Chris Vinyard is a big 21 year old Orioles first baseman who might be one of the last serious prospects to come out of the draft and follow process, which will be eliminated starting in a few weeks. For a relative bargain price of $90k, the Birds got themselves a prospect with a nice power ceiling. They also got him with the 1143rd pick in the 2005 draft. Not a bad value.

Those 26 doubles were an Ironbirds record. He led the New York-Penn League in both doubles and homers. I'm a bit conflicted on what I see him developing into. His stats say that he's a potential three true outcomes slugger, but all of the scouting reports I've ever read say that he has a short, quick stroke. They make him sound more like a Mark Teahen at the plate rather than the Richie Sexson analog he's showing. His strikeout rate and isolated power are significant. I have no problem with three true outcome behemoths, so this isn't an issue for me. One thing that COULD be an issue is if the dip in his walk rate is real rather than a small sample size fluke. Three true outcome approaches only work well if you have walks to go with the whiffs and bombs.

Another thing that is a potential issue is Vinyard's defense. He's even less nimble than you'd expect a 6'4", 230 lb first baseman to be. He may grow up to be a butcher in the field, pushing him to prematurely DH. There are only so many of those jobs to go around. He's also not particularly quick on the basepaths, but you're smart enough to figure that one out all on your own.

Vinyard isn't an elite prospect at this point, but there are plenty of good indicators going on here so he's more than worth the effort of checking back in with him every so often. The Orioles need some thunder in their lineup at the 1B and DH spots and there isn't a whole lot in the system that's going to hold him back. If he keeps on hitting, he'll advance quickly. I'd feel a lot better about him if he made more consistent contact and developed some measure of skill with the glove.

Heath Michael Phillips is a 25 year old lefty who qualifies as a bit of a cliché. "Crafty lefty" may be one of the original baseball archetypes and he fits the bill. Since being drafted by the White Sox out of a Florida JuCo in the 10th round back in 2001, he's slowly climbed the ladder, culminating in a spectacular season in Charlotte last season. He doesn't have great stuff, working mostly with a mid/high 80's fastball with movement and command and a better than average changeup.

Last year was dominating and showed promise for a Major League career. If you would have asked me before the season, I would have told you that he's surely capable of being a lefty specialist in the big leagues. But his struggles this season have me wondering if his 2006 campaign was a career year rather than a breakthrough. His strikeout rate is mediocre and his walk rate is spiking. He's allowing more home runs. He's overall not showing the kind of ability to keep hitters off balance as he showed in 2006.

This is the problem with guys who have subpar stuff. They're always working to keep hitters off balance, get them to roll the hands over and weakly ground out to the second baseman. When their command is off a little bit or the changeup has a little less movement than usual, they don't have another trick up their sleeve to go to. Even the guy Phillips hopes to grow up to be, Sox lefty Mark Buehrle had a terrible stretch at the end of last season where he completely lost his ability to get hitters out.

Phillips is pretty neutral when it comes to ground outs/flyouts, which if he gets to the Cell might be a problem. The International League has a lot of parks that are difficult to hit the ball out of. The south side of Chicago does not have that advantage for him to exploit.

There's still hope here in the future if he develops his curve into an out pitch or if he becomes a real command specialist in the Bob Tewksbury mold. If he doesn't do one of these two things, he'll be a competent AAA pitcher for the foreseeable future, maybe getting a cup of coffee when the big club needs a spot starter or an extra lefty in the pen. If he does make one or both of those improvements, then I think he might be able to pass as a fifth starter or a long reliever.

You know, I'm surprised that Tim Hulett Jr. doesn't get more attention from scouts. He's got a decent glove, makes consistent contact, and has one of the best batting eyes in the minors. All of that combined with ML bloodlines usually at least gets a guy a token mention here and there in prospect lists. But scouts tend to greet him with nothing more than a yawn. I don't get it.

Okay, okay, I'll admit that he doesn't have much of a ceiling. He isn't going to hit for much power. And he isn't going to bat .315, which makes him a .290/.340/.350 kind of ML hitter. He even has a nominal amount of speed to offer, so that means he may be able to slide into a super utility role by learning how to play center field while backing up all of the infield spots, pinch hitting, and pinch running. There's not much risk involved, which at least makes him a prospect, even if there's no star power to be found. And look at it this way, Baseball America had Jose Vallejo ranked 29th, ahead of Hulett. I don't have a problem with ranking him outside of the top 10. But saying that he's not as good a prospect as a 21 year old second baseman who posted a .573 OPS in the Midwest League last season is insanity.

