Aloha from Winter League Week

About the only news in the Yankees' off field drama is that the reporters who camped out at Joe Torre's house have moved on to the Steinbrenner estate in Tampa. Quite frankly I'm finding the whole wait and wildly speculate thing kind of boring. Fortunately, there's still Yankee baseball being played, and so I've declared this week Winter League Week here at Poughkeepsie Pinstripes. In the coming days, I'll be going over the Yankee players and prospects who are spending their off-seasons working on their game against live competition.

Today's focus is on the Hawaiian Winter League, whose inaugural season last year was a great success for the Yankees as well as the league. It was with the Honolulu Sharks that Joba Chamberlain and Ian Kennedy made their dominating professional debuts and put themselves on the fast track to Yankee Stadium. This season the Yankees have sent four players to the Sharks, where they'll play against a combination of players from Japan and America.

The biggest name among the four is Austin Jackson, who I've written about before. Jackson has followed up his very impressive showing in the Florida State League with a solid .275/.367/.431 (AVG/OBP/SLG) line in 14 games. However, stats in Winter Leagues can be deceiving. Obviously there's the issue of a very small sample size, but there's also a huge amount of variety in the quality of opponents. In any given at bat you could face a pitcher who may have no professional experience or blue-chip prospect who has dominated Triple-A, or even a prospect from the Japanese League. Thus, when analyzing a player's performance in these leagues, it's sometimes better to look a little deeper for indicators of how a player is progressing.

When I look at Jackson's stats, the thing that jumps out at me is his high strikeout total. He's struck out 16 times in 51 at-bats, which is the second highest total in the league. It's a pace that would result in nearly 200 strikeouts over a full major league season, and that worries me. There are guys, like Adam Dunn or Jason Giambi, who can put up big strikeout totals while still producing but they're generally guys who hit the ball over the fence, something Jackson hasn't done so far. If he's going to continue to be successful as he moves up the minors, he'll either need to cut down on the strikeouts or develop some prodigious power.

The other position player the Yankees have sent to Honolulu is third baseman Brad Suttle. Suttle was a fourth round pick out in this year's draft. Coming out of the University of Texas, the Yankees hoped that he was the kind of polished college hitter who might be able to come straight out of a big time college baseball program and move quickly through the minors. His performance so far, however, isn't encouraging, to say the least. He started the season with a 24 at bat hitless streak, and now has a terrible .097/.263/.194 line. The good news is that he's had three hits, all of them doubles, in his last three games, which might be a sign that he has begun to adjust to using a wood bat.

On the pitching side, the Yankees have sent George Kontos and reliever Anthony Claggett. Kontos was a fifth round pick in the 2006 six draft out of Northwestern. He's got a plus fastball and slider, which allows him to rack up strong strikeout totals, but he has trouble with his mechanics which leads to lots of walks. Thus far he's continued this in Honolulu, picking up 11 strikeouts against 7 walks in 10 innings, which has resulted in a 5.40 ERA. He's worth keeping an eye on, because if he can find consistency in his delivery and improve his command, he would make for a formidable major league reliever.

Claggett was one of the three young pitchers who came over from Detroit in the Gary Sheffield trade, and he's the least exciting of them. Righthanders who throw an average fastball and slider are a dime a dozen, and unless he does something spectacular he'll just be an anonymous career minor leaguer.

Next up is the Arizona Fall League, where one of my favorite prospects, Kevin Whelan, is pitching for the team with one of my favorite names, the Peoroa Javelinas.