Future Redbirds

Rounding up Redbird notes from around the net.

I was checking the QC Times page for any Redbird notes and the headline on the page was not what I’d expected: It’s a girl! Now what do I do? While the article is a bit on the cliche side, I found it both endearing and humorous.

Kary Booher takes a look at what could be a dominant starting rotation for Springfield. As impressive as Walters numbers have been to date, a full season at Springfield will basically determine my opinion on him moving forward. A hitters park won’t be particularly forgiving and my gut tells me that the more advanced AA hitters will feast on his mediocre fastball. Prove me wrong PJ, prove me wrong! A name notably absent from that discussion: lefty Adam Daniels. This is probably the first year we will see starting jobs become truly scarce and servicable starting prospects get moved to the pen (Daniels, Haberer, Norrick and Rauschenberger all come to mind).

On the heels of erik’s prospect profile, Booher also has some quotes from Mike Parisi concerning this spring and the possibility of making the big league club.

Cardinals Diaspora has an impromptu interview with Colby Rasmus. (erik, I think we got scooped.) I’m still waiting for the Colby Rasmus blog to show up on the net. . . . .

Speaking of everyone’s top Cardinal prospect, John Sickels did a Jay Bruce vs. Rasmus smackdown on Monday. Also, some commenter spends the entire time debating the validity of Rasmus’ batting average. I used to make an effort to correct conversations like that (because there so wrong it’s painful to read) but I don’t have the patience I used to.

Matthew Leach has his latest (well-educated) guess at the STL opening day roster and this one includes Kyle McClellan. I don’t have a lot of faith in Franklin and Thompson being effective for a full season so I hope Worrell, Motte and Perez all have their Memphis-STL bus passes handy.

Several Cardinal bloggers that you should know, including FR’s own erik, took part in a Cardinal round table. Be sure to check it out and count how many times you read Colby Rasmus name.

It’s not directly related to prospects except for some guy name Colby Rasmus (that name sounds familiar. . . hmmm o well) but umpbump.com has a Cardinal preview as well. It’s not exactly inspiring — kind of like our offseason. ZING! — but the last sentence is tragically poignant:

In short, it was another utterly dispiriting offseason for Cardinals fans, really the fourth one in a row, and if you get the feeling that Cardinals ownership might be taking that famous loyalty of its fanbase for granted a bit, you would not be the only one.

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The community projections for Jarrett Hoffpauir were interesting.

That comes out to a .294/.375/.430 line for the second baseman with a .314 BABIP. That seems eminently reasonable depending on how much of a believer you are in his 2007 line.

For our top pitching prospect, Jaime Garcia, we see a return to greatness.

Those peripherals predict a FIP of 3.75 with a K/9 of 8.3 and a BB/9 of 3.2. If Garcia puts those numbers up while staying healthy, I’d guess he’d make his way into the top 25 prospects of baseball. I really hope that elbow stays attached for a whole season.

You can download the individual projections here.