Larry LaRue with a grrrrreat read on the M's MLB-ready talents, the guys who will go to camp with a chance to win a job next year. This is a really nice job by LaRue, one of the most interesting pieces I've read in a long time.
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Name six guys that Pedro Grifol and Roger Hansen think can come to camp next year and win jobs in Safeco. I promise you that your six won't be the six that Grifol and Hansen name. In fact, I kinda shook my head, blinked, and wondered if I was listening to them wrong.
Don't think so. The fact that Grifol and Hansen push names that we're not used to, that's not annoying. It's intriguing.
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Adam Moore, Matt Tuiasosopo and Michael Saunders, you'd have gotten, but not the next four:
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Greg Halman. From behind our monitors, and with no videos even, we 'net rats have been very unimpressed. 183 strikeouts in 457 AB's? That puts Rob Deer to shame.
Halman reminds Grifol of a young ... wait for it ... Ken Griffey Jr. He can be "a huge impact guy," meaning a big star in the major leagues.
It's easy enough to spike the K stats back and scoff. It's more interesting to remember that Baseball America put him absolutely #1 last year and here Grifol is, saying he's got Junior-level talent and that he can be a superstar in the majors.
As you know, at SSI we respect the guys who have played the game and when they're all saying that Halman is a freakish talent, we stop short.
I'm not saying that Halman will ever be a major leaguer, but if he panned out, here is a player who came up as a freakish power/speed guy with K numbers that made you want to toss your cookies.
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If you haven't seen it, here is an interesting summer '08 article in which minors yogi John Sickels grants Halman a longshot chance at becoming a major-league "superstar."
Sickels recommended that the M's bring Halman along slowly, but they pushed him right up to AA where Sickels prophetically warned against the "real breaking balls" in AA. Whereupon Halman promptly served up the outlandish BB/K results we're familiar with.
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Sickels points out that Halman stole 23 of his first 24 bases in only 67 games at High Desert in 2008, slugging nearly .600 on the road, and suddenly the power/speed picture starts to emerge.
"Everything comes so easily" to Halman, says Grifol, and that sounds weird to us watching his strikeouts. But Jose Canseco fanned at hilarious rates as a young player too, mostly because he just wanted to see how far he could hit the ball.
Supposing that you were selling Lotto tickets, each one of which gave me a 10% chance at a free Jose Canseco or Juan Gonzalez, those would be some pricey tix.
Igor fanned 143 times while walking 35 times at the age of 22 ... and hit 43 homers with 109 RBI in the American League. The next year, he posted a Gehrig-like 169 OPS+. Gonzalez ran very well in his early 20's.
There are definitely some MVP's who defy gravity on their K/BB ratios.
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M's fans would propose Halman as the M's least MLB-ready minor leaguers, so it's worth a pause that he came up in conversation as one of their most MLB-ready.
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