Minor League Ball daily discussion, February 17, 2017

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to the Minor League Ball daily discussion for Friday, February 17th. On the agenda for today:

So far I’ve posted National League Western Division and American League Western Division prospect sleepers. NL Central will be next, followed by AL Central, NL East, then AL East. The plan is to have all of these done by the middle of next week. We will still be looking at other sleepers as spring training progresses. Pivoting to MLB draft coverage will happen soon, and we will also be working up Farm System ranking lists.

Here’s a discussion question for today. Washington Nationals manager Dusty Baker discussed his search for a closer this spring, discounting the idea of a closer-by-committee while also noting that “the days of Rollie Fingers going three innings and Dave Righetti going 3 ¹⁄_3, those days are gone, they’re not conditioned to do that.” Baker wants to name a specific closer for psychological reasons, so that pitchers know ahead of time when they are most likely to be called upon.

Two questions come to mind:

A) Do you agree with Dusty that closer-by-committee doesn’t work as well as having a single closer?

B) If you were Dusty Baker and you had to pull someone out of the minor leagues to be your closer for 2017, who would it be?

Two Caveats:

***it cannot be someone with any experience above Double-A, and
***it cannot be someone who is currently used mainly as a reliever in the minors.

In other words, if you had to take a minor league starting pitcher (Double-A or lower) and use him as your closer, who would it be?