craig

I'm inclined to agree with Truffle. I don't think anyone would care a whole lot if his name were Trevor Smith. He's a good athlete with legitimate power, but he needs a lot of work at the plate and in the field. That sort of thing would be intriguing for a catcher or shortstop, but for someone who seems ticketed for 1B, that's not exactly encouraging. Still, it's good to see he signed. If "anyone" means ESPN or the radio, that's true. But I can't remember many top-10 picks by the Cubs that people like us who check boards like this every day don't care about. A 3B/RF prospect with potential monster power, why wouldn't we care? We never heard of Vogelbach's name before, but we're all interested in him. We'd never heard Szczur's name or Wells name last year, but when there became talk that they had some genuine talent, we all got interested. I could care less if he's Gretzky. But a kid with big-time power potential and the chance to play 3B while doing so, hope springs eternal so I'm interested. Just like I'm hopeful that Rosario will have a rocket and end up hitting withpower. And that Schecht will sign and end up being a hitter. I don't see why Gretzky is any worse a risk than any of those other type guys.

If Gretzky signed on Monday and it's Thursday today, I don't think the commish is sitting on that. But if Vogel is a million over, it's easy to imagine him holding that up. I can easily imagine Gretzky getting overslot, but I don't think he's going to exactly be a big-ticket Selig-stopper deal. Devoss was $500 for a $350 slot and he got through. I doubt Gretzky is more than $150 over his slot, if that. I'm not a huge Dunston fan, he's got some good peripheral tools if he can hit, but if he's not a really good hitter I don't think he'll be good for much. But I don't envision him being a super-duper superslot. Overslot to $500K, maybe. $700K, possible. But I don't think he's a 7-figures type prospect or anything like. Vogelbach might be a million over, but I don't think Dunston is going to be in that ballpark. I also wonder if some of the Vogelbach stuff is a little speculative. That the Cubs have reached an agreement, I can totally believe that might be true. But I think that rumor is quite different from the rumors as to precisely how much the agreement is for. For example, the rumor that the agreement is done might be true, but it would surprise me if it ended up $1.2 instead of $1.65.

October probably, for fall Instrux? Seriously, Phil Rogers saying that he's heard rumors of Vogelbach signing is hardly proof that he really has. And for all we know, his report is simply a report that he first or second-hand heard that from Jim Callis, who heard it from who knows whom. I'm not doubting that he'll be signed. I'm just questioning whether in fact they have reached an agreement. And if they have, at the high price that is vaguely rumored, selig likely won't authorize that until August. If Vogelbach gets authorized on Aug 15, there won't be enough Mesa season left for him to show up, get oriented, do his physicals, and actually get into any meaningful game action. He might show up for a couple of games, maybe. But I sincerely think his Cub "career" will likely begin in the fall instructional stuff.

Thanks for detailed observations, keener, that's really nice and appreciated. If his range is good, his defense is good, his arm is good, his speed is good, and his power is good, that's a lot of good stuff. As with many guys, it may end up coming down to the unlikely ability to react to breaking balls and the speed/movement of pro pitching. If he can hit, sounds like a winner. Kind of a likable situation. As a fan mostly checking box scores, I have no idea if a guy has no range, a rubber-band arm, and is a dizz-brain. But I can pretty easily track the box scores to see if he's getting hits, walks, K's, and power. So if we get good news on the non-hitting stuff, and then if a guy surprised and actually could hit besides, then I'd know he's a guy to watch.

Keener, thanks. Would be interesting if he had some power, which I don't think he manifested in college. That's a good observation. Any thoughts from his 3 strikeouts? Look bad? overswinging? Fishing at junk? (I think he was a low-walk-high-K kid in college, so I assume he's a hacker who might not see breaking balls well...) Did it look like his knees buckled pretty easily on anything offspeed? Perhaps in a first game in full-season, he was swinging harder, both for the HR and the K's. We'll see how the K's go as the summer goes on.

