Angels have 5 of first 37 draft picks

we get the old dudes on cheap short contracts. They kick ass and are Type A and B FA. We give them away and get other teams’ draft picks.

i wish we sucked so we could just go ahead and rebuild all the time…

Clay Daniels was the international supervisor responsible for may of the Angles Latin players. With his dismissal in June of last year it will be interesting to see how the team fairs with international signings

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/baseball/mlb/06/05/angels.daniel/index.html

Any of them average 90 wins per season the last ten years… hmmm?

Trevor Reckling wasn’t even 19 yet when he opened the season with the Kernels. Of course they kept him all year there. Of course he spent time working on breaking stuff — that’s exactly what young pitchers do in low-A ball. He also has control issues, as many young players of his makeup do, and those surfaced last year as he hit higher levels. If anything, the Angels have been rushing Reckling into service, not delaying his development. He was the youngest pitcher in his division in AA last season.

And the fact that young pitchers dominate in low-A says little about how they’ll perform at higher levels. They’ll be promoted not by what their ERA says, but how their mechanics look, the effectiveness of their repertoire, and their maturity and character. They promoted Walden more quickly than Reckling from Cedars, and Walden has struggled since. (Your contention that Walden, stuck in Cedar Rapid, decided not to “compete” in the second half of ’08 is bizarre since he was promoted to Rancho in the second half).

And judging a pitcher based on Cal League ERA — a slugger’s mecca of extreme hitters parks — is short-sighted. Then citing O’Sullivan’s record at Arkansas — where he pitched fewer than 20 innings total — doesn’t help. He was promoted quickly because he showed strong pitch efficiency, good control, strong mound presence, and generally kept the ball in the park while at Rancho — and it ain’t easy to do that. O’Sullivan still needs another year or two to ripen, but it wasn’t “dumb” to promote him past Rancho.

As a rule, other teams do not promote their players faster than the Angels. Small market and struggling teams that lack depth do. There are thousands of counter-examples of medium and large market teams that keep their players on the farm until years 23-25. Moreover to argue that Reckling was promoted too slowly, while O’Sullivan was promoted too quickly, hurts your overall thesis.

Anyway, about these examples of “ridiculous” over-stays on the farm: Wood got his first ABs with the Halos at age 22, and Rodriguez his first ABs at 23. Both struggled with the bat and were blocked by better players. Still, they got more ABs the next year. Meanwhile, Sandoval is a college draftee who is essentially a AAAA or reserve player — a corner infielder with only modest speed and power. There’s nothing “ridiculous” about his staying in the minors to this point. Moreover, most of our homegrown players — Kendrick, Aybar, Mathis, Santana, Weaver, Lackey — all were introduced at age 22 or 23. Completely typical if you’re not dealing with a really standout phenom.

In general, two things are true:
(1) The Angels tend to do player development correctly, and their strong farm in the middle part of the last decade is testament to that.
(2) The strength of the Angels current farm system among the fanbase is exaggerated. The Angels had consecutive bad drafts before 2009, didn’t sign some high picks, focused too much on free agency, and made some bad Rule V decisions. We lost some of our most valuable prospects via questionable trades. The farm is definitely middle-of-the-pack at the moment, and we need these five draft picks (in addition to the good 2009 draft) to get us back on track.

i just want an Ace pitcher out of it for league minimum.

use them.