In terms of diagnostics, he's developing into a groundball/liner hitter, though that's not a bad idea as his 5'10" frame doesn't really work as a flyball hitter. There are worse things than being a slap hitter as long as you're good at it. It also bears mentioning that he's consistently been more effective against RHP than against southpaws.

So let's review, he's a good defensive second baseman who has enough smarts and footspeed that he might turn into a decent supersub kind of like an Esteban German/Chone Figgins. He doesn't have much of any kind of power. He knows the difference between balls and strikes. So how you look at him depends a lot on whether you think that the phrase "A poor man's Dustin Pedroia" is a compliment or not. The ceiling is David Eckstein at second base. The downside is that he doesn't get a chance at all and ends up cruising Durham, Tucson, Portland, and Louisville in a long AAA career.

Pay attention to this one, class because you're going to be hearing a lot about this guy in the near future. Manship has been well known in the scouting community ever since he was a high schooler in San Antonio. The right hander was a member of Team USA's junior national team and he was dominant. But he broke off a couple too many curveballs and ended up needing Tommy John surgery. The result of that was a medical redshirt at Notre Dame. When he came back, he was pretty effective in his 2 years playing for the Fighting Irish. Teams backed off of him as a draft eligible sophomore last year thinking that it would take a bunch of money to sign him. The Twins absolutely stole him with a 14th round pick and handed him a $300,000 bonus, or approximately third round money.

Manship works in the low 90's with outstanding control. His best weapon is a fall-off-the-table curve. He also has a change and a slider, but as of last fall, they were still under development rather than fully functional pitches on par with his fastball/curve combo.

The kid clearly is not being challenged at the low class A level. I haven't seen any reports of increased velocity or dramatic improvement in his changeup so I'm treating this as a refinement of his approach and a conservative assignment to start his first full season. The Twins have made a cottage industry out of drafting solid college pitchers and quickly turning them into command machines who run up through the minors like they have a plane to catch. Matt Garza, Kevin Slowey, Glen Perkins are all precedents for this.

The biggest complaint people have with Manship is that he isn't a big guy. He's only 6 feet tall and 195 pounds. When you couple that with his past elbow problem, you might get concerned about durability. There might be something to that, but it's not something you can see being a factor immediately. One thing that isn't affected by his size is his ability to induce ground balls. The guy has been a worm burner machine in his brief time as a pro. For Beloit, he almost has a 4/1 GB/FB ratio. In last summer's rather paltry 14 innings after signing, he had a ratio over 3.

I like Manship. He has a good track record going back through high school and college. He would have been drafted much higher had teams thought he was signable. He's in an ideal organization as the Twins know what they're doing when it comes to young pitchers. His ceiling is higher than that of Kevin Slowey because of the velocity and the flashy breaking ball, but he's a higher risk due to his being farther away from the Majors and his injury history. Expect him to climb the ladder fairly quickly this season, though expecting him to make it to AAA like Garza and Slowey may be asking a bit much given the rarity of such a feat and the fact that Kyle Waldrop is progressing quickly too and the upper levels of the Twins system is getting a bit crowded.

Rabelo is a switch hitting catcher who made his first appearance of the season on Thursday night, giving Pudge Rodriguez a much-deserved day off. He went 0-4, grounding out 3 times and being victimized by a pop fly once. Rabelo is up with the Tigers while Vance Wilson nurses a fairly serious sounding elbow injury. Rabelo was drafted out of the University of Tampa in the fourth round of the 2001 draft and he looks like a fairly standard backup catcher.

Rabelo started hitting for a bit more power last season, but no Big League pitcher is going to be particularly scared of him. Here's the thing, he's not clueless at the plate, but he's limited in the damage he can do. Coupled with a good glove, that spells a solid backup who is ready now. He his bat slows a bit or if he starts having injury problems, he could fall off the map and never be heard from again or he could have a 10 year career as one of those immortal catchers like Henry Blanco or Mike Difelice. Don't expect a Josh Bard or Dave Ross kind of breakout.