After such a hot start, it seems a little odd to me to promote Geiger after a stretch that has seen him go 0-9 with 5 K's. I know the sample size is small, but that's 1/3 of his K's for the season in the last 2 games. Good luck to him in Peoria, I look forward to seeing how he handles more advanced pitching. He and Easterling along with some of the recent pitching promotions make Peoria an interesting team to watch now. The promotion decisions only sometimes link tightly with recent performance. If anything, it seems the norm for the Cubs to promote guys who are in slumps, mini-slumps or perhaps larger. If it's based on player performance, I think the machinery of decision-making goes more slowly. Management notices a guy is hot, takes some time to think about promoting or processing that through and who else will move, and by the time they do it the guy has rolled off of his hot streak. (As happens to all hitters.) More importantly, during the draft-signing summer, it's new guys in who domino others. No need to move Geiger before. But with DeVoss at 2B, that dominoed Amaya to 3B last night and Geiger to 1B. I'd rather see Geiger playing 3rd at Peoria and continuing to work on 3B than to have .377 Amaya benched, or to have Geiger playing 1B at Mesa. So basically I think this is more about DeVoss than about Geiger.

That's as slot or sub-slot as you can get for a teenager. Interesting. That's possibly good news to me in one weird sense: I'd wondered how it was that Rosario's signing had been authorized and announced, and few of the others. If he was a standard overslot, and DeVoss, and they had both been approved, that might have implied that we hadn't signed anybody else. But if Rosario was announced only because he's sub-slot, then perhaps they've signed 6 other guys to over-slot but those just haven't been announced/approved yet.

That certainly doesn't inspire much motivation to spend very hard on him. There are plenty of other overslot/superslot draftees who would seem much more worthy of spending dollars than on him. If he's good for the $200K dollars, that's one thing. But that doesn't sound much like a guy you spend $500-750K for, if that's what he's expecting. A mostly low-90's fastball that doesn't have good movement or location, and a short dinky guy with limited projection, spend it elsewhere. Thing is, he's got to decide too. That doesn't sound like the kind of pitching that's going to make him a weekend starter at Texas. A farm system has lots of teams and lots of innings to give to lots of pitchers, so you don't need to be pitching great to get a chance to pitch and work things out. But a premier program like Texas has what, two weekend starters? If he's smart, he might consider whether it might not be better to go pro and get innings, rather than go college and watch. But I don't know what I'm talking about, really, and even if I am being objective it's not as easy for a teenage kid to be objective about his chances. Sometimes you're used to being viewed as good, and the prospect that at Texas there are going to be at least a couple of guys who are both as talented, more advanced, more established, and much more likely to get the weekend starts might not register.

Thanks for note on Rosario signing. He's only 17, so he's got a lot of development time ahead of him. He's not tall, lists at 5'11", but my understanding is that the Cubs view him as having pretty good power potential as a hitter. BA had very little on him, I think since he's so young and as a Puerto Rican might not have been a showcase guy. But I think the cubs view him as having some power potential, in keeping with their prioritization on that this draft. Interesting that DeVoss got that much overslot. Any sophomore or HS/JC has leverageso some goes without saying. But I admit that surprised me some. Certainly he was one of the guys (well, he and Rosario) that seemed to produce the least enthusiasm on the board when they were taken. Hopefully they both work out. DeVoss walked like crazy as a sophomore. Hopefully the Cubs don't discourage that.

A regular poster at other board went to the last couple of Smokies games. (Or maybe it was yesterday and Saturday?) Had some other interesting comments about the games and players, but two that I'll pass on: Said Dolis got up to 95, but totally wild. Said that Beeler maxed at 91 yesterday, but said he had a nice little breaking ball. Both disappointing and encouraging, I guess. I htought I'd heard talk about Beeler being faster, and being a big guy I'd hoped he was a really good fastball guy with a breaking ball undeveloped, but that if he later developed a good breaking ball he might be really good. But if he already has a pretty respectable breaking ball, that's good. But if he's really an 87-89 guy who tops out at 91 once in a while, that's perhaps not quite as promising. Poster also said that in the two games, Vitters has looked great and has smashed a couple of balls on the button in each game that went for outs. Also said he's even made a couple of really good plays at 3rd. This poster is not a Vitters ripper, he likes him a lot, so much so that he believes he'll hit enough to be a success at 1B. But in past he's been totally hopeless about his 3B defense, which is also why he's so strongly in favor of putting Vitters at 1B. But he liked some Vitters defense this weekend.

