Crooked Pitch

I’ve been catching up on my baseball podcasts over the past couple of days and wanted to share with you a quick note from one of my favorite shows. It has to do with Pittsburgh Pirates top prospect Andrew McCutchen.

McCutchen almost made the Pirates “big club” out of Spring Training ‘08. Instead, he played the entire season in Triple-A Indianapolis hitting .283/.372/.398 with 26 doubles, nine home runs, 50 RBI, and 34 stolen bases. Many feel that McCutchen is ready for baseball in Pittsburgh on a full time basis, and some feel that he has nothing more to learn at Triple-A so whether it’s as a full-time starter or bench player, breaking camp with the Pirates is a certainty.

In a podcast recently with Baseball Prospectus Radio, Pirates Director of Player Development Kyle Stark proclaimed that McCutchen would either be an everyday starter in Pittsburgh or he would be back in Triple-A. There will be no middle ground.

“When he goes to the big leagues, it’s gonna be for good”

“If he doesn’t earn a starting job out of Spring Training, then he’ll probably start the year at Triple-A”

Those of you that play in very deep fantasy leagues or leagues that use Minor League players probably already have McCutchen stashed. But in mock drafts some of you are actually drafting him. He has an ADP of 330.88, which is well outside a 23 round draft but proves that he’s getting some looks from speculators.

Now that you know that Spring Training is an all or nothing proposition for McCutchen we’ll have to see mock drafting him is curtailed.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 9th, 2009 at 12:39 pm and is filed under Fantasy Baseball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.