To read the club reports, click on the league buttons below.
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In the spring reports for each club, are the names of the painfully close, those closing in, and a few just plain out green-capped into a minor league career.
Coaches, trainers, scouts, managers, and general managers are not the only ones poking and prodding the prospects. The fans, who range from an aging bunch of Greatest Generations, to a smattering of families living the spring dream to the autograph hounds to the handful of hard-partying spring breakers, pay big league prices to sit in minor league parks, up close and personal, to see their heroes, and maybe catch a glimpse of the next great star on the rise.
Reading the Signs
Reading a minor league program of a club is the baseball zen version of tea leaves. Based upon how a club is recruiting talent, the type of talent, the quanity of bodies, and how they're distributed around the farm tell you a lot about how the club is postioning itself to perform, and how much stock they put in their farm system to get them there.
Checkbook clubs, which buy more of their players from the free agent market, tend to fill their minor league slots with servicable bodies and a very few prospects.
Organic clubs that cannot afford checkbook baseball, and leverage the farm for talent, have depth in prospects at all levels. Even amongst the organic teams, though, there is the ebb and flow of players. When the Mets are comfortable with their depth chart on the field, their minor league spring roster might be quite small. When they are in a rebuilding, or stocking year, trying to beef up farm production of talent, their minor league camp roster numbers swell. |
Then there are the clubs that are content with their small corner of the world, and their piece of the MLB revenue-sharing pie. Most of their clubs have minimal farm systems with the bare requirements in talent and bodies to keep up their player development system.
There are those organizations, on the other end of the spectrum, that are bulding the game of baseball long term. The Minnesota Twins have a deep farm system, rich with talent that made them our pick for MLN Spring Farm of the Year 2008.
The Red Sox are one of the Seven Wonders of the Baseball World. The firm of Epstein & Francona adeptly blends top-dollar players with a deep farm system to put both the drive and punch into a World Series Championship run. The Red Sox are also a spring apart on the fan side. The Red Sox Nation is a traveling sea of the faithful, an oasis of old school team idolization that moves like a wave with their club through spring training facilities
Each team’s spring training rituals are as unique as the clubs themselves. The Yankees do their spring with MAJOR ATTITUDE. Their minor leaguers have their own breakfast chef flipping omelets on the back patio of their spring training facility on the other side of Raymond James Stadium. Fans pass through a narrow walkway to secure areas away from most of the players. Meanwhile the now dark campus in Vero Beach, formerly known as Dodgertown, was an intimate love affair between fans and players, where open walk-ways and low fences offered the Blue Crew a chance to mix and mingle.
While Barry Bonds slipped into quiet ignominy, young Carlos Gomez, the Twins' big catch in the Johan Santana trade with the New York Mets, was lighting up the basepaths, possibly blazing a trail towards a better day in the National pastime. No one is bigger than the game, but great talent can make the game bigger.
How will each club fare after this year’s spring test? Click on a spring league and read the report.
Spring reports on each league and each club will come out daily during April. You can watch for your report on the main baseball page, or click on either the Cactus or Grapefruit League below to see what is currently available.
Completed reports available have an yellow ring around them. New reports added daily in April.
