After falling short in the Nationals system, outfielder Derrick Phillips regained his college eligibility and will take the field next season with Division II powerhouse Southern Indiana. He is tuning up this summer in the Coastal Plains League.
In an offensive year, the Cape Cod League all-star game still came down to power arms in a 1-1 tie.
Texas A&M righthanders Daniel Mengden and Gandy Stubblefield take the next step in their development in the California Collegiate League, where both were all-stars this summer.
Hunter Renfroe (Cal Ripken League) and Philip Ervin (Cape Cod) get off to homer-happy starts in summer college leagues.
Several high school seniors made their mark in the CCL, but Rice's Austin Kubitza was an easy choice as the league's top prospect.
When power numbers were dropping all around college baseball, Victor Roach went on a home run surge.
Four rising freshmen, including No. 1 prospect Joc Pederson, lead the first installment of the Hawaii Collegiate League's Top 10.
The total package—the leadership, the absurd numbers and the strong performance in Team USA's biggest win of the summer against Japan—makes Sonny Gray Baseball America's 2010 Summer Player of the Year. A rising junior righthander at Vanderbilt, Gray is the third Commodore to win the award in the last five years.
With the West Coast League championship at stake, the Corvallis Knights put the ball in Josh Osich's hands. And, like he had done for most of the summer, the 225-pound lefty from Boise came through.
He is still working to rid himself of the nasty habit, but once Clemson shortstop and Team USA infielder Brad Miller learns to stop thinking on the field and instead rely on his athleticism and instincts, he can be one of the best all-around players in the country.
George Springer needed just 90 feet to prove he was ready to make an impact. In a fall 2008 intrasquad scrimmage, Springer took one too many steps away from third base. Connecticut catcher Doug Elliot saw Springer's aggressive lead and called for a pitch-out. Time to teach the freshman a lesson. But Springer read Elliot's call and countered. When Elliot fired the ball to third, hoping to catch the runner napping, Springer bolted to the plate. By the time the catcher got the ball back, Springer had stolen home.
Ball State two-way star Kolbrin Vitek leads the Great Lakes League Top 10 Prospects list.
Whenever coaches and scouts talk about Christian Colon, they invariably start and finish with praise for his baseball IQ, instincts, leadership skills and confidence. Colon is just a darn good baseball player, they'll say, a born winner who simply finds a way to get the job done.
While his arm action is neither smooth nor orthodox, Kevin Jacob lit up radar guns this summer, reaching 98 mph for the Anchorage Bucs.
Harold Riggins is more than meets the eye. The 6-foot-3 first baseman looks 230, weighs 270, hits for average in a power hitter's body, and spurned pro scouts in favor of three years at North Carolina State, 800 miles away from his home and family in Normal, Ill.
Soggy weather only put a slight damper on the Cape Cod League all-star game, which made a successful return to Fenway Park on Thursday after a 22-year absence. More than 13,000 fans packed most of the infield seating bowl for the league's home run hitting contest and all-star game, which the West team won 3-0 in a game shortened to four and a half innings by rain.
In 2007, Florida Gulf Coast coach Dave Tollet was looking at an intriguing recruit. A 6-foot-6 lefthanded pitcher named Chris Sale spent most of his time throwing an unspectacular 82-84 mph at Lakeland (Fla.) High. But every once in a while, the kid's velocity would shoot up to 88, flashing major-college zip before diving back to the low 80s.
Powell Lattimer and John Manuel -
Once the a star on the MTV reality miniseries "Two-A-Days", Ross Wilson now enjoys the relative obscurity of playing college baseball.
In the spring of 2007, Matt Hayes took a chance. The coach of the Forest City Owls needed an extra arm, and it was too late to draw a big-name player into the Coastal Plain League. So Hayes brought in a stringy, 6-foot righthander out of a small junior college in Illinois named Spencer Patton. Two years later, it looks like Hayes made one heck of a good call. Patton, now a junior at Southern Illinois-Edwardsville, was back in the Coastal Plain Leage and led the league in strikeouts. Through his first two starts of 2009, Patton dealt 27 Ks in just 14 innings of work.
Weeks before the USA Baseball collegiate national team finished off its perfect summer, a first-inning pickoff might have been the biggest play of the whole campaign. In the second game of pool play at Haarlem Honkbal Week in the Netherlands, Team USA was up against a Cuban national team that was the same minus one player from its 2004 Olympic gold medal team and its 2006 World Baseball Classic squad. Cuba's Glorbis Duvergel singled against USA lefthander Mike Minor to lead off the game, but Minor stopped Cuba in its tracks and gave the Americans the momentum by picking Duvergel off first.
Baseball America