Innholdsfortegnelse for March 9, 2018 i Baseball America

MARCH 9–23, 2018 VOLUME 38, ISSUE 7 Andruw Jones has been a longtime favorite of Baseball America, and for good reason. He won the Minor League Player of the Year award in back-to-back seasons, he twice topped our Top 100 Prospects ranking and, at age 19, he became the youngest player to homer in the World Series. So it was nice to catch up with the 40-year-old, ever-smiling Jones at the hot stove banquet in Charleston, S.C. He works these days as a special assistant in the front office of the Braves, the club he signed with at age 16 out of Willemstad, Curacao, and the one he won 10 consecutive Gold Gloves for during Atlanta’s run as National League pennant contender. Jones finished his 17-year major league career with…

All across the game, rookies are having a monumental impact. It’s gotten to a point that nearly every contending team, in some form, has a rookie to thank for their success The Dodgers reached the 2017 World Series in part because of back-to-back National League rookies of the year Corey Seager and Cody Bellinger. The Yankees rode 2017 American League ROY Aaron Judge to within a game of the World Series. The NL runner-up Cubs continued to debut an impact rookie yearly with Ian Happ. A trio of rookie pitchers—Kyle Freeland, German Marquez and Antonio Senzatela—helped guide the Rockies to their first playoff berth in nine years, and Andrew Benintendi finished among the team leaders in every offensive category for the AL East-champion Red Sox. If the recent past is…

Imagine any sports bar across the continental United States. That’s it. This is no different. The standard menu—the burgers, the fries, the wings, the nachos—the TVs all set to ESPN, the perfectly adequate service. You’ve been here before. You’ve been in a million of these. And there would be nothing remarkable about this particular one if it weren’t located on the third floor of a FEMA Disaster Recovery Center. Carlos Berroa orders a quesadilla and a Coke Zero from his seat by the window. He has time to kill, but not much. He grimaces as he stares at the soot-colored clouds rolling in over the mountains. He shakes his head and clutches his phone. It doesn’t look promising. “We might be lucky,” he says, half believing it. “We’ll see. We…

COLUMNIST, MLB.COM tracy.ringolsby@baseballamerica.com More than a few eyebrows were raised a year ago. The Baseball America Prospect Handbook had just been released when pitchers and catchers reported to spring training and the Rockies’ Top 10 Prospects ranking included six pitchers. At the time, pitchers, Rockies and Coors Field didn’t mix. Now they do. Colorado advanced to the National League wild card game last season, the fourth postseason appearance in the franchise’s 25-year existence, and it was a quartet of those young guns who provided the foundation for success. The demons have been exorcised. And scouting director Bill Schmidt has been vindicated. Long considered one of the game’s best at identifying hitting talent, Schmidt has begun to see returns on pitchers drafted by the Rockies. This is in no small part…

PLAY BALL! Check out some of the sights of college baseball’s opening weekend as shot by national writers Carlos Collazo and Teddy Cahill and posted to Instagram. The 2018 Prospect Handbook began arriving in mailboxes across the U.S. the week of Feb. 5, and readers across the country have been taking to Twitter to show off their springtime reading. Packed with reports on 900 players (plus 30 more if you get yours directly from Baseball America) it’s a must-have book for every level of baseball fan. Order your book today: store.BaseballAmerica.com @BaseballAmerica @BaseballAmerica BaseballAmericaMag ReadBA…

CINCINNATI REDS Nick Senzel is one of the top third base prospects in baseball, but his spring will be spent in the middle infield instead of the hot corner. The Reds are trying the 22-year-old Senzel at shortstop and second base this spring at his first in big league camp. “He’s expressed a desire to do it, and it makes sense for us. We’ve always said you let people play themselves off the premium spots,” general manager Dick Williams said. “There’s no reason to think he shouldn’t get some time there and show us what he can do.” Senzel played shortstop at Knoxville’s Farragut High but moved to third base at Tennessee in deference to former prep teammate A.J. Simcox. By the time Simcox was drafted in 2015, Senzel was…

Major League Baseball cleared 21-year-old Cuban outfielder Julio Pablo Martinez to sign in late February. Senior writer Ben Badler breaks down potential suitors. Visit BaseballAmerica.com/international inside the game / baseballamerica.com For the top prospects in the Dominican Republic, scouts travel to see them on their home turf. For Venezuelan players, they have to travel to the scouts. Nearly all of the top 2018 prospects from Venezuela have flown out of the country—to the Dominican Republic, the United States, Aruba, Colombia and elsewhere—to play in front of top decision makers. That’s because the number of scouts willing to travel to Venezuela continues to shrink. One of the most recent events was Major League Baseball’s annual Venezuelan national showcase, held in neighboring Colombia. While MLB’s Dominican national showcase featured the majority of…

The Dodgers haven’t won a World Series since wearing a Starter jacket. Same goes for the Mets, Athletics and Blue Jays, all teams often-remembered for the days when Starter filled the dugout of every team. And while Starter may have faded from baseball’s most public stages years ago, when Carl Banks’ G-III Sports Apparel took over the Starter league licenses four years ago, he revived all things iconic. That means the return of satin Starter satin jackets, and so much more. It won’t help teams over the World Series hump, but it might help fans reconnect to the glory days. “The Starter library is so vast that you could do too much too soon or you could bring back the key items that really gave Starter that emotional connection with…

WRITER, ESPN.COM jerry.crasnick@baseballamerica.com Shohei Ohtani is an international superstar along the lines of Ichiro Suzuki, and a 23-year-old talent with the long-term horizon of an MVP candidate. He’s aiming high in his desire to blow away hitters with his fastball and clear outfield fences on a regular basis. With the possible exception of Babe Ruth and Brooks Kieschnick, few players have aspired to that level of versatility. So before Ohtani went about the business of picking a team in December, agent Nez Balelo and CAA took an unusual step and sent a questionnaire asking potential suitors to outline their plans, philosophies and systems in place to help make this unprecedented partnership work. “I didn’t think the questionnaire was a big deal, because teams already had figured out they better have…

Throughout the season, Baseball America will present position rankings of the best college players in the draft class. Here we focus on the outfielders, which is one of the strengths of the class. 1. Travis Swaggerty, South Alabama: Swaggerty’s mix of hitting ability, athleticism and speed make him one of the top college hitters in the class. 2. Griffin Conine, Duke: The son of former big leaguer Jeff Conine, Griffin is coming off a breakout summer in the Cape Cod League. The lefthanded hitter has impressive raw power and a solid approach at the plate. 3. Tristan Pompey, Kentucky: Pompey earned All-America honors last season after an impressive sophomore year. He is a switch-hitter like big brother Dalton, a Blue Jays center fielder, but he is bigger and projects to…

@STEVERUSHIN inside the game / baseballamerica.com Baseball is seldom mistaken for song. Notwithstanding the circus calliope of the ballpark organ, the percussive pop of ball in glove and the shared language of hits and singles, the game is usually associated with just two kinds of music: chin and walk-up. Basketball is often likened to jazz, individuals improvising within a group dynamic. Baseball has no such analogy. An arietta (a short aria) is easily distinguished from an Arrieta (a tall righthander), despite the operatic solo artistry associated with both. There is one large exception to this. For 60 years, Billboard magazine has published its Hot 100 list of the biggest pop songs in America. For the last 28 years, Baseball America has published its own Hot 100, a ranking of the…