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Monday, June 25, 2007

Cool Minors Stuff

I’m going to try and switch up the format here a bit, because reporting on all the levels at once is a bit daunting for me. I’m going to focus on the interesting trends, or what have you, that I think are noteworthy.

-Alan Horne pitched another impressive game last night. Horne’s final line of 5-4-2-1-1-6-0 (IP-H-R-ER-BB-K-HR) left him with an ERA of 2.39 in 86.2 innings. As mentioned in the comments of the last post, Horne has also been deemed an “untouchable” prospect. Tremendous turnaround year.

-Brett Gardner’s been hitting for less power than he was early in the season, but his batting average is going up. It seems that Gardner was in fact sacrificing average for power in the early-going, but perhaps he’s found a balance. The weird thing in all of this is his K rate. When he was hitting for more power, he was striking out less, but now that he’s been hitting more singles, he’s been striking out more.

-Austin Jackson is 7 for his first 14 in High A, which is nice, but seeing as it is all singles, it’s probably a bit of a fluke.

-Jose Tabata has his OPS up to .750 on the strength of a .328/.418/.379 June. His numbers for the month are actually also a little better than that because of a suspended game, which has yet to be counted, where he was 1 for 2 with a double.

-The Seth Fortenberry in Low A experiment continues to perplex. Seth hit his 12th homer tonight and is OPSing a good bit over .900 since the beginning of May. I’m not sure why he’s still at the level. Time is not on his side and the Yankees aren’t doing him any favors.