Thoughts For A Friday Morning - Meet Me in St. Louis, Louie Version

 Spent most of my adult life in St. Louis and a part of me wishes I was going to be at Busch Stadium tonight to root on the Guardians in person.  Instead, I will be watching on TV like so many other Guardians' fans.  

But let's dive in this morning:

TO ALL THE TEAMS IN OUR SYSTEM

• Guardians in the playoffs
• Columbus, Akron, Lake County and one of our DSL teams in the playoffs.  
• Every team but one (ACL team) had a winning record.
• Likely that most of these teams had an average age BELOW what the average age was for players in that league.  So, not a lot of over-age, 4A players stuffing rosters to artificially help win championships. 

Lake County Captains

Congrats to the guys.  It was a great win and this experience should clearly help guys in the future.   The amazing thing is that this was accomplished even in the face of probably the most aggressive promotion strategy that I have ever seen the Guardians use, meaning a lot of the guys at the end were at Lynchburg during the year and some of the stud prospects on the Captains' roster at the beginning of the year had been promoted to Akron a long time ago.

Akron Rubberducks

You guys continue to fight and, hopefully, can clinch the Eastern League semifinals tonight.

Columbus Clippers

You have made the playoffs without a bunch of former MLer, 4A players on your roster.  Mostly homegrown guys, many of whom are still very good prospects, even after all the promotions and inj

I will have more on this in my end-of-minor-league-season post at the end of September but with all but one team (ACL team) finishing with a winner record and 4 of our 7 minor league teams making the playoffs, it has been a pretty successful year.  Considering how young the players are on those teams, we also had success in a way that is helpful to the development of future major leaguers.

Cleveland Guardians

What can I say.  As magic numbers start to fall, as my pre-season prediction of 61-101 drops further in the rearview mirror, as we start to get performances from younger players and trade deadline acquistions, this season looks more and more satisfying.  Congratulatons on knocking off that first magic number (i.e., making the playoffs)

While the post-season is all about getting hot at the right time and having a manager who is experienced and good at navigating these short series, the goal, for me, is to pass all these thresholds.  So, going into tonight, what we have left is:

Magic # is 3 to win the AL Central (KC)

Magic # is 4 to get the #2 seed (Houston)

#1 seed - we are currently 0.5 games behind the Yankees and they hold the tiebreaker

Top seed for the World Series: We are currently 2.5 games behind Philadelphia and LA.  We hold the tiebreaker over Philly and the Dodgers own the tiebreaker over us.

St. LOUIS SERIES

We need to keep pushing through the end of the year.  We also need to keep trying to make this team better.  I still want to make some moves starting this weekend, even though I know they probably won't be made:

• Bring up Enright, DFA Strzelecki, send down Sandlin - It will be a great story and Enright deserves a shot.  Right now it is doubtful that he gets protected this winter as we have soooo many young pitchers to protect against the Rule 5 raft and maybe giving him a shot now also increases his trade value.  Plus, like with Walters and Sabrowski, the lack of scouting on him may help him be successful early.
• Bring up Brito and Rodriguez and send down Schneeman and Brennan.  Look, as I said before, I don't think this would impact the minor league options for anyone at this point, as you have to be in the minors for 20 days to burn an option and I think you only have to stay in the minors for 10 days after being optioned.  With 9 days left in the season, we shouldn't have an issue if we wanted to bring Schneeman and Brennan back up to the ML roster for the post-season.  We need to find out whether Rodriguez will be a fit for the post-season roster and if we can survive Brito's lack of defensive versatility in order to inject more offense into the lineup for the playoffs.

Would love to see these things done but I doubt if they will be.  In any case, will enjoy this weekend with my two hometown teams battling it out, followed up by the battle for the Ohio Cup and a good warmup series for the post-season with Houston.