Forward-Looking

With the start of a new year, this seems like an appropriate time to take a look at what the future holds for the Rockies.

Starting with the immediate future, the Rockies will begin the 2010 season with a new voice in the radio broadcast booth. Jeff Kingery’s departure generated quite a bit of buzz and speculation last fall as to who would be given the task of filling his big original-broadcaster shoes. This week, the new guy was revealed to be longtime Nuggets broadcaster Jerry Schemmel. Needless to say, Rockiescast is very curious as to how this new broadcast team of Schemmel and Jack Corrigan will sound. I’m hopeful that Schemmel will be a solid replacement for Kingery. Kingery’s firsthand knowledge of every moment in Rockies history is gone, but Schemmel will bring his own skill set. A huge part of baseball radio broadcast is finding interesting topics to discuss during lulls in the action on the field, and it appears that Jerry Schemmel has plenty of interesting things to talk about.

The new year is also a good excuse to look at what the Rockies have cooking in the organization for the long term.  I freely admit that I’m terrible at getting good, in-depth info on prospects. Luckily, we recently got a hot tip via e-mail about a blog committed to the art of scouting baseball prospects: Diamond Futures. This week, they did their analysis of the prospects in the Rockies’ system.  Take a look: it’s some pretty interesting stuff. My only complaint is that Diamond Futures failed to rank organizations by the most important criteria: awesome prospect names. Al Alburquerque, Jhoulys Chacin, Rex Brothers, Delta Cleary…how can another organization possibly compete with names like that?!