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name your team's 08 sleeper prospect

A's: Arnold Leon Farhan Zaidi said this of Leon to OaklandClubhouse earlier this off-season: OC: You mentioned Leon. How did the team first zero-in on him and do you see him as a starter long-term? FZ: We do. In the Mexican League this past summer and also in winter ball, he has pitched as a reliever, but our scouts that have seen him say that he really has a starting pitcher’s mix. Certainly, there is no indication that he would lack the endurance to be a starting pitcher. We initially identified him through his stats because he performed very well in the Mexican League over the summer. This year, we didn’t really scout the summer Mexican League that extensively, but we knew we wanted to have a presence down there during winter ball. He was one of the guys we targeted as someone that we wanted to get a number of looks at. Once our scouts actually got down there and saw him pitching with solid-average to even a plus fastball – our reports ranged from 88-92 all of the way up to 90-94 with plus secondary stuff, with plus command – we immediately decided that this was a guy worth aggressively pursuing. Especially since we had internally made the decision to be more aggressive internationally, we thought that this was a guy who would be the perfect kind of player to launch a more aggressive spending campaign in Latin America because as far as spending money in Latin America goes, this guy was as sure of a bet as you could find, in terms of pitching in the highest level you could pitch down there, which I believe is the Mexican League, and having some success. The combination of the very positive scouting report that we had seen from winter ball and the fact that he had performed well over the summer, as well as the winter, led us to pretty aggressively pursue a deal there.

    The easy choice here is Arnold Leon, who we recently signed out of Mexico.  In the Mexican League this summer, he posted a sub-2 ERA as an 18-year old, an incredible feat at any age given the extreme hitter-friendly environment in that league.  He continued to pitch well in Winter Ball, where our scouts saw him up to 94 and had high praise for his command and feel for pitching.  He will probably start out the year in Stockton, but given his success in the Mexican League (which is generally viewed as being equivalent to a AA/AAA level), he could move quickly.

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