Sickels - Clayton Richard

by joerote on Sep 23, 2005 2:57 PM EDT

Just found out the other day that he entered the draft this year through a newsletter my step-mom gets from the group home in Lafayette, IN. My step-mom worked there long ago and I guess Clayton's parents are the new house parents, which is quite a selfless act for people who are entering their golden years but that's another story altogether.

The reason for this post was to get your opinion on him and see if he's going to be in the book. Some background on him, he was a highly rated QB coming out of HS and came down to hometown Purdue (my connection as I'm a Purdue grad) and Michigan. He chose Michigan much to my chagrin. He redshirted his freshman year as Michigan's QB was a senior. His Redshirt Freshman year (last year), he got beat out by a true freshman so he decided to play baseball in the spring. Looking at his numbers, they weren't bad for taking almost 2 calendar years off from baseball.

http://www.thebaseballcube.com/players/R/clayton-richard-1.shtml

H/IP rate was a little higher than you'd like but the K/IP and BB/IP were both pretty good.

Then he pitched really well in the Pioneer League this summer again with very good K/IP and BB/IP rates and an average H/IP. Sample size was too small in the Sally League to really tell.

http://www.thebaseballcube.com/players/R/clayton-richard.shtml

For a kid that hasn't played much baseball since HS, it would seem there would be a lot of room for development. Any thoughts on him? Is he going to be in the book?

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Lafayette players

Just a sidebar (not often I get to respond to fellow Purdue/Lafayette people on these things)....

I'm not sure what's really caused it (other than improved coaching?), but Lafayette Harrison and McCutcheon have had a lot of players actually make it into the draft and subsequently to MLB in the past few years (Sabel, Bruntlett, Dunwoody).

Maybe having two teams in the Colt World Series is paying off by getting the county and surrounding area players (i.e., the Hoosier North team) experience against a wide range of competition.... Well, the idea would hold except one would expect the Lafayette All-Stars to have reaped some benefit, but none is apparent, and the HN teams are almost always clearly better than the LAS teams (probably due, however, to the larger pool from which the HN team is drawn).

Anyway, after having Butch Metzger, Bob Friend and probably Walt Tragesser as the most notable Lafayette entries previously in the MLB record books, this is heady stuff for us!

Friend still ranks as the best of the bunch, but maybe Clayton or (eventually) Josh will overtake him.

-tmt

by Tom Talavage on Sep 26, 2005 1:27 AM EDT reply actions