I think as Tony has taken more on in research, interviews, visiting affiliates, he's become less the cheerleading fan and more of a reporter. However, his primary sources are the coaches, scouts and brass within the system, so his reports strongly reflect internal evaluations. Even if he were to remove his own opinion entirely, the overall tone would be hopeful first, critique to follow.

Tony has collected a huge volume of information from organization sources and visits, and in that sense he's like a mega-BA for the Indians, but it is true that you can tell he doesn't have the experience to weigh what he's being told with a refined perspective. I think people link to Tony a lot because he's posted by far the most info about certain players. I used his reports as a secondary source for the PTM piece.

The age discrepancy appears to come from his birthday being reported in some places as 2/10/88, but most sources (including official ones) report it as 10/2/88. That makes the difference between his being 19 or 20 during this season.

To what we've already discussed, I'll add that unlike a member of a more traditional news media, Tony's access to the players and the organization is probably more dependent on friendly terms, so he probably doesn't have the luxury of saying everything that's on his mind.

I just went back to reread it, and I see the Archer/Espino mention in the last category. I hadn't recalled a highlighting of the young pitching wave on first read, and. I think it depends what lens you're looking thru when you see players divide up over categories. To you, the youthful arms jumps out as a key finding - to me when I read it first, the emphasis didn't register as much.

From my own lens, when the minor league season ended last fall I was very interested in how aggressively the FO would place and promote the young arms. I had been surprised that Rondon, Gomez and later Espino had gotten the full-season nod last year over some of the college arms that we've traditionally seen at low-A. The fact that they held their own thru the season, joined by brief glimpses of De La Cruz, Frias, Chris Jones, Ryan Morris, Mike Pontius, Joey Mahalic and a couple others made me even more curious about the start of '08. None of these players really had enough experience to register in prospect rating systems, by virtue of lack of experience and absence of high draft slot.

When it became pretty clear that the youth emphasis on the pitching staffs would continue, I started looking at it as something I would follow pretty closely for myself, as a story, I guess - as a departure from previous protocol, and as a group of like-aged young guns that will be progressing and competing up the system, how they would fare, and if the (to me, welcome) shift in emphasis to youth and ceiling would pan out.

I know its early, but just from the first week of games, the results have been really good. In a couple months our farm system could be looking a lot better than anyone credited it for.

Hello Jay,

I think you did a very good job highlighting the young talent that is developing in the Indians' system, both pitching and hitting-wise, especially emphasing the very young talent that is appearing in High-A (Gomez, Rondon, Weglarz, Mills, Rivero, etc.)

Many of the national publications aren't aware of the quality depth (more than just some "names" that are mostly college draftees who are doing very well at lower levels like we would have had a few years ago; nowadays, we have mostly younger than league average who are putting up solid to great numbers at those levels, but most prospect evaluators haven't figured that out yet. They still think our system doesn't have "quality" or "blue-chip" depth, yet there are quite a few prospects in our system who project to have high ceilings at this point.) Many also seem to think that our farm system is quite poor because Miller/Lofgren/Crowe (who they consider to be our "top prospects," all had relatively poor years in 2007,) but don't seem to realize there is a considerable amount of projectable young talent at the lower-levels, most of which had solid to good years in 2007.

If those lower-level prospects keep progressing though, chances are, the national media will find out about them in another year or so. I think they're still a bit "shell-shocked" over Carmona's dominance, probably asking themselves, "How did we miss him?" :-)

Just my 2 cents.

Started using it occasionally last week, I think. Something needs to break the deadlock, as nothing has really settled in. AbaCab has a lot going for it as a nickname.