Developed Teams 2011: Arizona Diamondbacks

My grand plan was to profile the Diamondbacks in honor of their fair city playing host to the 2011 All-Star Game. But that was over two weeks ago and we're now closer to the Trade Deadline than the mid-summer classic. However, it's better late than never, and The Plan will continue as promised... if a little behind schedule.

For such a young team - having existed for just 13 short seasons - they have a remarkable store of talent. Their offensive prowess is evident from the list above, even if the key middle-of-the-order bats didn't spend considerable time actually playing for the Diamondbacks. Dan Uggla was picked up by the Marlins Rule 5 style before his debut, and put up very impressive power numbers for the Fish. Carlos Gonzalez was a major piece of a blockbuster trade to the A's while still in the minors (the same trade in which the D-Backs parted with Brett Anderson, btw). Carlos Quentin played about a full season's worth of games over his first two seasons in Arizona before having his best years in the south side of Chicago.

Of the recently-developed Diamondbacks still with the team, the breakout performances of Justin Upton and Miguel Montero have more than overshadowed Stephen Drew's disappointing production. Mark Reynolds just left the team last year, and we know he can mash, but he also can strike out a Major League record amount of times. The guys on the bench are nothing spectacular - Cust and Barajas are the only two who have spent any significant time starting for a Major League team. The rest are solid backups, which is more than some teams I've looked at for this project can say.

What really amazes me about the D-Backs is the abundance of pitching that has come out of their system over the years. Not all of it is top-shelf talent, but using just the players included on MLB 11: The Show's rosters, the 'Backs have 29 pitchers to their name. It's interesting that the game's youngest team (tied) has developed twice as many pitchers as the game's oldest team (bonus points if you can name that team. Hint: they already have an entry in this project).

As I said, not all of them are that high-caliber. Their three highest-ranked pitchers (according to MLB.com's preseason rankings) fall between 100 and 120: one is a potential star who's shown flashes of brilliance but can't escape injury (Brett Anderson), another has the exact same description, just replace "injury" with "mediocrity" (Max Scherzer), and the third is currently playing out the veteran star closer fantasy (Jose Valverde).

Brad Penny has had a nice career for himself (he's another guy who started his Major League career with Florida after lingering in the Arizona farm system), and Chris Capuano has been living comeback to comeback. It was of course an act of purest optimism to have put Brandon Webb on that list at all, seeing as he hasn't pitched since 2009. But the Sports Illustrated baseball preview had his name there, and MLB has him as the next-highest ranked pitcher after the above three I already mentioned, so I figured, whatever.

After Valverde, their bullpen gets a little weak, but thankfully they have enough surplus starters to back them up, even if everyone not mentioned above has struggled mightily this year. But, as I've mentioned many times before, this team was put together with pre-season rankings, since that's when I started compiling these lists, believe it or not. And since it's taken me so long to get through THIS much of the project, imagine how much more complicated it would have been while trying to keep up to date with all the stats...