Q.  What's the exec sum?

A.  This one's easy.  Think Casper Wells, with a third baseman's glove in his locker.

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Q.  Wells has about a 60% shot at a substantial ML career.  Does Liddi have that much chance?

A.  He doesn't, not yet.  But Liddi is farther along at age 23 than Wells was, that's for sure.

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Q.  Liddi can stick at 3B?

A.  We've seen some shtick in different places, questioning Liddi's glove.  Hard to say what games they were watching.  

Tonight he was pulled way in on the grass, and then there was a line drive by him down the line ... we slo-mo'ed it several times.  Liddi read the ball and from the moment he started moving, to the moment he was vertical and stretched out, was an eyeblink.

Think about a catcher trying to block a pitch; you can read third basemen's explosiveness by "superimposing" a pitch block on them visually.  Liddi's explosiveness was outstanding.

Later, there was a tough little short-hop to him glove side, force at second ... Liddi gathered it in with textbook "soft hands."  That is, his glove traveled with the ball at just the right moment, his hands working together all the way ... his crisp flip over to the bag was notably fluid and dynamic.

He took another two-hopper and fired over to first without changing his feet, like Adrian Beltre ... 

It's just easy to see the excitement.  Liddi is a hulk, like Lonnie said on the podcast, and yet he's a pleasure to watch at third.  How often do you find a man weighing a tight 240 lbs., who moves like Scott Rolen at third base?

Lonnie had called Liddi "a small monster" and he wasn't kiddin'.  You could throw a high school prom dance on his back.

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I'm not guaranteeing a +10 runs glove at 3B, but this is a kid who needs to play third, I can tell ya that.

As Lonnie pointed out, Tacoma's manager had Liddi at shortstop down there.  For 24 games!  When your manager moves you from 3B to SS, it says a whale of a lot about the way you looked at third.

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Q.  As far as 2012 projections and Casper Wells age-arcs ... is SSI unaware of the fact that it was a big year in the PCL, and that Liddi hit about the league average?

A.  No, I hadn't heard that, thanks, though.

Had you heard that it's a real good thing to hit the PCL average when you're 22 years of age? 

Or that there is a different slash line for players facing AAA pitching for the first time?  Lotta old players in the PCL this year.

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... comparing Liddi's slash line to the PCL slash line is a bit simplistic, because Liddi is a young, all-or-nothing hacker, facing fringe ML pitchers for the first time in his life.   Neither does he have the home park that a lot of AAA hitters had.  

Granted that Mike Wilson, Wily Mo Pena, and all the other grizzled 27-year-old AAA vets this year, hit well.  Granted that guys who have seen ML pitching, came back down to AAA and had fun.

It's still a pleasant suprise to see a young hacker like Liddi handle the league so well, 30 taters in his very first look at pitchers with ML pitch sequences.  A lot of kids twist in the wind first time round.

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