Mack's Apples - 10-12-17 - Mets Top 30, Peter Flynn, D1 Baseball Change, Justin Fields, TJS Risk,

Good morning.

MLB has updated their top Mets prospect list. It is –

    1.     SP             David Peterson

    2.     SP             Justin Dunn

    3.     SS              Andres Gimenez

    4.     SP             Thomas Szapucki

    5.     OF             Desmond Lindsay

    6.     SP             Marcos Molina

    7.     1B             Peter Alonso

8.     IF               Gavin Cecchini

9.     C                Tomas Nido

10. 3B            Mark Vientos

11. SS             Luis Guillorme

12. OF            Wuilmer Becerra

13. SP            Jordan Humphreys

14. SP            Chris Flexen

15. 3B/OF    Jhoan Urena

16. SP            Anthony Kay

17. SS             Luis Carpio

18. SS             Gregory Guerrero

19. SS             Ronny Mauricio

20. C               Ali Sanchez

21. RP            Jacob Rhame

22. RP            Stephen Nogosek

23. SP            P.J. Conlon

24. 3B            David Thompson

25. C/1B       Patrick Mazeika

26. OF            Adrian Hernandez

27. SP            Corey Oswalt

28. RP            Jamie Callahan

29. OF            Quinn Brody

30. RP            Gerson Bautista

My thoughts on this list ramble… I just can’t list Lindsay (#5) and Becerra (#12) this high anymore. They’ve done nothing to prove to me yet that they are major league bound… I was surprised to see Oswalt (#27) this low. I expect him to turn some heads in 2018 in Queens… where is RP Drew Smith? Also OF Wagner Lagrange?  Lastly, there just is too much time being allotted to Cecchini (#8). He’s simply not a prospect anymore.

A lot can be said for the state of the Mets pipeline when you have Lindsay and Molina in your Top 5 and Cecchini is still lurking around in the Top 10.

Luis Carpio (#17). Really?

Mack's Mets writer Peter Flynn has been designated for assignment.

 D1 Baseball

The Division I Competition Oversight Committee has approved increasing the number of seeded teams from eight to 16 in the Division I Baseball Championship, beginning with the 2018 season. The committee, which met last week in Indianapolis, believes the change will allow baseball to have the same bracketing principles as other sports that have 64 or more teams in their bracket. Baseball was the only NCAA Division I championship with 64 or more teams in its field that did not seed at least 25 percent of its bracket. Previously, the Division I Baseball Committee did not seed teams 9 through 16.  As a result, the committee could potentially pair the ninth-best team against the No. 1 seed in the super regional round.

Justin Fields –

SEC Country - 

What if I told you there’s a place where the No. 1 football prospect in the country was just another face in the crowd? That place exists. It’s called a baseball diamond. And Baseball America expert Carlos Collazo was blind to the gridiron hype when he watched 5-star high-school quarterback Justin Fields play shortstop this summer. “I actually didn’t know much about him on the football field,” Collazo told SEC Country this week. “I looked him up and I was like, ‘Whoa, this guy is pretty legit.’ ”

TJS Risk - -

Previous injury history began to matter less. Intuitively, this does not make sense. One would think a previous arm injury – which is going to necessarily decrease the arm’s ability to resist future injuries – should lead to possible UCL injuries. And while that still may be the case, the model could not find a consistent relationship with previous arm injuries and the specific UCL injury. Previously, I found that when I combined the injury database classifications for wrist, forearm, elbow, and shoulder injuries into a single bucket, they loosely forecast a UCL injury – but I had previously found the same injury database confusing a broken leg with a UCL injury. Since it was programmatically scraped from disabled list feeds, and not edited or reviewed after the fact, it was liable to have a number of UCL or even Tommy John events misclassified as elbow tightness or a shoulder injury – especially if a player initially hit the DL for something other than the eventual TJS.

“A Salve For National Wounds” - 

Baseball offers the comfort of continuity against the backdrop of upheaval. “It's our game … America's game,” the poet Walt Whitman wrote in the 19th century. “It has the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere; it belongs as much to our institutions; fits into them as significantly as our Constitution's laws; is just as important in the sum total of our historic life.”