Good article for those with the Athletic. A couple points I found of note: He pointed out statcast pitch velocities and exit velocities which is rare for the writers that cover the Astros. He mentioned Conine's velo being <90 in his lone tracked appearance, and that De La Cruz was having EV improvement. I would add Pena had some nice EVs this spring though his EVs weren't called out in the article. Ivey increasing his change-up usage is a priority. Ivey isn't noted for a good change-up so this was kind of out of left field. Not sure if it means his change is better or that they want to try to get it better with more use.
I saw that the Rangers are hosting games in Round Rock with their alternate site roster playing against other teams’ alternate site rosters. They are playing the Astros April 7-8. Only Express season ticket holders can get tickets to those games. Hopefully we get some reviews of how those guys look.
With Whitley out for the season and 3 players filling in on the major league roster (Garcia, Bielak, Abreu), the AAA/Alt Site rotation looks pretty thin; it would likely be Ivey, Rodriguez, Conine, Emanuel, and Solomon or Hartman.
I'd expect Emanuel (once out of suspension), Solomon, Ivey, and Conine to mop the floor with AAA batters.
Yeah I expect those guys to succeed, it just doesn’t carry much weight in terms of top prospects. All of the guys you mentioned should see their stock jump significantly once they perform well in AAA.
Interesting guys who didn't make that list: Riley Ferrell, Colin McKee, Pedro Leon Good sign for Hansen. Not counting Verlander and Whitley, Houston has 5 guys on the IL (Valdez, James, Pruitt, Scrubb, Baez) plus 2 that are suspended (Martes, Emanuel). Some roster decisions loom once everybody gets healthy. Will be surprising and a really good sign if Solis and Solomon are in AAA once their regular season starts. If all those position players stick in AAA to open the season, the AA and High A rosters could be very very thin and we could see some pretty aggressive assignments.
Box score for the alternate site game (unofficial) Tyler Ivey, Jairo Solis, and Ronel Blanco combined to strike out 14, while Jose Siri and Taylor Jones homered.
Pretty cool that he got to call Verlander. If I were Click/Crane, I'd be strongly encouraging JV to earn some of that $33M by spending a lot of time mentoring the org's young righties. ~25 days to when the minor league rosters get set. Will be very interesting to see where they place Brown. Any measure of success in the upper levels will likely have him on updated Top 100 lists in the 2nd half of the season.
Apparently it was 4 innings, which is probably more encouraging development-wise,especially if the pitch count is correct. Throwing 39 of 54 pitches for strikes over 4 innings with 4 baserunners vs 7 strikeouts is pretty dang good for his age/experience.
