Milb.com is doing a series that lists the best prospect at each position. The Cubs were up yesterday. It's a pretty good list, but this was a head-scratcher.
Utility — Anthony Rizzo, Iowa (70 games), Chicago (87 games): Despite playing only 70 games for the Triple-A Cubs, Rizzo led the organization with 23 homers and drove in 62 runs while batting .342. He was promoted to the Majors in late June and never looked back, going deep 15 times and posting an .815 OPS for Chicago.
"Phenomenal year for him," McLeod said. "More than the numbers he was putting up, he made a conscious effort to work on a consistent approach. The performance was the byproduct of the work and prep he put in, and that was what I was most happy about.
"When you make a swing mechanics adjustment, there are a lot of different ways things can go. And to see him work as hard as he did, I couldn't be happier for him. It was a tremendous year, coming in the trade and putting [together] the season that he did in Triple-A and in the bigs."
I'm pretty sure he was only listed as the all-star utility player because he had reached the big leagues and they wanted to highlight Dan Vogelbach, but I still laughed when I saw he was the utility player all-star. Actually, I laughed when I even realized they did a utility player all-star.