A quick look at several St. Louis Cardinals prospect-related items.
At TheCardinalNation.com
Over at Scout.com, I still have a few more interviews and recap articles on the St. Louis Cardinals prospects that competed in the 2009 Arizona Fall League yet to run.
Wednesday’s piece is I think my tenth interview from there. This one is with Scott Gorgen (for subscribers only). Most recently prior to that, I ran a free summary of the four position players. Don’t read it if you are squeamish.
AFL velocities
Just this morning, I came across several other items of interest. With the Pitch F/X capability installed at several of the AFL venues, some very detailed information was gathered. Baseball America has summarized both the maximum fastball velocity and average fastball velocity of 120 pitchers that competed in the league this fall.
Not surprisingly, number one draft pick Stephen Strasburg of the Nationals was the top in throwing at least one 100.5 mph pitch. He was also first in average at 96.78.
Of course there is more to pitching than velocity, but it is one important indicator. Here is how the four Cardinals pitchers fared.
| Max mph | # of 120 | Avg mph | # of 120 | |
| Adam Reifer | 96.1 | 19 | 94.05 | 12 |
| Gary Daley | 94.5 | 41 | 93.08 | 22 |
| Mike Parisi | 93.3 | 61 | 90.24 | 76 |
| Scott Gorgen | 92.1 | 78 | 90.32 | 74 |
Not surprisingly, Adam Reifer and Gary Daley, Jr. were among the harder throwers while Mike Parisi and Gorgen were less so. Note the difference of less than 1.5 mph between Daley’s maximum and average.
Prospect videos
I ran across a great site with prospect videos called ProspectTube.com. Here is one of Daryl Jones being retired on a comebacker to Strasburg in the AFL. There is much more than AFL content there, though you might have to do a bit of searching. Definitely worth checking out.
Cardinals top prospect lists
Over the Thanksgiving weekend, I will be sprucing up my input to the annual top 40 Cardinals prospect list to be unveiled at Scout.com starting on December 5. We will again run a countdown from number 40 to number one at the rate of one prospect per day. The final list will be weighted one-third each by my picks, Dustin Mattison’s and our message board community, represented by CariocaCardinal and Gagliano, two of our most knowledgeable members.
The Baseball America Cardinals top ten prospect list has been released. Those who subscribe can read Derrick Goold’s writeups of the ten, ranked jointly by Derrick and the BA staff.
Happy Thanksgiving
I will probably post on Thursday because that is what I do, but it doesn’t hurt to get an early start. Thank you all for reading and especially to the subset who have the interest and take the time to comment. Here is hoping everyone has a great holiday weekend.