The future for Rabelo involves plenty more time in AAA. The Tigers have Wilson signed to a multi-year contract. Wilson is a little better offensively and he doesn't have options while Rabelo still has plenty of option years remaining. So he'll probably stay on the 40 man roster, but once Wilson gets healthy, he's going back to Toledo. Don't weep for him though, I've pointed it out in the past, but life as a AAA regular isn't that bad. I'd go as far as to say it's a nice gig. He can still expect a high 5 figure/low 6 figure annual paycheck, he gets called up whenever the team wants a 3rd catcher or when somebody gets hurt. And AAA has had a building boom on par with that of the Major Leagues. Teams like Buffalo, Indianapolis, Louisville, Memphis, Fresno, and Toledo have magnificent new parks and get nice crowds. I'd take it.

Joe Bisenius is a 24 year old right handed reliever who made his Major League debut for the Phillies in last night's loss to the Braves. He's a fastball/slider guy who works in the low 90's and gets plenty of swinging third strikes on sliders in the dirt. The Phils drafted him in the 12 round back in 2004 out of NAIA powerhouse Oklahoma City College, where he was a starter. They kept him in the rotation for his first pro season, but moved him to the bullpen during his 2005 season spent in the Sally League. Bisenius came alive last season, getting good results in both the Florida State and the Eastern League.

As was evident in his stat line above, he showed good stuff last night, striking out Pete Orr on a really nice slider and freezing Kelly Johnson on a fastball inside. His slider has a lot of hard, downward movement and his fastball tailed away from left handed hitters. He did leave a slider hanging to Scott Thorman, the first batter he faced. Thorman pulled it down the right field line before getting gunned down trying to stretch his double into a triple. That let 2 inherited runners score and put the game out of reach. On that level, the appearance was a failure, but all things considered, he had a decent showing. He pitched an inning and a third, allowing 2 hits, a walk, and struck out 2. He wasn't charged for any runs.

Bisenius does need to work on his command a bit. His pitches have a lot of run, which may lead to him always having a higher than ideal walk rate. Hopefully he will be able to curtail that enough to be a good ML pitcher. He has the talent to do so.

Other things to know is that he has a slight ground ball tendency, nothing on the Brandon Webb/Jake Westbrook scale, but chances are that if somebody does make contact with his slider, it will probably head over to the second baseman pretty quickly. It also bears noticing that he was pretty good at keeping the ball in the park last season.

So now if you're watching your team face the Phillies and some anonymous reliever named Joe comes into the game, you know what to expect.

You've probably never heard of Speigner. I hadn't until the Rule 5 draft. But he's a reliever prospect who the Washington Post is reporting has an excellent chance of making the Nationals opening day roster. He's been lights out in spring training and with the Nats pitching staff being what it is, a guy who gets batters out is worth his weight in gold.

Speigner was drafted as a senior out of Auburn by the Twins in the 14th round back in 2003. Do the math in your head. That makes him 26 years old right now, so the future is now. Add to that the fact that he's always had pedestrian strikeout rates and he's been mediocre in the International League, and you have a low ceiling prospect.

This is not Billy Wagner in waiting. It's more like a poor man's Hector Carrasco. He owns a low 90's fastball and a curve that has some potential. He's a small guy for a pitcher at under 6 feet tall and fairly thin at 175 pounds. He's generally a groundball pitcher, but in the 2 seasons that I have GB/FB data from, he's had some wild swings that reflect a certain amount of small sample size variability. In last season's stint in Connecticut, he was a reliable groundball machine, allowing half as many fly balls as ground balls. In 2005, he allowed 1.3 grounders for every flyball. And speaking of 2005, he wasn't terrible as a starter, but he wasn't particularly impressive either.

If Speigner can maintain a solid GB/FB ratio, he can be a pretty solid Major League reliever even while posting sub-optimal K rates. Ground ball pitchers who don't walk hitters have low ceilings, but whenever you can find an effective pitcher for $50k, that's a big win when the market is as irrational as it is right now. Will Speigner pull it off and be a good ML reliever? He probably will to some extent. He's clearly in an organization that believes in him and will give him another chance while the Twins never really felt like they needed him, and they probably didn't. So let's sit back and watch him work. Hopefully he'll make it.

Shane Robinson is a small, quick, right handed centerfielder that the Cards drafted out of Florida State last year. Actually, to tell the truth he's very, very quick. He was rated as one of the fastest players in the draft. He's also exactly the kind of player you'd expect a 5'9", 165 lb speedster to be, Joey Gathright part deux. Robinson had a pretty good career at FSU, starting all three years he was there and throwing up some impressive numbers.

