He recently released his Blue Jay Top 20 Prospect Ranking over at his terrific website and agreed to step into Da Box to discuss the Jays prospects further.
Imagine you were a scout for a major league team last winter and your general manager calls you to ask about Josh Towers. Your team has a chance to trade for Towers and the GM wants to know what you think. You say Towers is a #5 pitcher and he is not even guaranteed a rotation spot with the Jays in 2005, you suggest to the GM that he should turn down the deal. Next day the GM is back on the phone, the Jays have sweetened the deal and now they are ready to give up Alex Rios. You tell the GM to jump at the deal, you saw Rios at New Haven in 2003 and you think he is primed for a breakout season. Fast forward to today, do you still have a job?
If you want to be a scout you better have an opinion and you better be right more than you are wrong or you could be facing the wrath of your GM, if you are still working for him.
The easiest way to get to the live chat is to use Batter's Box's own Java applet. It will automatically use your Batter's Box account name -- if you have one and you're logged in, but a Batter's Box account isn't required to chat. Tonight's chat is in a slightly different format than the usual game chat in that it will be moderated by our own Joe Drew. Read on for details.
Original story:
The following information is adapted from a press release by the Toronto Learning Annex.
TORONTO -- The Toronto Learning Annex Presents sports journalist Alan Schwarz, joined by Toronto fan favourite Vernon Wells, in a lecture related to Schwarz's book, The Numbers Game: Baseball's Lifelong Fascination with Statistics at the Rogers Centre, June 18 beginning at 12:00 noon ET.
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And now, some parting shots from Sports Illustrated Senior Writer Tom Verducci, who flew down Blue Jay Way in Spring Training.Previously: 1. Paper Blue Jay
During the time Sports Illustrated Senior Writer Tom Verducci was flying down Blue Jay Way in Spring Training, the mainstream media was essentially ignoring the games on the field -- no big deal, it was Spring Training, after all -- to focus on games being played off the field.
Not all that long ago, it's likely that most Toronto-based baseball fans had, at most, just a passing familiarity with the work of Tom Verducci, Senior Writer for Sports Illustrated, even though the New Jersey-born scribe has been with the venerable print magazine since 1993, when the Jays were in the midst of capturing back-to-back World Series titles.
Now, pretty much everyone in Toronto, even the most casual of baseball fans, knows Verducci, thanks to his recent in-depth feature "I Was a Toronto Blue Jay," which placed the Blue Jays on the SI cover for the first time in more than five years. According to Verducci's own online-only "exclusive interview with myelf" about the experience, he was "embedded in the Toronto Blue Jays camp for five days, wearing uniform No. 2, [and] discovered what spring training and the major-league life are like in a completely unfiltered, uncensored way."
This week, Verducci steps into Batter's Box to further discuss his career and his Blue Jay experience, which Batter's Box general manager Jordan Furlong, writing in his own recent article, Viral Marketing 101, termed "terrific free PR" for the organization.
