Our whole farm is entirely devoid of any kind of decent hitting prospects.  Oh no!  Whatever will we do!?!

Oh, except these guys today:

AAA SLC:
S-Rod 3-4 today with his 19th HR in 206 AB.  That projects to 55 in 600 AB (granted, this is the PCL, but that's still impressive).  That all with an avg/obp/slg line of .310/.412/.660.  After seeing his defensive skills earlier this year in the majors, is there not at least a shot we see him starting at SS for the Angels in 2009?

AA Arkansas:
So I went to look at Rancho, and noticed that 1B Mark Trumbo didn't play today, so I had this sneaky suspicion he'd been promoted.  Sure enough, he had!  Just today!  In his AA debut?  Try 5-5 for 2 HR and a double.  That puts his MILB season total at 28 in 412 AB.  Oh, and if that wasn't enough, Chris Pettit, who missed most of the beginning of the year hit 2 tonight as well.  Both were back to back with Trumbo. 

For all the talk of how our system has no good prospects left, I'm not sure I agree.  And this is without even discussing our elite prospects Conger, Walden and Adenhart, nor those starting to show solid growth despite being a little to old to be considered star prospects, aka Sandoval, Matt Brown and Jason Bulger, nor the slightly-starting-to-be-kinda-frustrating-but-supposedly-elite-prospect Brandon Wood.

Update: To put this in perspective, I'm including a chart of S-Rod's age 23 season in AAA and D-Mac's age 23 season split between AA and AAA. It should help explain why this is so exciting. Also, if you include D-Mac's age 28 MILB season, you see that while he is hitting more HR, it's not drastically faster rate, and S-Rod has a much better AVG and actually draws walks, too! The only disclaimer here is that D-Mac kept this performance up over a much larger sampling of AB. All stats include S-Rod's performance today. A little crazy, eh?