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The end of the world. No, I’m not talking about WWIII, the continued collapse of the US Dollar/economy, or the next predicted apocalypse conspiracy. I recently spent the weekend in Montauk, celebrating a dear friend’s wedding. Montauk is colloquially known by Long Island residents as the “End of the World” because it is the easternmost […]

Please, blog, may I have some more?

In my last prospect security check, I went over Atlanta’s Christian Pache, Miami’s Sixto Sanchez and Detroit’s Tarik Skubal. Since then, both Pache and Skubal have received the call to the Bigs, and I predicted we might even see all three in 2020 when I originally wrote the piece. The same is not the case for this week’s lucky luggage — Jazz Chisholm, Oneil Cruz and Blake Walston — although they are all equally thrilled to be featured in one of my articles. In fact, I actually just got off the phone with Jazz, who is one of the few remaining real baseball players left at the Jupiter training site. After thanking me for including him in my article, Jazz began telling me how even though no one else is left in camp except him, he made a new friend: a baseball named Bilson whose face he drew on with a Sharpie. Times have apparently been tough in Jupiter — Jazz also has an imaginary cat named Tom Mattingly.

As poor Jazz sends smoke signals to Derek Jeter from the training site, we must press on with this security check. Unlike the last installment, we’ll probably be waiting until 2021 to see Chisholm and Cruz crack the MLB, while Walston won’t debut until 2022-23. That said, I’ve done my best to gather information about all three of these players and provide my own personal spin on each, despite the fact that there is no new statistical information to reveal. As one last reminder, all three players I’ll go over today were previously requested in the comments section by the readers of Razzball. If there is a particular prospect you would like to see an in-depth profile for in the future, just say so. If you’re on the fence, please keep it to yourself because the more of these profiles I write, the more Grey will make fun of me for writing 1,000 words on a single player in his daily round-ups. Alright, before we get to cruzin’ and waltzin’ — let’s start it off with some smooth Jazz.

Please, blog, may I have some more?

Now that the 2020 MLB season has hit the three-week mark, we’re at the point where we can start looking into some sell-high and buy-low candidates. With sample sizes increasing from the “far-too-small” to the increasingly indicative, we begin to ask ourselves questions like: “is Dylan Bundy actually good now, or are hitters just being thrown off by his dusty, pathetic attempt at facial hair?”  Translation: are the results we’re seeing legitimate? If you’re willing to make a calculated gamble, this is as good of a time as any to find excess value in the trade market and/or dump an early star destined for decline to the league dingus. One such player I’m looking at adding shares of at present is Eduardo Escobar of the Arizona Diamondbacks, who entered the week of Aug. 10 batting .164/.233/.255 with just two extra base hits across his first 55 at bats of the season. After finishing draft season with an ADP of 113 overall as 2B13/3B17, Escobar looks to be an obvious bust from the outside looking in — but let me tell you why he’s a major buy-low candidate for me for the rest of the season.

Please, blog, may I have some more?

If you’re a hardcore baseball fan, you’ve probably already mulled through your fair share of 2020 MLB mock drafts. It seems like every website worth a damn posts one, yet no one really knows what to expect, and it only takes one curveball to throw the entire equation out of whack. Even so, I figured I’d give it a try for Razzball’s sake, if for no other reason than to give Grey some spicy motivation to tune in on Wednesday night. See, now it’s a mock draft.

There’s a lot of uncertainty with this draft. Nobody knows for sure just how college heavy teams are ultimately going to go with the unique situation created by COVID-19, and which teams will elect to play the strategic bonus tomfoolery game. It’s difficult to project just how these factors will play into each and every team’s respective strategy. We might see more teams than ever taking on the “best-available” approach.

But as it relates to fantasy baseball, Wednesday’s draft is relevant because it sets the stage for the ensuing trajectory of every drafted player’s stock as a prospect. Not only does draft position tend to influence how people value prospects in first-year player drafts, but who drafted said player can also go a long way in determining what their Minor League journey will look like and how confident we are as fantasy owners that they will develop successfully. That being said, here is my carefully-concocted mock draft of the first 29 picks this upcoming Wednesday. Mush! Onward into the unknown!

Please, blog, may I have some more?