This is a short Cubs minor league recap seeing as the Iowa Cubs and Kane County Cougars were postponed.
Tennessee Smokies 4 @ Huntsville Stars 1
Eric Jokisch struckout 7 and walked none over 6 innings today. He gave up 3 hits and no runs. The 23-year old left-hander is off to a fantastic start in AA. He's thrown 6 innings in each of his three starts and has not allowed more than 4 hits in any of them. He's thrown a total of 18 innings, allowed only 10 hits, walked just 3 and struckout 17. He's allowed 1 home run.
Jokisch was picked in the 11th round in the 2010 Draft out of Northwestern. His strikeout rate prior to reaching AA had been above 20%, but last year in 105 innings he struckout only 14.9% of the batters. He's had pretty good control over his minor league career and if he can get back to the 20% range where he was before last AA a year ago, he could be a valuable prospect.
Zach Rosscup threw 2 scoreless innings and Brian Schlitter allowed an unearned run in the 9th.
The Smokies only had 6 hits and nobody had more than 1. Arismendy Alcantara was 1-1 with 3 walks. He also stole 4 bases today, which gives him 5 on the season. Alcantara only has 3 extra base hits on the season. Two of them have been home runs and the other a double.
Christian Villanueva was 1-3 with a home run and a walk. Justin Bour was 1-2 with a couple of walks.
Daytona Cubs 13 @ Clearwater Threshers 2
Yao-Lin Wang threw 4 innings, gave up 3 hits and a walk. He allowed a run and struckout 2. Austin Kirk pitched the final 5 innings, striking out 4 and walking 2. He allowed 3 hits and a run (a home run).
Javier Baez had one of the best games of his season so far. He was 3-6 with a home run. He has 3 home runs on the season now and most of his hits have been extra base hits. The problem has been getting balls to fall in, which should change. The other problem has been walks and strikeouts and we saw both today. He struckout only once and didn't walk, but here are the number of walks for the 1, 2, and 4 hitters (Baez batted 3rd): 9.
Zeke DeVoss was 1-2 with a double, stolen base and 3 walks. Taiwan Easterling was 1-3 with a double and 3 walks. John Andreoli was 0-2 with 3 walks. The Smokies had 11 walks today.
DeVoss has 12 walks and 10 strikeouts on the season. He's hitting only .245, but his OBP is an impressive .431 and he's slugging .490 to go with it. He's not going to come anywhere close to maintaining his current .245 ISO, but this guy can get on base. A lot. He's been picked off twice in the last two days so he needs to work on that a little bit.
Dustin Geiger was 3-5 with a double and a home run. SS David Bote was 0-3 with a couple walks.
Here's how well the Daytona Cubs have hit so far (through yesterday).
Player: PA, BB%, wOBA, wRC+
Jorge Soler: 27, 14.8%, .546, 254
Stephen Bruno: 51, 9.8%, .473, 205
John Andreoli: 53, 17.0%, .420, 170
Dustin Geiger: 47, 6.4%, .394, 152
Zeke DeVoss: 60, 15.0%, .392, 151
Micah Gibbs, 33, 15.2%, .364, 133
Chad Noble, 26, 7.7%, .339, 116
Loving those walk rates even if it's this early in the season.