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Minor League Ball Gameday, July 31

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By John Sickels Updated
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Andre Rienzo
Andre Rienzo
Jason Miller

Good morning prospect watchers. There is bound to be a lot of news involving prospects today, so I wanted to get this thread up-and-running earlier than normal. I will write up reports about any prospects involved in deadline trades as rapidly as I can, but you can use this thread here to discuss the news as it occurs.

***Yesterday's Minor League Ball Gameday thread.

***Who needs Jake Peavy? We have Andre Rienzo! He pitched well in his major league debut for the White Sox yesterday, the right-hander from Brazil allowing three unearned runs in seven innings, walking three, allowing five hits, fanning six.

***In additional White Sox news, on-base maniac Marcus Semien has a .680 OBP and a 1.171 SLG over his last 10 games for Double-A Birmingham. I will write about him as soon as the trade deadline is past.

***Toronto Blue Jays first base prospect L.B. Dantzler went 2-for-5 for Vancouver in the Northwest League yesterday, raising his line to .319/.405/.572 in 33 games. He was a 14th round pick in June from the University of South Carolina, where he hit .322/.444/.617 this spring, though his 5-11, 200 pound body doesn't excite scouts and he was seen by most as an organization player at higher levels. Hitting well in the Northwest League doesn't mean he will pan out, but it keeps him in the conversation at least and he'll get a full shot in A-ball.

***Andrew Ball asks what the Future in "Futures Game" stands for.

***My complaint about Twitter and Wikipedia really annoyed some people last night.

I was not in the best of moods and feeling cranky and I overstated my case. That's on me, but I really do find aspects of both services to be problematic. Wikipedia is a good starting point to research a topic, but people overuse it (ask any teacher or college professor). There are some topics where it is still very shallow and, in some cases, misleading, or just flat wrong. I have personal knowledge of this for some non-baseball topics of personal interest, but I will not discuss those issues here as they wander far afield into forbidden topics.

As for Twitter, yes of course it is a good source of "breaking news." I've done a lot more with it over the last year and have found it very useful. But aside from any problems with rumors, the limits of the Twitter format are a real hindrance for style of expression.

I sometimes spend more time trying to cram what I want to say into the character limit than I did coming up with the idea or piece of information in the first place. Shades of meaning are lost and sometimes shades of meaning are extremely important, even when writing about baseball prospects, or when ranting about some new item of technology.

I've found Twitter to be useful as a blogger and a good driver of traffic to Minor League Ball, but as a writer I've found it very annoying. And I was a writer long before I was a blogger.

The bottom line is that I use both twitter and wikipedia extensively myself, but people need to be more aware of the limitations of the format. That is what I was trying to say so in-artfully.

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