Cards' La Russa expects Ankiel to 'be here in September'

Rick Ankiel's long wait to return to the major leagues could be over soon.

The pitcher-turned-outfielder's power numbers at Triple-A Memphis have earned him a callup to the St. Louis Cardinals -- possibly this month, manager Tony La Russa said Friday.

"There's no doubt he'll be here in September," La Russa said before his club's game against the Washington Nationals. "Whether he gets here before September, that remains to be discussed."

Ankiel's line is 271/317/571, with 31 HR in 380 AB.  85 K vs. 24 BB, however.  I wonder if the majors will exacerbate that and he will be a Jose Hernandez type hitter with power, but crazy strikeouts and no walks.  I also wonder how his defensive range is.  He was playing CF in the minors, so maybe it's good.  Presumably his throwing arm is ok ;-)  

In any event, no matter how he does in the bigs, this is an unbelievable accomplishment, as he overcomes both a very late start and a deep-seated psychological problem.  

Both Firefox and IE7 have "search bars" that allow you to look up things easily on Google, Wikipedia, etc.  Searchplugins.net makes it simple to create search plugins for other sites as well.  So I used it to make a bunch of baseball-related search plugins.

All you need to do is switch the search engine in your search bar (in the upper right hand corner of your browser), and you can look up a player just by typing his name into that bar.  If you have Firefox and an extension like Context Search, you can also look things up by highlighting them on web pages, right-clicking, and choosing the appropriate search engine.

My plugins can be found here.  They include:

Baseball Cube

ESPN Baseball Player Stats

FirstInning.com

Minor League Ball - Comments

Minor League Ball - Diaries

Minor League Ball - Stories

Minor League Splits

Rototimes Baseball

Rotowire

Rotoworld

Hit the "I" next to them to install them. All of the plugins work in Firefox.  Most of them should work in IE, except for the ones marked with the Firefox symbol.  The ones marked "last name" only accept players' last names; the other ones can handle full names.

There are also plugins on searchplugins.net for Baseball-Reference.com, Fangraphs.com and MinorLeagueBaseball.com.  Mycroft.mozdev.org has still others, such as Baseball Prospectus and Hardball Times.

I hope you enjoy these plugins!  I know that they save me a lot of time.

I just picked this guy up late in a draft based solely on the stat page: 24 years old; 6'4", 195 lb. lefty, which sounds like a pitcher; and a pretty good line in hitter-friendly Albuquerque (8-2, 3.40, with 96 K and only 8 HR in 95 IP.)  In 30 major league innings, he had a 3.03 ERA and struck out 36.  However, control seems to be a big issue (4.4 BB/9 at AAA, 8.2 in the majors.)

I have not seen him pitch, nor have I really heard much about him.

Anyone have any insight on Pinto?  What's his timetable, and how good does he figure to be in the long run?

Which one of these guys would you rather have?  Evaluating the two of them, I am getting:

Betemit:

Much better plate discipline

More power

Better major league performance

J. Lopez:

Plays more difficult position

Two years younger

Better minor league performance:

Tougher hitting environments

Better age relative to league

High doubles rate in minors & majors may indicate future power

I'm finding it to be a very tough call.  What do you all think?

Poll

Would you rather have Wilson Betemit or Jose Lopez?

44%

Wilson Betemit

44 votes

55%

Jose Lopez

55 votes

99 votes | Poll has closed

To Firefox users: I created a search engine for FirstInning.com, the fantastic site that has extensive sabermetric information (including balls-in-play info) on minor leaguers.

To add it to your list of search engines, go here and click "FirstInning.com," next to the icon of a bat.  That will add it to your search engine list along with Google, eBay, etc.  Then all you need to do to look up a player is switch to the FirstInning engine and type his last name in the search box.  (If you have the Context Search extension, you can also highlight his last name on a web page and right-click to look it up right away.)

I also have made these search engine plugins:

Basketball-Reference.com

ESPN Baseball Player Search

Rotoworld and Rototimes Baseball

MinorLeagueBaseball.com, MinorLeagueSplits.com, and, yes, MinorLeagueBall.com

These plugins make my life a little easier; hopefully they will yours as well!

http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/news?slug=ap-mets-rangerstrade&prov=ap&type=lgns

The Texas Rangers acquired outfielder Victor Diaz from the New York Mets on Wednesday for minor league catcher Mike Nickeas.

Diaz was on the Mets' opening day roster and hit .182 (2-for-11) in six games before being sent to Triple-A Norfolk, where he hit .224 with eight home runs and 38 RBS [sic] in 103 games. Diaz spent parts of the last three seasons with the Mets.

Texas assigned Diaz to Triple-A Oklahoma. The Rangers made room on their 40-man roster when outfielder Adam Hyzdu was outrighted to Oklahoma.

Nickeas split the season between Double-A Frisco and Class-A Bakersfield.

For a man whom I predicted on this very site would be "comparable to Danny Tartabull," this is... not so good.  Very rarely will you see someone's game collapse so completely and so quickly.  For a guy who seemed major league ready to go down to AAA and put up a 606 OPS almost makes no sense.

Nickeas has some good walk totals, but not a whole lot else.

Strange story, this Victor Diaz fellow.  I guess we'll see how it plays out in Texas.

http://www.denverpost.com/rockies/ci_4259048

Sounds like he'll be starting...

At 10:42 p.m., manager Clint Hurdle reached his flash point. Furious with his team's offensive maladies, his patience expired, he announced that Double-A super-prospect Troy Tulowitzki would be arriving today and that Luis Gonzalez was heading back to the minors. Left unsaid was that Clint Barmes, the Rockies' shortstop since August 2004, would be benched.

The Rockies had planned to keep Tulowitzki with the Tulsa Drillers during the Double-A playoffs. But two weeks ago the pendulum began to swing as Barmes slumped and Tulowitzki remained hot. Only 21, Tulowitzki hit .291 with 13 home runs and 61 RBIs in 104 games.

I've created Firefox search plugins to search MinorLeagueBaseball.com and MinorLeagueSplits.com.  If you use the Firefox web browser, this will save you some time, because whenever you want to look up a guy's stats, you don't need to load up any webpages.  All you have to do is mouse over to your search bar (to the right of the address bar), change the search engine to MinorLeagueBaseball or MinorLeagueSplits, and type the player's last name in the search box.  

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Third-hand here, as supposedly Sons of Sam Horn is reporting that ESPN Radio is reporting this deal.

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Just reported on WFAN, can't find a link yet.

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