-P- The Royals have promoted Eric Hosmer, who was the third overall pick in the 2008 draft. Hosmer, 21, was hitting .439/.525/.582 for Class AAA Omaha. This just reminds me that I'm getting faintly nervous about Pedro Alvarez, who was the second overall pick in that draft. Putting aside, for now, the usual explanations about Alvarez being a slow starter, his career tells a pretty consistent story - he has ridiculous power, but he struggles with strikeouts and has periods where he really has trouble hitting for average. At this point, it's possible to see those problems improving, since he's still only 24. But it's also possible to see them eating him alive. I think the likeliest outcome is that he will have a peak where he's a very good power hitter, but it will be a short one - the combination of his conditioning issues, streakiness, and strikeouts will be a hard one to overcome in the long term. Hopefully, that will be more of a problem for Alvarez's next employer than it will be for the Pirates, and the Bucs can end up getting good value from their draft pick.
Hosmer and No. 5 overall pick Buster Posey now look like more valuable players. I would have been upset with the Bucs at the time if they had picked Hosmer or Posey instead of Alvarez, however; Alvarez was widely regarded as the best prospect of the three. And No. 1 overall pick Tim Beckham now looks like only a marginal prospect in the Rays system. Draft picks are inherently unpredictable, and it's hard to slam any one pick too much as long as it was sensible at the time. And there's obviously still plenty of time for Alvarez to get on track.
-P- Dejan Kovacevic's piece on Gerrit Cole doubles as a pretty good summary of the decision the Pirates might have to (or, rather, get to) make between Cole and Anthony Rendon. Most of what I've seen about the piece today, here and on Twitter, focuses on a tossed-off comment from the piece about "even basement-run blogs" interviewing Rendon. Kovacevic shouldn't have put it that way, no doubt, but too much of the commentary about his work, here and elsewhere, focuses on stuff like this rather than on the other 95 percent of what he does, which continues to be really good. See also his series on Charlie Morton earlier this week.
UPDATE: JRoth95 in the comments:
Given that the only reason I ever came here was the DK gave consistent and complimentary links to Charlie (and sometimes stuff WTM put up here as well), I think it’s pretty myopic – or maybe hypersensitive – to view DK as just another reporter who likes to slag blogs.