Picking Low-A is a matter of guessing who will move along from Auburn and who might be held back. The former is fairly common, but the latter isn’t. With High-A, it’s not so much who might be held back but who will be kept down by the FAs in AA and AAA (this is less of a factor than in the the dark times of ’07-’10, when 70+ players would be in the big camp and nearly 15 of them were major-leaguers).
With that in mind, here’s what I thought the 2013 P-Nats would be (mistakes in red, wrong roles in blue):
CA – Nieto
1B – Keyes
2B – Dykstra
SS – Ortega
3B – Sanchez
OF – Burns
OF – Taylor
OF – Souza
DH – Ramsey
BCA – Leonida
BIF – J. Miller
BIF – Kelso
BOF – Oduber
Like Hagerstown, I was much more accurate with my prediction than in the two previous years, getting 10 of 13 players right and seven of 13 roles correct. I don’t feel so bad about getting the roles wrong because both Sanchez and Dykstra have been shifting around the infield for the past couple of seasons. Missing on Souza was also a happy mistake because it meant that he finally got the bump to AA.
Despite my success thus far, I have no illusions that I’ll be as accurate with this set of predictions, either. But that’s not the point — giving us fodder for discussion (and maintaining site traffic, natch) is!
CA – Severino
1B – Pleffner
2B – Renda
SS – S. Perez
3B – McQuillan
OF – Wooten
OF – Mesa
OF – B. Miller
DH – Ramos
BCA – Manuel
BIF – Norfork
BIF – Soriano
BOF – Piwnica-Worms