Minor League Ball Gameday, Monday, April 3rd

Good morning and good afternoon everyone and welcome to the Minor League Ball Gameday discussion thread for Monday, April 3rd. It’s Opening Day Part Two, with the 24 clubs that didn’t play yesterday getting into action this afternoon and evening.

The minor league season begins on Thursday and will be the main focus of Gameday discussion going forward. For today, here are your reading items of interest.

****MLB Scoreboard

****Carlos Martinez’s start last night for the St. Louis Cardinals against the Chicago Cubs was a true thing of beauty.

****Sam Dykstra at Milb.com has a breakdown of Top 100 MLB prospects who made Opening Day rosters. We’ve covered most of these guys here at Minor League Ball and will pick up the remainder in the next couple of days.

****Youngsters are the big interest here of course, but Alex Remington at The Hardball Times looks at players on the other end of the experience spectrum: the oldest players still active in MLB and what they may do this year.

****Madison Bumgarner is getting better, writes Dave Cameron at Fangraphs.

****At Crawfish Boxes, AstrosFuture looks at how the 2017 Houston Astros starting lineup ranked when they were prospects.