Ignoring Omaha

Everyday I wake up and say a prayer that the Royals have traded David DeJesus, Mark Teahan, Ross Gload, TPJ, John Buck and Grudz for a player.

The Royals send many prospects through AAA and have them prove themselves there before getting to the majors (Butler and Buckner last year. Rosa, among others this year). But the front office knows who is a genuine prospect and who isn’t. They know how much stock should be put in PCL hitting stats.

on the AAA team. Shane Costa has gotten more than a few chances to prove himself. I would be shocked if Mitch Maier was better than Mark TeahEn right now. As NYRoyal and others have pointed out, players in the PCL continually put up big hitting numbers. Don’t you wonder why no other team gave Craig Brazell a chance? Are they all stupid? I doubt it.

Remember Calvin Pickering? He tore it up in AAA. Then they called him up, and he hit a few homers. It was a lot of fun…. until we realized that players like Pickering on the big club meant the team was terrible. Pickering got a chance the next season and wasn’t good enough to make it.

They just called Aviles up and hopefully he gets a chance for some more ABs. There is a reason there are different levels in baseball. AAA and the majors are actually a BIG DIFFERENCE. If we bring up more than three or four AAA players to get significant playing time, we will lprobably ose 24 straight.

trade away average or below average players so we can promote crappy players who have thus far been unable to take roster spots from them??

thats not how you build a good baseball team, at least in my opinion. moreover, i think you have a really inflated idea of what MiL stats suggest.

but otherwise, glad to see more people reading and posting on the blog, don’t be scared off when ppl disagree with you, just turn it around and tell them why your right :)

I just disagree on the statement the front office knows who the genuine prospects are. No the Royals picked who they thought was the best prospect when they conduct the draft each year. But who is the best prospect now should be constantly reevaluated by the current stats, with stats from higher leagues having a higher value.

I know some journey men put up great numbers in the PCL, just like some top prospects put up crappy big league numbers with no consequences of the journeymen overtaking them. If they journeyman is better than the top prospect consistently, then he should play. But the stereotype of the AAA is very negative and it is hard for a AAA player to take the spot of a big league player especially when the AAA player is not an extremely young player.

Why are we devaluing the second best league? I care more about how someone hits in the PCL than in the Eastern Kansas League or the Western Iowa Conference. Matt Diaz tore it up in AAA in in 2005 behind a Royals team that lost over 100 games. Now he is backing up that success in Atlanta.

I can’t find Brazell’s current Japan stats but last I heard he was doing well.

In 2006 Jeff Kippinger had a good season for Omaha, and we did not reward his good play. Now he is playing for the Reds and doing quite well.

I’m not saying that AAA success guarantees major success in the least. I am saying that a top prospect who struggled in the minors but gets called up over a slightly older never highly sought after player with better minor league stats is stupid. Because if the PCL is so bad we should at least be using the players who tear up the PCL. Do you think that Marky Mark would outhit Maier in Omaha? I really doubt TPJ would outhit Berroa either.

Prospects and potential are dangerous words when they are outweighing performance in decision making processes.

does anyone think BERRORa at his worst was worse than Pena right now?

They are both awful hitters. But Berroa is also an awful defensive SS. Pena is at least a good defensive SS.

So, Pena is much better than Berroa.

how many times have we heard that? Too many. I don’t think the royals have any budding superstars. This miraculous super upside potential is largely made up in my mind. Players do not magically become allstars without performing in the past. But some players will continue to do extremely well as they move up.

Gload etc. dominated AAA….but now they are in the bigs and not fairing well. Maybe one of the players below them who is dominating at AAA would be able to sustain it in the bigs. It is impossible to tell unless they got PT. The guys we have now in my mind had their shot. They have all had adequate playing time and I don’t see upside for these guys, I see prolonged averageness at best.

Kepinger and Diaz may not be the missing links, but they would/should both be starters on this team and we would not be last in runs scored, homers, etc. Do you think Brazell wouldn’t have outperformed anyone we had at first base last year? Or even this year? And Berroa is better than Pena, just because Berroa isn’t liked doesn’t mean he is horrible. Hitting over .250 with 10 to 15 times more homers is not TPJ awful.

Here is my best example. The royals deemed Ryan Sheeley as their top first baseman prospect. Ryan Shealy has never hit well in AAA or the Bigs but he kept getting AB’s. Brazell was tearing up the PCL…the same PCL that Shealy couldn’t hit….but Shealy was the prospect so he kept playing over the journeyman.

I was mainly looking at Shealy 2007 and well 2008 numbers in AAA and comparing them to Brazells over the same period.

Newcastle looks nice on paper, but then you come down here and the people have a really bad reputation. I landed in Sydney and I told some people at the airport I was going to Newcastle and they made funny faces.

Newcastle is blue collar angry white kids who are racist to the extreme. Lots of fights, shady people, and rough night life. A week or two ago a couple of my american friends got jumped and beaten pretty badly. One kid had to get a plate in his jaw. Well anyways that was because a couple of local kids heard their american english, knew the semester was ending and knew that the americans would be going home before they could press charges against them.

Scientists from the University of Nebraska-Omaha recently announced that the stink emanating from the Saddle Creek Record label, and its cloyingly sweet brand of nasal indie pop, actually has negatively distored the true potential and power of several Royals prospects over the last several years. Bob Hamelin, who had a few decent years prior to the creation of Conor Obrist’s first band, Commander Venus, saw the writing on the wall years ago. “This town stinks. The music sucks too.” He growled to Omaha World Herald beat writer Thad Livingston in the summer of 1994. Although the sucess of Saddle Creek has spawned an independent film theatre, evidence suggests that the twee pop in NoDo has also negatively impacted the selection of films, which focus on the marginally eclectic, but largely avoid the powerhouse and thickly layered works of the true masters like Ozu, Passolini, Herzog, and lil Ronnie Howard.

I buzzed through the preceding 100+ comments, but IMO Costa has been given a bum wrap by KC fans. Someone pointed out that he only had a handful of AAA AB’s & a couple/few hundred AA AB’s before making his way to KC.

Calling him a bum, or a never has been would be similar to doing the same with AG at this point IMO.

I remember watching the (04?) draft when Costa was taken on my computer @ work. They had a video highlight reel of him, and the INSTANT I saw his swing I liked him as a MLB’er. He had/has a short compact swing. He has the body type to potentially turn into a power hitter. He is fast and can play defense at an avg+ level.

I know we are more than crowded in the OF w/ average players now, but I’m still banking on him being a serviceable MLB player if and when he gets the chance. Be it in KC or with another organization.

I may be all wet on this, and I’ll definitely submit that as a possibility, but he hasn’t in my recollection been given consistent AB’s in KC since his first callup when I think he was inserted pretty regularly…