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.

A lahar is a basically an avalanche of mud and debris that is shot down a mountain during a volcanic eruption. When entire glaciers are melted in a matter of a few minutes and then race down a mountain, bad things happen. They're immensely destructive and the Seattle-Tacoma region is especially at risk since Mount Rainier has a history of producing exceedingly large lahars. I bring this up because the first time I glanced and saw the name LaHair, I saw "Lahar". I'm probably the one person who has watched enough geology programs on PBS and the Discovery Channel family of networks to have that misread stick in my mind. That being the case, I find it funny that this big lefty first baseman spent half of his 2006 season crushing baseballs in Tacoma.

The Mariners deservedly named LaHair their Minor League Player of the Year. As much as the Texas League and PCL are regarded as hitters havens, San Antonio and Tacoma are both exceedingly good pitchers parks. From the numbers themselves, he looks like a pretty decent prospect. He's not especially young, this was his age 23 season. But he's alarmingly old. One thing that has me a bit concerned is that he had an extreme platoon split this season, hitting a mere .209/.321/.286 against LHP this season cumulatively. There are worse things to be than a platoon 1B/DH, but it isn't what you dream of when you go to sleep at night.

PECOTA doesn't hate him, but doesn't project him as much more than an entry level first baseman for the next half decade. He's not a bad bet to become a regular, but he's not a good bet to become an above average one. Since the Mariners are going to be employing Jose Vidro as their everyday first baseman and the might be willing to listen if somebody else wants to take Richie Sexson's contract off their hands, LaHair is in an organization where he might get a chance to break in sooner rather than later. If I'm a Mariners prospect, I'm wondering why they had to go out of their way to get Vidro when you could have called up the Royals, who seem to have some weird grudge against Justin Huber. A Huber/LaHair platoon would likely be a better situation and it sure as hell would be cheaper. But I digress. LaHair is a middle of the road prospect.. For upside, look for a kind of Lee Stevens kind of journeyman. For a downside, look at AAAA nomads like Graham Koonce.

A year ago Haehnel was looking pretty good. He didn't have great stuff. He never has had that. Scouts still were a little skeptical because of this. His fastball mostly sits in the high 80's and that's his best offering. He also has a decent, but not great changeup.  He has some deception in his pitching motion, which helps, but he's still not destined for stardom. Still, he was coming off a season where he demolished A-ball hitters working out of the pen, striking out 3 and a half times more batters than he walked and more than batter per inning. Nevertheless, the Orioles decided that they wanted to see what would happen when the lefty moved to the rotation.

Wow. That didn't turn out quite the way they wanted. The O's sent him to the Hawaii Winter League to get his legs back underneath him as a reliever and while the results were better, that's not saying much. He wasn't exactly dominating there, posting a 5.00 ERA. His K and BB rates were back to respectable (16 punchouts and 5 walks in 18 frames) but he still was a fairly hitable.

Haehnel's chances of being a big league reliever are still alive and breathing, but things are not looking good. Finesse lefties aren't exactly a rare commodity and unless he gets it moving in a hurry, he'll have the dubious distinction of topping out as an A-ball reliever. One additional thing to keep in mind is that he was 23 years old during his stellar 2005 season. Another warning sign is that while scouting reports mention that he gets some sink on his pitches, he's been a flyball pitcher for at least the last couple of years.

Personally, as much as I've been critical of him in this article, I really would like to see him succeed if for no other reason than because I viewed him as an interesting sleeper when he was in college and because I generally root for all prospects who are fellow Illinois or Indiana natives.

William Jennings Buckner has long been a favorite of mine dating back to his days at the University of South Carolina where in 2004 he struck out 105 batters with 23 walks in 84 innings of work.

Buckner's main weapon is a knuckle-curve, which he compliments with a fastball that sits mostly in the low 90's. He gets good sink on the fastball and his groundball/flyball numbers are consistently above 2/1. In that respect, it's also a good sign that even when he was pitching at High Desert in 2005 and 2006 he still allowed only 16 home runs in 165 innings.

Obviously his biggest issue is with walks. If he can cut back on those he stands a good chance of being a middle or back of the rotation workhorse. Given his strikeout rate and ground ball tendencies, he can probably get away with pitching to contact when he starts getting deep into the count. Just give them the sinking fastball and stop trying to be fascist.

The Royals have a number of prospects who are this same kind of midrange prospect. Tyler Lumsden and Danny Christensen fit the profile as well. Their ceilings are as #3/4 starters. If Buckner doesn't improve on his control, he could feasibly be a long reliever.