Stan Musial's Stance

Programming note:  The United Cardinal Bloggers are in the midst of their annual Spring Training Roundtable.  This year 17 Cardinal blogs are participating, each asking a question a day for comment by the other 16.  The complete schedule can be found here.  Please check out each blog for the discussion if nothing else.  So far the questions have been great (First Cardinal memory, Salary Cap in baseball yes/no, what is the 2010 Cardinals’ most pressing need at this point).

I’ve been in class all week, which has cut into my sports reading.  Being in class is not an excuse for letting work (the work that allows me to keep the lights on and the wife happy) lapse, so after I get home from school, and entertain my kids, I log into my laptop for a couple of hours a night.  That’s REALLY cut into my sports reading.  I guess this is a round about way of saying sorry for the lack of posts this week.

Now to business.  Baseball America put out their list of top 100 prospects on 23 Feb, which was Tuesday I believe.  I don’t know if this has been discussed anywhere else in the Cardinal blog0sphere, although I suspect it has (Erik Manning probably commented on it at a minimum).  Baseball America (can I abbreviate that BA?  Probably not) uses the following criteria to establish the list:

The rankings follow our standard prospect guidelines, which means any player who has not exceeded 130 at-bats, 50 innings or 30 pitching appearances in the major leagues (without regard to service time) is eligible. As always, our view is not necessarily to what a player will do this season, but what his ultimate major league ceiling is, weighed against the likelihood that he will reach that ceiling.

Without further adieu, here are the Cardinal prospects on the list:

• Shelby Miller (#50)

Pretty short list, eh?  Actually this shouldn’t surprise anyone given who the Cardinals traded away in 2009 for DeRosa and Holliday.  The UCB has been discussing what the Cardinals still need for the 2010 version, and the bench has come up; some interesting takes have been offered on how they build that bench vis-a-vis free agency or from within.  If the Cardinals don’t have a top 100 prospect hitter going into 2010, well, that sounds like one more data point suggesting Mozeliak will have to acquire a bat before Opening Day.