State College Spikes – Season 2

The State College Spikes are a short season Class A baseball team – short season meaning they don’t start play until the end of June. Major League Clubs support short season teams so they have a place to stock the players whom they sign through their draft which takes place after high school and college regular seasons are complete.

Today is that draft day. It will begin at 2PM and the first few rounds will be televised for the first time (ESPN2 is carry the draft).

Since I have time on my hands, I’ve thrown together a website to track the Pittsburgh Pirates draft choices (the Pirates are the major league affiliate for the Spikes team) because the Spikes roster will be primarily populated with kids from this draft. This provide a way for friends of mine, who actually have jobs and have to work, to actually follow the draft today and get a feel for who might be playing for the Spikes this year.

I seeded the site yesterday with those Pirate players whom minor league baseball currently lists as being owned by the Pirates but not yet playing with a Pirate minor league team (they are primarily holdovers from last years short season team who didn’t get promoted to a higher level team this year – some of them will be cut before the short season play starts June 20th). During the course of the draft today I will be updating the site in real time as the Pirates make their picks.

Here’s the link to the site.

And here’s an RSS feed that will be updated as each pick is made.

FOLLOW-UP:  While the blog turned out pretty good for a quick and dirty deal, I ran into some Blogger issues (WordPress has spoiled me) when I tried to put some bells on whistles on the blog.   So I’ve converted the blog to WordPress and here’s the link to the current version.