Gregor has more than picked up for the production lost when Correa went down. Hands up if you had that happening Sidenote: Danry Vasquez is hitting .304/.381/.478 in the 24 games after the HiA all-star break. He must be taking lessons from Rio.
Conrad Gregor is finally starting to garner some eye-witness reports. Here's one from Baseball Prospectus. Between him, Preston Tucker, and A.J. Reed, odds are good we produce another power bat in the next 2-3 years. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKRr9V9dFuA&feature=em-upload_owner
Gregor got promoted @jasondschwartz: .@conradgregor55 is headed to AA. He put up outstanding .367/.449/.678 in just under 2 months with #JetHawks.
Boom. Love that one of Tucker or Gregor is on track to hit the major league club sometime next year. The downside is that the organization has to choose its future bats wisely. Singleton already has his contract (and, to be fair, younger), but Tucker, Gregor, and heck, Krauss, may all be productive players in the very near future. It's a good problem to have, but you can't hold on to all those guys. You just don't want to let the wrong one go (J.D. Martinez).
JD Martinez. Maybe we should have given his new swing a chance, like we did with Wallace. Of course, I can't see him maintaining anywhere near the averages he has now, but could still be a very good regular.
Hopefully, by next year, we are in a position to package one or 2 of these guys along with other prospects for a high profile ML level player. Maybe I'm being overly optimistic, but I don't think that is too far fetched.
Yeah, it's easy now to say we should have given him a chance with his new swing, but we did give him hundreds of career at bats and he was coming off injury. Reading between the lines, there may have been an attitude problem in play there, too (too lazy to post the article, but he did get benched a couple times for explicitly ignoring coaching instructions). We also probably expected more out of Robbie Grossman than he's given. Anyway, back to Gregor. The nice thing about having all these guys who are on the cusp of MLB production is they generally attract suitors. Definitely hoping we package some of our fringier guys + a risk/reward guy from the lower levels for a good MLB-level player.
Folty allowed 8 ERs in 4 innings pitched raising his ERA to 5.12. He has been pitching really badly as of late, anyone know if anythings wrong?
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Astros #3 behind Cubs & Twins. http://www.crawfishboxes.com/2014/7/22/5926761/keith-law-espn-astros-farm-system-rankings
He got benched one particular game for swinging at the first pitch and making the third out of the inning after the first two batters were quickly disposed of. Porter pulled him and then forced him to explain to the media as to why he was benched as it is a team rule to take a couple of pitches in that situation. In my opinion, it's kind of a stupid rule. Not much difference in making the 3rd out on the 4th pitch of the inning as opposed to the 6th pitch of an inning. Also, Altuve did the exact same thing less than two weeks after Martinez and there was no public benching or discipline.
There is a difference, though. If the first 2 batters made it through with little effort, the third batter should at least try to get the pitcher to put some effort into the inning. No problem in making the 3rd out...but it could make a difference with a 1 pitch ab vs a 5-8 pitch ab that makes him work.
Yeah give Luhnow a medal, it takes a real genius to improve the worst farm system after having the number one pick + multiple competitive balance picks 3 years in a row. Clearly the majority of our top 10 prospects have to be from Luh..... oh wait, 6 of those guys were already here. One of the four is Mark Appel. Another has a broken leg and was taken over Byron Buxton, McCullers is being subjected to Lancaster for an entire season like most of the top pitching propsects in the system, and his other guy in the top 10 has a ceiling of an above-average third baseman and probably won't reach it. Amazing how delusional some of you are. Face it, Luhnow has done nothing that any monkey sitting in his chair couldn't do.
