also available at www.SethSpeaks.net –
The Twin Cities Metro Area got a lot of snow in the last 24 hours or so. Monday morning, I opened up my garage door to see a lot of snow coming down, well, down and sideways. I turned around, shut the garage door and worked from home. I honestly was more productive working from home. It was a good day. Watched Up for the 47th time. Watched a lot of Dora and Sponge Bob. Helped push a couple of people’s cars the snow and ice. That’s just fun times!
But aside from the productivity at work, it was a good mail day too. I made the long trek to the mail box and found that I had received my copy of John Sickels’ The Baseball Prospect Book 2010. That was very exciting. As you know, Mr. Sickels was a guest on the SethSpeaks.net Weekly Minnesota Twins podcast about two weeks ago. As he mentioned at that point, the book contains 41 Twins prospects. All 41 prospects are given a grade of A through C, you get to see stats from the last two years and then an informational and entertaining profile. A quick sample of the comedic writing of Sickels is the start to his profile of Danny Valencia. “After Joe Crede got hurt, the Twins made due with Matt Tolbert, Brendan Harris, Nick Punto, the ghost of Mike Pagliurulo, and the animated zombie corpse of Gary Gaetti at third base for the stretch run.”
Sickels is a tremendous writer. He wrote 1,170 player profiles. He has lists of his top 50 hitters and top 50 pitchers, and reviews the 2009 seasons of his choices from a year ago. He has Sleeper Alerts and Breakout Candidates. It’s great to read his thoughts on Twins prospects, but it’s amazing how frequently it becomes helpful to be able to read profiles on other teams’ prospects. After you buy my book (!), be sure to purchase your copy of John Sickels’ The Baseball Prospect Book 2010.
Soon after, my door bell rang. It was UPS or something, and it was a delivery for me. If you recall in December I mentioned a third writing project that I was working on. The delivery was a few copies of the FoxSports.com/Scout.com Fantasy magazine. I wrote the Twins minor league content. To see it in print is really pretty cool. So, if you see a copy on the newsstand… I see it’d only $4.95, so that’s not too bad.
Finally, last night in my e-mail inbox, I received the electronic version of the Diamond Futures 2010 Prospect eGuide. I saw the Twins prospect rankings for their site, and enjoyed it. On the site, I saw that they had a 300 page e-book available, so I thought I would get that. The authors have been doing this for a long time. They look at some different categories. They grade players too. And in the top, they rank their Top 500 prospects in baseball. In case you were wondering, Juan Portes came in at Prospect #446.
Finally, on last night’s Travis Talks Minnesota Sports podcast, he was joined by Twins prospect Tyler Robertson.
If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to e-mail me or leave them in the Comments section.
SethSpeaks.net 
I had to laugh at that first comment. I had to push a friends car out this morning, there’s something almost nostalgic about pushing cars out while living up here in the great white north.
I thought you lived up on the border Seth. I took some time off from following the blog, did you move?