was still featured on the front page of the NBC sports web site.

Hilarious.

Royals Review forever.