And he didn't do terribly in his professional debut.

He wasn't fantastic either. The limitation that this kind of slap hitter runs into is the fact that if the worst thing that the pitcher has to worry about is a sharply hit single, they're not going to risk the walk and just pound the strike zone, thus cutting off the walks that a hitter needs to draw in order to be an effective OBP source. Hitting .290 with no walks and no power is counter-productive. You don't have to hit 15 home runs a year to necessarily keep them from doing that, just get it out of the infield enough to pepper the stat sheet with doubles. If Robinson can do that, then his history of good plate discipline should make his OBP presentable. It works for David Eckstein, but it didn't work for Jason Tyner.

As to the other parts of Robinson's game, he's an exceptional base-stealer as you can see above. There's little chance that he'll be an Alex Sanchez copycat who looks fast, but gets bad jumps and gets caught as often as he's successful. I tend to think that's a skill that translates pretty seamlessly through all levels, even against better catchers and smarter, more experienced pitchers. His defense is good, but not as good as you'd think for a player with his speed. His arm is also weak so he's not going to with gold gloves. Nevertheless, even if his presence at the plate is more like Tyner than Esteban German, he still might find some time in the Show courtesy of being a good candidate for 5th outfielder status.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. When the Red Sox drafted Lowrie in the first round in '05, they saw Dustin Pedroia Redux. They saw the same kind of low-risk middle infielder who could hit enough to be a solid starter in the Majors. Things looked good after his first season, one where he demolished the New York-Penn League after being drafted. Then again, he was an advanced college player from Stanford. He SHOULD have been demolishing kids in the NYP. 2006 was a hard full season debut though.

Now I know that Wilmington is about the hardest place in the minors to hit a home run, but a .374 slugging percentage? I like the walk rate, but he's going to have to either pick up the batting average or the power stroke or else he's going to be J.J. Furmaniak instead of Michael Young. I don't think it's out of the question for Lowrie to rebound from this. He did hit very well at Stanford and posted a .429 OBP Lowell after being drafted. The K/BB is also acceptable. In fact the walk rate is particularly good. He also has no perceivable platoon split, which is nice for a switch hitter. It also bears mentioning that his second half numbers were much, much better than his first half stats. Pre All Star: .224/.333/.293, Post: .286/.364/.427. That post ASB line looks like a natural progression from his NYP stats

Lowrie isn't going to be a base stealer, but he's not Ben Molina out there. He has some work to do defensively and he's never going to have a ton of range, but scouts think he's fundamentally sound and he'll be competent at either spot up the middle.

For upside here, look for David Eckstein without the hyperbolic media affection. Heck, PECOTA already thinks he's that kind of ballplayer, projecting a .279/.341/.397 weighted mean for him this season.

Wimberly is the kind of slap-hitting waterbug secondbaseman that gets comparisons to Chone Figgins. It's not a terrible comparison. They have a lot in common stylistically and in general background. Their listed height/weight is almost identical. They're both switch-hitting natural second basemen who steal a lot of bases and have some versatility in the field. Esteban German is another name you could throw around with Wimberly.

There's not much power there and he'll have to work on the plate discipline to be able to make it in the Majors like Figgins and German. You also have to take into account the batting average inflating effects of playing in the California League.

On the positive side he has the base-stealing thing down. He stole a ton of bases at Alcorn State and rarely got caught. And he has some experience in centerfield and at thirdbase. Certainly, roto-leaguers should keep track of him. And if you're a Rockies fan, you might keep his name in mind as well. This kind of player isn't somebody I'd want to see get 600 at bats every season, especially if most of that playing time is coming at a power position like third or an outfield corner. But the Figgins brand utility speedster is extremely useful if mixed and matched at second and center, especially if your starters at those positions are fragile, suck, or have platoon issues. So bring on the speedy, scrappy guys as long as they can get on base. This is the crux of what could trip up Wimberly. If he doesn't draw walks and get on base, then he's Willie Bloomquist with less defensive value, which means that he's probably a utility player for the Sky Sox and not the Rockies.

All in all, Wimberly is a good find by the Rox in the 6th round and an interesting prospect. His ceiling is extraordinarily high. But if he gets there, he'll be fun to watch. And teams like to have players with this skill set around. So he'll probably get every opportunity to prove himself when the time comes.