This afternoon the Towel and I completed a trade in the Denslow Cup that we had been discussing since last week.  It involved David Wright and Ryan Zimmerman as the centerpieces, and since I had Zimmerman, my side was going to be bigger.  We play in a league that uses both OBP and Slug% as well as the traditional rotisserie categories.  Obviously Wright’s projected numbers year in and year out are going to give him a little more spring value than a guy like Zimmerman in our league because the couple percentage points Wright walks more than Zimmerman essentially cancels out the 5 or 6 extra points of contact percentage that Zimmerman will throw up come October.  Wright will steal roughly 10-15 more bases most years than Zimmerman, though, which gives him the edge.  Both are injury prone to an extent as well.

What I’m getting at here is that a trade involving these two guys should simply not involve any other truly valuable players beyond these two guys because they are strikingly similar players in a league like The Cup.  To further solidify my point, Wright’s ADP in ESPN league’s right now is 36.0, and Zimmerman’s is 39.0.  It does not take much value to square up a trade between two players that are 3.0 draft positions apart.

What that means is that I got hosed, because I threw in Josh Beckett and John Axford to go along with Ryan Zimmerman to bring back an oft injured 29-year old whose best season was now five years ago.  What’s more, Wright is in the middle of one of the hottest periods of his career at the dish and has a fractured finger.  Finally, the Mets are awful.  There is no realistic reason to think that anyone in that lineup will bang in 100 runners or score 100 runs himself because it’s basically a lineup comprised of refuse, Wright, Ike Davis, and Daniel Murphy.  Beckett is currently being taken at the 103 spot on average and Axford is going ten spots earlier.  What that means is that according to ADP, I gave up three guys in the top 100 for the guy I just described.

How could I do that?  Well, in short, I didn’t like looking at my squad every day and not seeing Wright’s name.  I hated watching highlight shows of him performing so well and playing so courageously through injury while on another manager’s squad.  David is my favorite player.  As I write this, I occasionally drift off and take in the objects in my room.  Directly under my television is an autographed photo of David driving in Luis Castillo from second that Whitney got me for my 26^th birthday.

David Wright is my favorite baseball player ever (tied with Nomar…duh), and I don’t mind if I got hosed in April to get him on my squad, because he is the kind of player that will keep me motivated and interested for the next six months.  If I didn’t already have Jimmy Rollins, Andre Ethier, or Shane Victorino, I’d be making the same kind of boneheaded moves to get them too.

That brings me to my final thought of the day.  I love the squad that I drafted this season more than any season in the past.  I have an entire lineup of my kind of guys.  When I say that, I mean that my squad collectively knows how to hit.  They crush strikes and take balls.  They hit the ball in the air.  They are either terrific athletes or young enough that it doesn’t matter yet.  And now, I have David.  If I don’t win this season, I’m going to be pretty upset, but what I’m fairly sure of is that my team hits, and that’s a really, really big deal to me, because for the next six months, they are an extension of myself.  When I look at my lineup before I go to bed, my team’s performance over the previous 24 hours is going to have a large and meaningful impact on the next 24 hours.

That’s just life in The Denslow Cup, bro.

---

Subscribe to The Golden Sombrero by Email

---

---

I recently returned to Dallas after a spring break that took me to Scottsdale and Farmington to visit the people I love as well as to visit a residency that hopefully I will be a part of once I graduate from dental school.  During my time off I was able to watch several Cactus League games at the finest baseball venue on the planet: Salt River.  Holy shit.  That place makes Camelback look like a JV complex.  After a decade in Tucson, the Rox and Diamondbacks deserve this place.

When I got home Griff allowed me to work out his C-Team guys in the infield and at the dish for a couple of days.  I was able to watch his guys play Durango (CO) High’s C squad a couple times later in the week.  A friend and former teammate of ours manages the DHS boys, and that entire program is doing a terrific job in no small part due to what he brings to the lower levels.  It was a great little break from the daily grind of dental school, and it reminded me of what makes this time of year so special.

I was fortunate enough to watch some of the younger guys for Arizona and Colorado take part in an afternoon Minor League contest on some of the practice fields at Salt River, and it was easy to see in their faces how grateful they were to be doing what they were for a living.  They were nearly all around 3 or 4 years, if ever, from breaking camp with the big club, but that was nowhere to be seen in the way they carried themselves regardless of the fact that it was Minor League Spring Training.

Over on the big field, Colorado utility guy and fellow New Mexican, Jordan Pacheco, was demolishing Cactus League pitching as he has done all spring.  It would take a real group of idiots to send this guy back to Triple-A.  He represented the state, as he has always done, spectacularly.  With upwards of five New Mexican players cracking Major League rosters this spring, there’s never been a better time to grow up a ballplayer back home.

As I worked out Griff’s boys, it was obvious how into the game the youth around Farmington is today.  Farmington High and Piedra Vista are the two best AAAA teams in the state and probably the two best regardless of class.  Shilo McCall (PVHS) is now the top draft prospect statewide following an Alex Bregman (Abq. Academy) hand injury.  PV defeated several very high quality teams in Phoenix last week including nationally ranked Santa Fe High (OK), and both Farmington schools are poised for what will prove to be a dogfight of a district season.

