From the Fish Pond and under a bus

There seems to be about two hours missing from my evening and I’m not exactly sure where they went.  My brother-in-law, Scott, just called to discuss check-in details for our quickly approaching departure to Jamaica and I noticed it was already 9:30.  I asked him what I should write about and he was zero help* in coming up with a good topic.

*Yes, I just threw you under the bus Scott.  Maybe next time you will have an idea or two ready in case I ask.

Normally I have no trouble coming up with things to write about, and I do have plenty of topics on the shelf to pull out and work on.  Unfortunately for me, I started off my night working on my prospect rankings instead of writing my article first and all those shelved post ideas all require far more time and research than I have to give right now.  So here I am “postless” and it is now 9:50 pm.

I suppose I have rambled enough without any real point so I’m going to drop some links and call it a night.  Yes, in effect I am mailing it in but that is probably a good thing.  I have flagged a lot of articles in Google Reader the last few days, and I did get a fair amount of work done on the KoK prospect list.

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David Pinto (Baseball Musings) recently covered two more Royals in his Players A to Z series.

On Kyle Farnsworth:

"The strikeouts are enticing, but Kyle’s other flaws negate their advantage. Couple him with a poor defense team and it’s a recipe for disaster."

On Josh Fields:

"Teams could live with his offense if he fielded his position well. Unfortunately, his fielding has been a negative the last three years. Of course, with those numbers he’ll fit in well on the Royals."

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Matthew Pouliot (Circling the Bases) covered the Kansas City Royals in their Diving into the depths series.

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Keith (The Royal Tower) wants Anthony Lerew to get a legitimate shot to make the Royals rotation.  I’d much rather see the team take a look at him than Kyle Farnsworth.  However I think it is unfair to assert that Kyle Davies has shown basically nothing.  He does have 99 major league starts and a lackluster career ERA of 5.54, but he has shown stretches of effectiveness throughout his career.  Davies has better stuff and is a year (eleven months to be exact) younger than Lerew.  For the long term sucess of the Royals I think it has to be Davies or Tejeda as the fifth starter heading into the 2010 season, but I would take Lerew over Kyle Farnsworth in that role every day of the week.

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MLB Trade Rumors recently posted a list of players who are out of options and there are some very intriguing names on the list that could wind up on waivers by the end of spring training.  I might do an article featuring some of those players in the relatively near future, but for now here are the AL Central players on the list without any commentary:

Chicago:  Jayson Nix, Sergio Santos, Gavin Floyd

Cleveland:  Fausto Carmona, Shin-Soo Choo, Andy Marte, Rafael Perez, Jeremy Sowers, Mitch Talbot

Detroit:  Don Kelly, Brad Thomas, Bobby Seay, Ramon Santiago

Kansas City:  Alberto Callaspo, Roman Colon, Kyle Davies, Josh Fields, Luke Hochevar, Anthony Lerew, Brayan Pena, Robinson Tejeda, Mitch Maier

Minnesota:  Scott Baker, Clay Condrey, Alexi Casilla, Brendan Harris, Delmon Young

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Speaking of Minnesota, the Twins always have excellent commercials and most of them put the Royals’ TV spots to shame.  Here is the latest from our friends to the North.

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A couple of minor league contracts of note that were announced yesterday.  The Texas Rangers signed OF-Endy Chavez and the Washington Nationals signed OF-Willy Taveras.

I’m a fan of what Chavez brings to the table, especially defensively, and there is no doubt in my mind that he be a better fit on the Royals roster than Brian Anderson or even Scott Podsednik.

I’m not a big fan of Taveras, but thanks to Oakland eating $4 million in salary, Willy was available for the minimum and did offer the speed that Dayton and Trey tend to drool over.  In this case the Podsednik and Anderson contracts probably saved us from Taveras.  For that I am thankful.

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Baseball America published a preliminary list of the top-100 college prospects who will be eligible for the 2010 draft, and then took a stab at lining up the top-32 players who could be selected in the 1st round.  As things stand now, I’d be pretty fired up if the Royals end up picking A.J. Cole.

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From the mind of John Sickels comes Get Off My Lawn.  Thankfully I’ve got a long ways to go before I reach 42, but outside of that fact I agree with his take and general premise.

"But I’m finding that as I read the most advanced sabermetric stuff regarding major league players, my eyes glaze over and I start to get the grad school feeling again: why am I reading this? I’m not enjoying it. I want to watch a baseball game."

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Finally I wanted to share a press release from the BBA:

The writers of the Baseball Bloggers Alliance would like to announce that they are taking to the airwaves.

Beginning Tuesday, February 16th at 11 pm Eastern, BBA Baseball Talk can be found at Blog Talk Radio.  This one-hour show will discuss the big stories of the day in major league baseball and other baseball-related topics.  Callers are welcome to chime in at 347-884-8690.

Your hosts for the first edition will be BBA founder Daniel Shoptaw, who writes at C70 At The Bat, and Ron Kaplan of Ron Kaplan’s Baseball Bookshelf.

Hosts will rotate on a weekly basis and the time and date of the show may move depending on the requirements of that week’s hosts.

The Baseball Bloggers Alliance is a confederation of 132 blogs working together for collaboration and discussion possibilities.

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(Wally Fish is the lead blogger for Kings of Kauffman and FanSided’s MLB Director.  Subscribe to his RSS feed and add him on Twitter to follow him daily.)