Down in the minors

Yup.   The Cubs are going to leave Veal down in the minors for three or four years.  He's going to come up, get a small cup of coffee, be hammered at least once (like all rookie pitchers) and then labeled as a failure because, gosh, he's already 25 years old and that's too old for a prospect.  (He turns 22 in September).   Remember, this is not a high school kid who went into the Farm System at 18.  This is a college player and they have to be on a faster track because they are already older.   The Cubs draft or acquire college players and still think that they can take 4 or 5 years in the minors to develop.  With a College player that gives you a 26 year old suspect by the time the reach the majors as opposed to a 22 year old prospect.  

And once again the Cub management will have take potential steak and turned it into compost.  

If Veal really is such an uber prospect, he should be fast tracked over the next season and a half, brought up in September 2007 and played, and given a real chance to be on the team as the last guy in the  pen starting the 2008 season.  

The farm system is in the crapper, no doubt about it.  We can thank Jim Hendry for that.  

Some of you jumped down my throat when I analogized Felix Pie as a poor man's Juan Encarnacion.  I apologize.  Upon further review, that comparison was too lofty.  I hereby want to go on record as saying that Felix Pie is a poor man's Angel Pagan.  

We now take you back to your regularly scheduled programming.  

About Gallagher up until this year I've heard his fastball has jumped in both movement and velocity this year from 89-90 to 92-94.. Which is very exciting. He also is getting hitters out with more than one pitch another exciting piece of info.  Wait for Gallagher

We don't need our minor league teams to do well. We need two or three top shelf prospects, and we just don't have them. It doesn't make sense to evaluate a minor league system based on the records of the respective teams, because that could easily just be a function of a system full of mediochre prospects. A good minor league system has players that project to superstars, or at least solid starters in the MLB. Do the Cubs have any minor leaguers that project as superstars? Not really: possibly guys like Veal and especially Mark Pawelek, but he is still way too raw to count on with any certainty. Do the Cubs have any minor leaguers that project to solid MLB players? Kinda...but again, those prospects are shaky at best, and very few position players have anything close to eye-popping skills. When Felix Pie is seen as the very best position player prospect in the entire system, that is a sign that we have an incredibly weak system, especially for position players. We used to have a much stronger farm for pitchers, but a lot of our best prospects have been traded away, and it seems like every Cubs pitching prospect suffers from two common things which has become a Cubs motif: injury problems and/or control problems.

The Cubs farm system is devoid of projectable, blue chip talent.  There is not a single other positional prospect to get terribly excited about at Double A outside of perhaps Eric Patterson.