Forgot Sandoval. That guy is great.
they have some decent offensive prospects coming up....granted they may be far away, and no one is a sure thing....but there are a few decent guys.
Buster Posey is close and should be starting this year (though who knows if he actually will).
DeRosa is a good bat.
I'm just going to say it.
Oliver Perez
Not yet as far as I know
MLB.com's Chris Haft talked to one of Villalona's teammates in single-A ball last year and got this bit of context:
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Right-hander Waldis Joaquin, a fellow Dominican who played with Villalona at low-Class A Augusta last season, didn't address his former teammate's case specifically. But Joaquin pointed out that in his country, people occasionally shoot first and answer questions later if they're being hassled by a group.
"Maybe if you have five people in one fight, you don't want to leave, and if you have a gun, you [fire it]," Joaquin said.
Another teammate, Garrett Broshuis, took to his blog:
A giant of a kid, homesick and still growing up, navigating his way through the labyrinth that is professional baseball; that is how I would describe teammate Angel Villalona. The game delivered him good times and bad, and he reacted as any teenager would react when under a pressurized microscope. He threw an occasional tantrum but got over it and would soon have a smile on his face.
[...]
I am told often by my teammates that the streets of the D.R. are dangerous. At times they exaggerate no doubt, but the latest data puts the murder rate at 23.57 per 100,000. This is much higher than the United States' rate of 5.8, but also much lower than the famed city of Detroit, which posts a rate of 46.
Still, most of my Dominican teammates claim to carry a pistol with them wherever they go.
"Everyone else has a gun, so you have to carry one too," one of them told me recently. "Especially if people know you are a baseball player, they might try robbing you, so you have to carry one for protection."
I don't know how much of their pistol-packing claims are based on truth and how much are based on myth-building machismo, but enough of them have made the statement that it seems plausible that a plethora of guns fill the streets of the D.R. With that many loaded weapons around, nothing good can come from an altercation.
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OK, so it alright to carry a gun and shoot someone in the chest if you are a teenager in the Dominican Republic. It is just anger. Pheww. I jus thought he liked shooting people. I was worried this was out of the norm. Cant wait to see how the MLBPA incorporates this new policy. I hated my LF so I shot him, but it is OK.