As far as I remember Soto was last seen in Pulaski striking out about 60% of the time. He has been a flop thus far.

Lind is going to be Molitor or Mattingly. He is going to surprise with his power, possibly he will be Olerud with McGriff's power. He will astound!

As I said in the other post, I was surprised to see Rosario ranked #16 with only a C rating.  Sickel's explanation was that he couldn't throw stikes, but his 2.79 BB9 to 10.71 K9 in AAA last year was quite impressive, and a nice improvement on his BB9 rate.  Who cares if you walk 2.79 guys per 9 IP if you strike out 10.71 per 9 IP and you only allow 6.21 H9.  His WHIP was 1.00.  That's fantastic and he should have been ranked a grade higher in my opinion.

I'd agree that Lind should be a B+.  He may hit .300/.360 with 20-25 homers every year, but his weak defense should bring him down a notch. 

I was expecting at least an honerable mention for Ismael Ramirez.  I know he's 25 years old now, but he dominated A+ on 2004, was good in AA in 2005, and dominated AA in 2006 to the tune of a 2.08 ERA and 1.08 WHIP.

No mention of McGowan, is he still considered a prospect?

here is a HUGE amount of uncertainty on this list, and what ends up in the book may look different. The Grade C+/C guys are interchangeable depending on what you want to emphasize. For example, you can make a case for Rosario in the Top Ten or even the Top Five, but I just don't think he will ever throw enough strikes to live up to his potential.

Maybe I should have said "young players" rather than prospects.

I hear you. I didn't intend to come off as pedantic. Hinske's rookie season was certainly cause for optimism, especially given the broad range of offensive skills that he demonstrated.

Interesting that you referenced the Phelps thread. In it, I was the crotchety one citing Phelps' age and K rate as cause for concern. That he suffered such a rapid and dramatic demise hardly makes me prescient -- I was cautiously optimistic, not overtly pessimistic, so I'll hold off on the self-congratulation. I do recall also being cautiously optimistic about Hinske, given that he, too, was a 24-year old rookie.

I'll stick by my position in the Phelps thread: old rookies who succeed are an exception. Show me a 24-year old rookie who did well, and I'll show you a player with theoretically only a handful of seasons of growth left in him.

Hafner appears to be following the Giambi development curve. Start late (in Hafner's case, real late), and keep getting better until you hit 30. Not a traditional path, though of course in Giambi's case there may have been, ahem, contributing factors.

Of course, for every Hafner you can scare up, there's a Maas, a Charboneau, a ...

I was happy to learn from Jordan that roster members have set it up so that their comments are featured automatically.  I'll admit I have been quite frustrated lately that none of my comments were ever featured, especially because the response to my comments by roster members often would become featured.  But it appears this was just a function of their comments being automatically featured and a downturn in going through and manually featuring other comments.  I've always felt that the roster can run this site however they like and I owe them a debt of gratitude since I spend literally hours here each week, but I couldn't help but feel a little bit slighted before I learned of the automatic settings.

Off topic here but it does have to do with a Jays minor league affiliate and more specifically, a name change.  The Syracuse SkyChiefs are now once again the Syracuse Chiefs.  You can visit the team website at syracusechiefs.com for a peek at the new logo.

Matt Michael of the Syracuse Post Standard also has an interesting blog article on the new logo. 

http://www.syracuse.com/weblogs/baseball/index.ssf?/mtlogs/syr_baseball/archives/2006_12.html#213568

If they were going to change it, they've should gone back to the old Chiefs logo.  I liked the name SkyChiefs personally and the logo was pretty decent. 

With the Jays introducing that joke of an alternate cap at the Frank Thomas press conference and now this, it hasn't been a good off-season so far with logo changes in the Jays system.

I was recently reviewing Casey Janssen's splits with Toronto last year.

I haven't looked at this, so I'm just speculating. But rather than trying to make too much of Janssen's home/road and indoor/outdoor splits, perhaps his good-offense/bad-offense splits should be examined. If memory serves, and it does so less with each passing year, Janssen seemed able to bamboozle impatient offenses, like the Angels', but not so much the offenses that made him throw more pitches. While most pitchers figure to have a decent-sized good-O/bad-O split, I'm wondering if that wouldn't be more pronounced in the case of someone like Janssen. As I said, this is just speculation. I could be way wrong.