Heh heh, at some point he'll want to have a K/BB ratio of quite a bit better than 9/9. But that's the game with teenagers. It's a projection game, and if we want to develop teenage talents, I can't let myself get impatient because a guy isn't developing right away and because I can't necessarily tell whether he ever will. I do admit I've been a little disappointed this summer. Last summer with Greathouse, Kurcz, Reed, Richardson, Hartman, Fitzgerald, I thought we had a whole crop of overslot type kids, all of whom had some low 90's capacity in HS/JC. With some natural development and maturation, who knew how hard they might be throwing or emerging? But a year later, other than Kurcz the other five all seem worse than they were last summer. Ackerman, different story, he has obviously gotten better. And Brian Smith, while he got killed this week, had shown some hints. Hopefully Reed is about ready to kick in and start to show some progress.

6'3" lefty Angel Mejias made his debut, with two perfect innings. He was on BA's list of bonused Latins from last year. Didn't specify how much he received, so as cal has listed "low 6-figures". Of the guys that had been listed as 6-figures players, he was the only one who hadn't played yet this summer. So being a pitcher, I'd wondered if he wasn't injured. So I'm delighted to see him pop up in a box score and pitching effectively. Scouted as a slender 6'3", he's 17, lefty, by report as of last summer touched up to 90. I sometimes remind myself that these Latin reports, when a kid signs when he's 16 as Mejias did, the scouting data is really based on the equivalence of an American junior high/JV guy. Very premature. But I'd think if there was a freshman lefty at my HS who touched 90 and was tall, I'd figure the chance was there that he'd project into a big-league power arm.

Cubs: IF Pin-Chieh Chen, Taiwan - $300,000 bonus Cal has set up an international signing bonus thread on this board, so you can always check.

Rhee bounces back from one of his rare good games with a pasting. 6 runs in the first three innings, although he ended up going 5 and allowing only 10 runners.

cal, thanks for the Liria article. I must say, that's one of the best articles by a local paper that I can remember, more scouting info and input from coach/manager on his stuff than you almost ever find in the local papers. I loved the stuff: the hard consistent 90-95 fastball with sneaky movement, and an out slider. I'm not sure I read it right, I kind of took Rosario's comments to suggest that, while he "can be a starter or a reliever", I almost took his comments to suggest he really projects him to end up as a reliever. But maybe he really did mean he might be a starter or he has enough power to make it as a reliever as well. But the "getting innings" think kind of hinted at the view that they might see him long-term as a two-pitch reliever. I thought the note that he'd only switched to pitching a year before we signed him was also informative. The bit about the stretch problems, hopefully fixable. Or not real; he gave up most of his runs I thought in one bad inning, and that possibly at the end of an outing? Might be that stretch propagated trouble and led to all of that. But could just be coincidence. And the part that all five of his runs were allowed with runners on base, well, duh, other than a solo HR what other chances are there to allow runs without runners on base?

Fantastic. Nice to Malava confirmed, a great-throwing catcher with serious power from both sides is fun. (Obviously throwing and power works only if you can also catch and hit, but fun to imagine how useful that could be if he can do both...) And fun to add another guy who projects as a possible true hitter, a guy who projects to possibly hit and hit with power. Between the draft and the Latin picks, there's a volume of new names who have a chance to develop into middle-of-the-order bats. With Castro and with the focus on CF types, the ability to be a little more corner-willing is refreshing.

Marwin Gonzalez is 22 now, is having a pretty easy time in the PCL. He's hitting .560 at present. He's not a power hitter, but neither is he Darwin Barney. Slightly over 1/3 of his hits this season have been for extra bases, and he's slugging over .450 on the year. .830's type OPS. I think he's going to be a major leaguer. Pugliese three no-hit innings thus far. Not bad early run for an 18-year-old.

