By Sean in DC
The magical date of September 1st is less than a week away! That means September call-ups and roster expansion for MLB teams … but, unfortunately, not so for your fantasy teams. For those of you making a push towards your league pennant, the decisions can be gut-wrenching.
Do you grab that hot young rookie who’s been tearing it up in AA or AAA, or do you hold onto someone like Ian Kinsler who says he will be back for the last few weeks of the season? After all, he is the one who got you where you are …
Today, I plan on telling you about a few of my sources for prospects and where to find out more about these up and coming stars of tomorrow. You’ll need to be able to make informed decisions in the coming weeks. Prospects, prospects, prospects! Lenny Melnick will always warn you to never rely on them, but you need to be aware of who they are and which ones have a chance of turning into the A-Rods and Johan Santanas of tomorrow.
The granddaddy of all baseball sites, one that covers all levels of baseball, is Baseball America. For the subscription fee, this site and magazine will easily keep you well informed of prospects at every level of the game. I highly recommend it. Other subscription services like Baseball Prospectus and Baseball HQ also cover the prospects very well.
For those of us on a budget, or who are too cheap to even take our wives out when we win our leagues, we have some other options.
First, subscribe to the Baseball America free e-mail! Go to Services on their site and you’ll see the option to subscribe to e-mails. The Baseball America Prospect Report (BAPR) is a daily compendium of important Baseball America news that showcases the best performances from the previous night’s minor league box scores. It’s been a must-read for me all season, and I am sure it will give you a glimpse of the value that Baseball America offers you via their subscription services.
Second, how about the obvious choice, MinorLeagueBaseball.com! MILB.com does a great job of covering the minors and will keep you up on all its stars.
I really enjoy reading the blog-type site at ProjectProspect.com. They have some interesting articles about up and coming prospects. They run them all year long and are continuously updating their rankings and lists.
Many of you, I am sure, use Baseball-Reference.com, but did you know about Minors.Baseball-Reference.com? It is another very easy way to find out minor league stats for those up and coming prospects … not just for this year but from last year and the year before.
Some of the better sites, like FanGraphs.com, are also posting minor league stats for many of the major prospects. MoundTalk.com also was a very well written blog that updated me on prospects in the past, but since their server problems early this year they’ve been on hiatus. I hope they return soon.
Also, keep your eyes peeled for many blog stories over the next few days. There will be plenty of coverage of prospects and September call-up lists. Check out the baseball writers from ESPN, Sporting News and SI … to name a few. I would even recommend printing a few of these out and saving them for use in the winter/spring when it comes time to prepare for next year’s drafts.
As you can see, there are plenty of sources out there for prospect information, so make sure you take a few moments this week to either inform or refresh yourself about which prospects might be worth grabbing. One of them might help your final push toward your league championship for this year, or they might work out as good dynasty league pick-ups or early draft prep for next year!