Game 54, Orioles At Mariners
Bedard vs Guthrie, 7:10 pm.
Because any attempt to talk about anything other than Chone Figgins is immediately rejected, let’s just start off with Chone Figgins news – he’s not playing tonight, and Eric Wedge says he’s going to get a couple of days off. His performance last night obviously is a driving factor here, but more than that, I think anyone following this team can feel the level of vitriol rising towards Figgins, and it’s getting close to what is probably an unhealthy level of anger from a fanbase towards a player. If Figgins struck out a few more times tonight, he was going to hear it from the crowd, and I don’t know that it would be all that helpful for him or the team. The Mariners don’t need Figgins to be the new Bobby Ayala.
So, he gets a few days off and the crowd gets a few days to let their anger subside. It’s probably in everyone’s best interests.
Ichiro, RF
Ryan, SS
Smoak, 1B
Cust, DH
Gutierrez, CF
Kennedy, 2B
Olivo, C
Rodriguez, 3B
Peguero, LF
The 2011 Draft: Many Names, One Pick
Next Monday, around four o’clock, the Mariners are going to select the player that will likely finish the season as their number one prospect. It’s very cool for us, but also kind of scary. Coming into the season, we were pretty confident that the Pirates would likely take Rice third baseman Anthony Rendon and we’d then have our choice of UCLA RHP Gerrit Cole or TCU LHP Matt Purke or maybe a college hitter. Purke slipped off the radar, Cole has been good at times and mediocre at others, the college hitters haven’t broken away, and Rendon has simply been injured. In the meantime, various other names have clawed their way into the discussion and the whole thing has become nebulous as the “what have you done for me lately?” scouting crowd starts to make their vocal presence known. There’s a phrase my father used to use for situations like these, but it’s unrepeatable in polite company.
In the past few weeks, I’ve heard about seven different names linked in discussions for picks one through three of the first round. At this stage, the hope still seems to be that we get Rendon, but no one knows what the Pirates are going to do. If Rendon is off the board, it could go in any number of directions. What follows is seven capsules on the players we’re likely looking at. The information is largely culled from various internet sources and synthesized/spun in some small way. I’m not playing armchair scout yet because that’s something I reserve for draft day and players that I know to be in the system. College data is taken from collegesplits.com, prep data is pilfered from BA’s Top 200 Prospects list.
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