Introducing myself and a new series of posts!

Hi fellow Rays fans,

With this post I first want to introduce myself and also introduce a new series of posts I'm going to make over here at RaysProspects.com.

My name is Wolfgang Burgholzer (Burgi) and I arguably am the biggest Rays fan in Europe (I live in Vienna/Austria). Some may know me from my time over at TheRaysParty along RZ. Unfortunatly we both had way too much going on so that we had to stop blogging over there in '09. Now, as I finally have more spare time to spend, I'm going to dedicate it to one of my greatest passions: Writing about player development and player acquisition.

How did an Austrian guy end up becoming a Rays fan?

I've had an affinity for US sports for about 15 years now. It all started with the NBA (especially with the Bulls - Jazz matchups) and went on to the NFL, the NHL and finally the MLB. When my girlfriend and I have been in the states in '07 I started to love the city of Boston and looked into the Red Sox way of doing business a bit more. I immediatelly liked them much more than the Yankees as they are way smarter in what they are doing. But ... I very fast realized that it's way to easy to build a winning team with that kind of nearly unlimited resources. And as I'm always rooting for the underdog I was looking for a well-run franchise with a limited budget. And that's how I ended up becoming maybe the biggest Rays fan in Europe (so ... it was before '08! ;-) ... really no bandwagon!). The things I love most about baseball is the complexitiy of running a successful baseball team (developing talent, gathering talent, how to put your roster together, how to use matchups every day, ...), the beauty of developing talent in the minor leagues and the stats driven way of analyzing a players' performance. Thus I'm way more into acquiring and developing talent within a franchise - in order to give it a chance to compete in the long run - than in its daily business.

What am I going to do here?

In order to supplement the excellent and in depth daily content here at the website, I'm going to work on a new series which should give an in depth look at the progress the minor league prospects make. It will be a series of posts which will be published every friday and which concentrates alternatively on the hitting prospects one week and on the pitching prospects the next week. The series is going to be called Weekly MiL-breakdown: The hitting prospects (or The pitching prospects).

Within each post I'm going to analyze the systems' hitting/pitching prospects by ...

1) ... looking at the overall hitting in the Rays MiL system.

2) ... analyzing the top prospects (about 30 pitchers and 30 hitters) performance and progress into detail every two weeks. I'm also going to single out 3 prospects on the rise and 3 prospects on the fall.

3) ... presenting the prospect of the week by looking into his scouting reports, numbers and development as well as his future role within the Rays.

4) ... taking a deeper look at one particular stat by looking at the numbers of the Rays top prospects at this stat. Later today in my first MiL-breakdown I'm going to take a deeper look at BABIP.

I really hope you enjoy reading my weekly posts as much as I'm definitely going to enjoy writing them.