@ Steve Lombardi:
Seriously? I’ll just assume you’re being funny and/or tongue-in-cheek and leave it at that.

@ MJ Recanati:

Well, then, maybe the Yankees should have told A-Rod to keep his mouth shut?

See:

The Pac-10 baseball season brings every other conference team to the Willamette Valley, either Eugene or Corvallis. That brings a slew of future professionals to Goss Stadium or PK Park.

How many? In last year’s draft by major league teams, 61 players were selected off Pac-10 rosters, seven in the first round.

That number doesn’t include Gerrit Cole of UCLA. He was taken in the first round by the New York Yankees, the 28th overall selection, and turned down the team of his childhood dreams that was reportedly willing to offer a bonus of up to $5 million for the right-handed pitcher who was clocked throwing in the high 90s in high school.

Cole told a reporter that what convinced him to enroll at UCLA was hearing Alex Rodriguez of the Yankees say “he wished he would have gone to college and grown up” rather than sign with the Seattle Mariners out of high school.

source: http://special.registerguard.com/csp/cms/sites/web/sports/10898505-41/story.csp

Steve Lombardi wrote:

How about doing your homework on a kid that you’re going to take 1st – and make sure that he will sign – before wasting your 1st pick on him?

No amount of homework would’ve told anyone that Cole wanted to go to college. He didn’t slide down to the latter part of the first round because of college but because he was known to be asking for a healthy bonus. Further, considering that he has Scott Boras as his agent, that tells you that Boras wouldn’t have wasted time with a kid he couldn’t make money with in 2008.

MJ Recanati wrote:

We didn’t sign Cole so how could we regret it?
If you mean we are going to regret not signing Cole, we never had a chance to. Cole didn’t want to be a pro baseball player yet, he wanted to go to UCLA to chase tail and improve his draft status by about $2-4M and 15-20 slots.

How about doing your homework on a kid that you’re going to take 1st – and make sure that he will sign – before wasting your 1st pick on him?

@ Jake1:
We didn’t sign Cole so how could we regret it?

If you mean we are going to regret not signing Cole, we never had a chance to. Cole didn’t want to be a pro baseball player yet, he wanted to go to UCLA to chase tail and improve his draft status by about $2-4M and 15-20 slots.

we are going to regret signing Cole.

probably already do

Scout wrote:

I was less impressed by the previous year’s draft, even if we don’t fault them for Cole’s decision to go to college.

Very fair statement.

@ MJ Recanati:
I was referring to the Cashman/Oppenheimer duo, not to the strategy of sacrificing some drafts for an immediate infusion of talent. Last year Oppenheimer was given a set budget that seemed pretty tight. I think the team did well given those constraints. I was less impressed by the previous year’s draft, even if we don’t fault them for Cole’s decision to go to college.

@ Steve Lombardi:
Thanks, it’s nice to look back on Wang. I will miss him a lot around here. He was a fun (and easy) guy to root for and I hope he finds his form again and can go back to being a very good MLB pitcher.

@ MJ Recanati:

From the Times back on 8/23/2000 -

The Yankees, meanwhile, have liked what they have seen from Wang, who improved to 3-4 with a 2.71 earned run average after Staten Island beat Hudson Valley, 6-3, last night.

”There’s a lot of upside potential to him,” Gary Lavelle, the former major leaguer and current pitching coach for the Class A Yankees, said of Wang, a Taiwan native. ”The language barrier is the most difficult thing. But he’s very coachable and very smart and has a good grasp of pitching. He just needs to play against better competition, which is what he’s doing now. That’s the biggest hurdle for him. He’s not used to facing the good hitters he’s facing here now.”

The league has helped Lavelle bridge the language gap by allowing the team to use an interpreter, Dan Mock, during visits to the mound.

Wang throws a two-seam fastball that dives and a four-seamer that sails. He has a slider and a splitter and is working on a curveball.

”He’s a pretty smart guy on his own,” said catcher David Parrish, son of the former big-leaguer Lance Parrish. ”He knows what he’s trying to do out there. His motion is a lot different than every other pitcher. It’s a little more drawn out. He takes his time, somewhat like Hideo Nomo.”

At 20 years old, the transition to a new country and a new culture has gone smoothly for Wang, who spent the previous two years living away from his family at a physical education school in Taiwan.

Mock, who shares an apartment with Wang, said the pitcher prefers Chinese food to hamburgers and hot dogs. They spend most of their free time together or with teammates. ”He’s a cool guy,” Parrish said. ”We try to joke around with him as best we can.”

Between the lines, the transition has been just as smooth. Wang has allowed only 66 hits and 17 walks in 73 innings.

”Everything’s been the same baseball-wise,” Wang said through Mock. ”The batters are more aggressive, swinging at the first pitch. In Taiwan, batters take until they have a strike.”

link: http://tinyurl.com/yarfmv3