Perhaps the one thing that stuck out in my mind the most vibrantly while I was home was the generational aspect of the game.  Several of Griff’s kids have family members that I either played with or against or even watched as a kid myself.  Two good friends and former teammates watched the births of their first children this month as well.  This time of year reminds us all to look positively toward the future and toward the upcoming months and to treat today as exactly what it is: an opportunity to grow within the game and within life that we will never get back.  It reminds us that last season, last month, and yesterday are all distant memories and that today and every single day after it deserve to be approached positively.  Also, the weather in the desert southwest in March cannot be beat.

---

Subscribe to The Golden Sombrero by Email

---

---

In a previous post I commended San Francisco’s Kyle Zimmer for his standout career both as a student and as an athlete and suggested that he also will fall in the first half of round 1 come June, so I felt as though I should follow that up with a brief scouting report.

Zimmer has a prototypical pitcher’s frame at 6-foot-4 with lengthy limbs.  He is an excellent athlete and often receives better grades for athleticism than for anything else, a terrific sign given the fact that he has had to learn pitching on the fly.  He did not go to the University of San Francisco to pitch but rather as an infielder, but his arm is so strong that eventually he was bound to wind up on a mound even as simply an experiment.

Zimmer has added a lot of extension and length to his delivery and is far more solid in back than he was early in his pitching career, exactly what one expects from a converted infielder or catcher.  Quality deliveries require enough length to provide the time necessary to reach a repeatable release point from a healthful slot.  Zimmer definitely has a delivery now that allows him to do that.  He has been up to 99 mph this spring already and could throw up a triple-digit readout at any time.  With a potentially triple-plus fastball and some polish to his delivery, he immediately shoots into the one-one conversation.

His secondary stuff is behind the fastball, but not nearly as far as it could be given how little time he has spent on the mound thus far.  His curveball (we are only considering the sharper and quicker version even though he has used a loopier one in the past as well) already is a 50 pitch, and his changeup, while fringy now, has shown enough promise to assume that it will always be useable and will always be improving.

He commands the ball well to both sides of the plate, and his numbers back up his projectability.  He has filled out a lot in his time with USF (around 220 lbs. now), but he probably still has some development left in him as well.  His changeup has already looked better in his spring starts than it did on the Cape, and he has used his tighter bender more frequently as well.  All of this shows Zimmer’s propensity to listen and react to criticism.  Zimmer’s makeup is off of the charts, and I like him a lot more than other righties in the 1-1 conversation right now.

---

Subscribe to The Golden Sombrero by Email

---

---

As opening weekend of NCAA baseball came and went, baseball fans, particularly those of the amateur and collegiate ranks, were once again swept up in the joy of spring and a return to normalcy.  We have been without the game since the end of the Arizona Fall League in many ways.  Although there is no such thing as the off-season for us here at The Sombrero, the recruiting season just isn’t the same as the spring and summer seasons.

The premier series of the weekend saw Vanderbilt travel to Stanford where Mark Appel, arguably the top talent headed into the 2012 MLB Draft, deal on Friday night.  This series also featured the loaded 2011 Draft’s only unsigned 1^st-rounder, Tyler Beede, toss his first collegiate pitch.  Both of these teams rank in the top-10 and are absolutely loaded talent-wise.  What they also are loaded with are entire rosters of players devoted to academic excellence.  This weekend also saw Duke travel to 13^th-ranked Texas in a game that also featured nothing but standout student-athletes.  Next weekend Texas travels to Stanford where the same applies.  These teams come from prime-time athletic conferences and perform well in sports other than baseball, but consider the fact that last year’s Texas squad hosted a series against Brown, a school in which no player on the field was receiving athletic-based financial aid, and actually dropped a game to the Bears.  They’re the University of Texas.  Just imagine for a minute the 40 or so kids that the Longhorns football team might send to the hospital if the Bears were to travel to Austin for a football game.  This hypothetical scenario reflects the idea behind this piece.

Baseball is unique in the world of collegiate athletics in that it provides academically inclined players and institutions many if not all of the opportunities that those players and schools where athletics must come first are provided, which quite clearly is not the case across the collegiate sports landscape.

(more…)

#1 Matt Moore

Tampa Bay Rays

DOB: 6/18/1989

Previous Rank: 31

ETA: 2011

It’s almost impossible to earn a ranking ahead of Bryce Harper, but philosophically we consider a pitcher with present ace stuff and Major League opportunity to be more valuable than even a likely Hall of Fame hitter.  Moore made considerable steps forward in 2011 in the command department and catapulted himself forward into becoming the top pitching prospect in the game.  He then went on to make three appearances during Tampa’s stretch into the postseason before tossing seven innings of two-hit baseball to open the Division Series in Arlington.  Pretty impressive for a 22-year-old.

Moore is 6-foot-2 with extremely clean and effortless mechanics.  His body projects, but honestly, what do we need to project here?  Moore is the easiest 70 fastball guy in baseball.  His secondary stuff and command are top shelf, and his makeup is championship caliber.  His fastball reaches 97 mph.  His breaker is a deadly downer that consistently receives double-plus grades.  His changeup is an easy plus pitch with double-plus potential.  His slider is new and rarely used, but it is also plus.  Stephen Strasburg didn’t even have four plus pitches as a 22-year-old, and he isn’t a lefty.

Matt Moore will challenge for a Cy Young as soon as he is given slack on the leash to grab 100 pitches per start and 32 or so starts per season.  There is not a pitcher in the game today I would rather have signed long-term than Matt Moore.  Not Gerrit Cole.  Not Tim Lincecum.  Not Strasburg.  Not Justin Verlander.  Not Clayton Kershaw.  Matt Moore will be the American League’s best pitcher sooner rather than later.