Crooked Pitch

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I promise tons of AFL content over the next week, but until that happens I, at least, wanted to share the leader boards with you. Here are the home run leaders from the Arizona Fall League.

1. Nolan Reimold | Baltimore Orioles AA | 6 Home runs
2. Matt LaPorta | Milwaukee Brewers A | 6 Home runs
3. Caleb Stewart | New York Mets AA | 6 Home runs
4. Juan Miranda | New York Yankees A+/AA | 5 Home runs
5. Sergio Santos | Toronto Blue Jays AA/AAA | 5 Home runs
6. Michael Aubrey | Cleveland Indians A+/AA | 5 Home runs
7. John Mayberry | Texas Rangers A+/AA | 5 Home runs

Today’s pitch count is 10.

1. What a shock! Atlanta Braves starting pitcher (and I use that term loosely) Mike Hampton is hurt. Again! It only took one inning of pitching in the Mexican Winter League to do him in this time.
2. Dodgers GM, Ned Colletti, is leaning towards focusing on his current young group of players instead of paying too much for free agents in a weak pool of players.
3. Casey Crosby, a Detroit Tigers top pitching prospect, is having elbow surgery. He is likely to miss all of the 2008 season.
4. The Baltimore Orioles may be in the running to sign free agent outfielder Jose Guillen.
5. Lone Star Ball concluded a community prospect project with 126 voters chiming in on who the Texas Rangers top 30 prospects are.
6. John Sickels lists the New York Mets top 20 prospects.
7. Over The Monster let their readers vote on the Red Sox top prospect. Over 100 voters decided that Jacoby Ellsbury, not Clay Buchholz was the Red Sox top prospect. Now OTM is asking who’s #3.
8. Get comfortable before you start reading the post over at DRaysBay that evaluates every Rays position player.
9. Well, today marks the day that the Bill Conlin fiasco graduates from the sports blogosphere and enters the ranks of top, main stream blogs worldwide as Instapundit picked up on this mess. Now, Conlin may be a douche bag, well he most likely is. But he doesn’t deserve this onslaught. Conlin wrote this remarks in a private e-mail that the other blogger should not have made public. IMHO
10. Take a look at the Baseball Prospectus list of the 11 top Minnesota Twins prospects. See also the LA Angels top 11 prospects. And the KC Royals top 11 prospects. And the Detroit Tigers top 11 prospects.

Since I posted, earlier today, about the Baseball America top 10 prospects by organization rankings, I’ve been getting lots of e-mails about other prospects lists out there.

Thanks to Will M. for giving me the heads up about MiLB.com ranking the top 50 prospects. They are counting them down and have shared #50 through #31 so far.

Kerry Wood, who recently signed a one-year, $4.2 million deal to stay with the Cubs has just had his hat thrown into the ring for the vacant closer job in Chicago.

This excites me much more than Wood returning to the rotation.

I stole this idea was inspired by Matt from Fantasy Insider Online to create a MySpace Page for Crooked Pitch. Swing by (pun intended) and give me a shout or join my friend space. You’ll get absolutely nothing for doing so except my utmost respect and admiration. Plus you’ll find a bunch of fantasy resources on my profile page.

Each year, Baseball America comes out with the top 10 prospects for every organization. On top of that, they also include other information about the minor league system of each team by including the players with the best tools, a projected lineup 4 years out and information about top draft picks. I’ll link below to the teams that BA has completed so far. According to their website all teams won’t be done until early February.

• Atlanta Braves Top Prospects
• Florida Marlins Top Prospects
• New York Mets Top Prospects
• Philadelphia Phillies Top Prospects
• Washington Nationals Top Prospects
• Chicago Cubs Top Prospects
• Cincinnati Reds Top Prospects
• Milwaukee Brewers Top Prospects

I will update you as new teams are updated at Baseball America. The Houston Astros should be out later today, and you can see a full list and scheduled release date here.

I am pleased to host the first edition of the Carnival of Fantasy Sports. I am hoping that this blog carnival really takes off. Here are the results.

I’ve given the top prize to The Fantasy Football Geek Blog who submitted a post titled, “Rumblin’, Bumblin’, Stumblin’ - Fantasy Football Player Value Adjustments - Week 11“. It’s a look at

Guys who spent their time in week 10 doing one of three things: rumblin’ up the player value charts with big performances, bumblin’ through a rough week and making their owners nervous, or stumblin’ so badly that their fantasy value took a major hit.

Honorable mentions go to the following:

• A look at the Top 10 Closers of 2007 at FantasyleagueBaseball.blogspot.com.
• THROWING KNIVES: RANKING THE SUPERSTARS breaks down the NBA’s premier players. There is tons of great fantasy content over at Epic Carnival, where this was posted.
• Trying to wade through the baseball keepers water, is always a touchy subject. One of my biggest bonehead keeper moves of all time was dropping Hanley Ramirez after the 2006 season in favor of Aramis Ramirez. Ouch! Over at Sweet Lou’s Baseball Lab, he helps us with the post, Disecting Keepers.

Thanks to everyone for submitting your blog posts about fantasy sports. And thank you, also to everyone for stopping by to read them. Next week’s blog carnival will be at Fake Teams.

• To find out more about blog carnivals, click here.
• To find out how to submit a blog post to the next Carnival of Fantasy Sports, click here.