Closing In...

If you go the official Dodgers site, you'll see a counter indicating how many days we have left until pitchers and catchers. We're thankfully below the four-day mark now

I just wanted to point to the Baseball America chat on the Dodgers farm system. Only subscribers get full access to the complete top ten, but you can glean a lot about our system as a whole from the chat, especially with regards to prospects who haven't quite arrived on everyone's radar screen yet.

What I want to highlight is the following lines from the chat:

Q: Mitch Miller from Los Angeles asks:

A little surprised to see Chuck Tiffany way down at the bottom of the list. I thought it was pretty clear that he was a top 100 overall prospect for sure. Can the Dodgers have 10 in the top 100?

A: Alan Matthews:

It's not only possible, it's likely.

This is of course great news. BA does top ten lists for every organization, giving 300 prospects total, and if the Dodgers have its own entire top 10 in the top 100 of all MLB, then we're obviously in great shape.

The one caveat I think is the relative youth of our system. Most of our true stads were drafted in 2002 and later by Logan White, our scouting guru. Their ETA is at best 2006, and we should probably be patient with many of them. Edwin Jackson might slot into the 5th starter slot if he has a strong ST, but I'd rather we wait and let him get more seasoning in AAA. If he makes the MLB team, I want him to earn it with a lights-out ST. Right now, this is how I think our roster might work out over the next couple of years:

2005

Rotation:

Penny
O. Perez
Lowe
Weaver
Ishii

Starters:

Izzy - SS
Werth - LF
Drew - CF
Kent - 2B
Bradley - RF
Choi - 1B
Valentin - 3B
Ross - C

[I'll ignore platoon issues for now]

2006

Rotation:

Billingsley
O. Perez
Lowe
Jackson
Ishii

Starters:

Izzy - SS
Werth - LF
Drew - CF
Kent - 2B
Guzman - 3B
Bradley - RF
Choi - 1B
Navarro - C

2007

Billinglsey
O. Perez
Lowe
Jackson
Tiffany

Chin-lung Hu - SS (assumes Izzy is traded)
Werth - LF
Andy LaRoche - 3B
Guzman - RF (we let Milton walk)
Delwyn Young - 2B
Drew - CF
Choi - 1B
Navarro - C (maybe Russell Martin instead)

Anyhow, this is obviously all pure speculation, and a lot of the names I entered can be totally different, but I do think that the Dodgers' future is quite bright. I don't think the Snakes will be very good anytime soon; the Giants are poised for a coming collapse when Barry gets old; the Padres don't have great position player talent; and Colorado is a perpetual basket case. If McCourt can keep payroll in the top quartile of the league as he promised, we'll have enough studs on the farm to succeed.

I really do think we'll also have two top-flight starters emerge from the farm in the next two-three season or so, coming out of the following group:

Edwin Jackson
Chad Billingsley
Chuck Tiffany
Jonathan Broxton
Julio Pimentel
Greg Miller
Mike Megrew
Scott Elbert

As for position players, I think we'll get some strong big-leaguers out of the following

Chin-lung Hu
Joel Guzman
Corey Dunlap
Andy LaRoche
James Loney
Russell Martin
Dioner Navarro
Delwyn Young
Blake Dewitt