I'm surprised so many people haven't heard of Taylor. He was one of the best MRs in the sox system last year and a 7th round pick. I guess he didn't jump up the prospect charts until this offseason after all the trades, but he's top 25 on soxprospects now. Struck out 98 and walked 22 in 79 innings last year. He didn't miss a beat going from Salem to Portland either. He had a 1ip 6 h 6 ER 2 HR performance in Portland, but outside of that he pitched 33 innings of 1.91 era ball giving up 22 hits, 2hrs, 11bb and 41k.
Granted MR prospects are never going to get that much press. Are there any sites out there that show avg, OBP and slugging against for Minor League pitchers? And groundball rate? Taylor has avoided the HR ball for the most part but has a pretty bad GO/AO ratio. Curious to see if there were lots of doubles off him.
It's funny because I made a post a few days ago talking about how Ben Taylor and Sheppard would be in the bullpen mix this year at AAA and that Ben would probably start the season in AA because of the logjam of MR... they must really like what they see.