One thing that probably had at least a little to do with Peralta's 3 year DSL stint was serving a 50 game suspension for PED's. Granted, Contreras did as well, but Peralta wasn't a bonus baby, so maybe they waited on him as a kind of punishment?..... Thanks, dave. I'd remember Contreras, of course, because he was a known name. I hadn't realized on peralta, since at the time he was just a no-name teen coming off a poor rookie year. That might explain it. Anyway, nice to have him start out well.

Other than Whitenack, Rosscup was daytona's best pitcher. Even when Struck was there. He was good, then he missed most of a month, then he pitched a couple of outings, now he's gone again. Does anybody know what's up with him?

Interesting that Peralta skipped past Liria and got the Peoria spot. 18K/2BB at Mesa is one thing, we'll see how that plays in full-season. He was 67K/19BB last year (67IP), and 22K/4BB two years ago (26IP). I'm kind of curious about his story. His K/BB have always looked nice, but he's always been highly hittable and hasn't had notably good ERA's. Second, the Cubs kept him in DSL for three summers before finally bringing him over. Usually the more favorably-perceived guys come over sooner. So maybe he's a late bloomer, or had some health issues, or wasn't advancing well in his English classes, or something. Or maybe he just wasn't viewed as being that gifted. That was then, it will be interesting to see what he's got now.

Man, lots of crazy jumping around. We'll see with Loosen. This seems to be the kind of thing they do with a guy who happens to be performing well but who they don't really view as much of a prospect. Put him wherever somebody needs him. So if I'm guessing this right, Peoria is left with: Kirk, Jokish, Hicks, Peralta, and del Valle? I won't be surprised if Struck get demolished in the PCL. But, sometimes when you're kind of confident and on a roll, it takes a while to get exposed. Beeler looked pretty decent at Tenn for a bit before getting kind of exposed. Kind of a change for the Mesa team. They'd been using a 4-man rotation, so to lose both Peralta and del Valle will change their look quite a bit.

Thanks much, pitch. INteresting that you note many changes and few curves. In the Peoria newspaper (http://www.pjstar.com/sports/chiefs/x1722639758/Chiefs-Kirk-pitches-no-hitter), Kirk said he was better yesterday because his curve was working, unlike the last several games in which he's been poor. Maybe the the off-speed pitch he's calling a curve and you're calling a change, but it's really the same thing? Just wondering, because sometimes guys have slow curve and harder curve. If he was mostly around 90, that's not overpowering of course but that seems decent. Granted, this was the best night of his life. So maybe on an ordinary day what was 90 yesterday is 87... Perhaps the 96 was sun, perhaps it was a flukey radar mistake. But I wonder if it's also possible that he does let rip a fast 4-seamer once in a while, but because it just isn't a very useful pitch he just ends up working with the 90-mph cutter instead, which locates and moves much better? Anyway, thanks a ton for the report.

Im pretty sure the gun hasn't worked at Peoria all year. I know it wasn't working at the 3 games I've been to this year. Here is an article about Kirk's no hitter, and they talk about his "stuff" a little in it. http://www.chicagonow.com/cubs-den/2011/07/cubs-farmhand-austin-kirk-throws-no-hitter/ I wonder how informed whoever's writing that really is? But it certainly seems fair enough. Although how often he's reached 95 since HS, I wonder. My understanding is that his fast stuff is straight and not that good of a pitch. So even if he could reproduce the occasional 95 that he threw in HS, that he doesn't try much because his 4-seamer isn't worth much. But that instead he lives on his cutter, which has good movement versus both lefties and righties. And his curve.

pitch, thanks for game report. One of the things we've wondered about is whether Kirk is all a location guy, or whether he has a capable fastball. Do they have a stadium gun, and if so can you share what kinds of velocity he might have been reaching? If they do and you can share that, thanks in advance.

OO, is it a lock that he'll play CF as opposed to the Cubs perhaps trying him at 2B? Just curious. 59 walks in 61 games, and 230-some AB. That's a pretty high walk-ratio. A Juan Pierre who walked like Brett Jackson or Matt Cerda could be a useful guy, even if he didn't steal a lot.