"Bounty" on the Farm?

First, don’t forget that I’m requesting questions to pose to Kevin Goldstein of Baseball America; Kevin has agreed to an interview with PRD. – Go to the comments section under the “Questions Please” entry.

I was reading through my normal rotation of websites and I saw the following headline, “Bounty on the Farm.” Now thankfully I was finished with my morning coffee cause I have yet to figure out how to clean a laptop screen.

Anyway, having seen the title, I was expecting a ‘homer’-istic take about how loaded our minor league system was. Tom Krasovic, the writer, was thankfully taking a different approach. He indicated that we should be proud that our team has recently put the following regulars into the bigs:

Jason Bartlett, SS, Twins
Sean Burroughs, 3B
Adam Eaton, RHP
Khalil Greene, SS
Brian Lawrence, RHP
Rodrigo Lopez, RHP, Orioles
Xavier Nady, OF/3B
Jake Peavy, RHP
Oliver Perez, LHP, Pirates

While that is encouraging, it is also discouraging because so few of the position players have become impact players (though Nady could become one and Burroughs still could become an effective hitter). Only Khalil Greene, it could be argued, is an impact player. I think it’s too early to say call Khalil an impact player; let’s wait until he does it again – though admittedly – I think he will.

Also, I have a hard time including Lopez in that list. Bartlett and Perez were both guys we liked but traded. Lopez was cut and became effective after leaving the organization.

Josh Barfield, Freddy Guzman, George Kottaras, Travis Chick, and Tim Stauffer (Baseball America’s top 5 Padre prospects) each have a decent shot at becoming solid Major League regulars. But Towers says, “Right now, most of our talent is at the upper levels. Our two best minor league clubs probably will be at Double-A and Triple-A…” Which scares me because those teams are not bursting with impact players.

For a minute there, I thought Krasovic was talking about this kind of Bounty. But then maybe I would finally be able to clean my laptop screen.