Hope everybody had a great weekend. Aside from seeing the Dodgers get swept, our weekend was pretty good. Just a couple words on the Dodgers to tide me over until the winter. The Mets are clearly a better team. From the bats in their lineup to the arms in their bullpen, they had us beat. The Dodgers should not resign Nomar next year, because James Loney is ready. The money saved from signing Nomar needs to be applied to a true home run bat either at third or the outfield. Drew is not a true homerun threat, and we really need someone that can hit 40 homeruns, not 20.

Most of my weekend was spent researching media players, which are little electronic devices you connect to your tv and they can playback media files like videos and mp3s. Unfortunately there are not very many options available, and of the ones there are, they all have problems. On Sunday I borrowed my Dad’s old Pentium 3-500 and I have it hooked up to the tv downstairs. It’s not powerful enough to playback HD quality video, but it will give me an idea if this is the route I want to go. This is called a HTPC (Home Theatre Personal Computer). You can hook up a remote, watch downloaded video files, record HDTV, play DVDs, and even upgrade it to HD-DVD or Blu-Ray in the future.

Today we have a student free day, which means us teachers are not free. We could be, but we’ve elected to go to work and get paid instead of stay at home and not get paid. Have a great Monday.

With spring training finally getting started and daily posts to dodgers.com returning, I thought I’d take some time to talk about a team who’s farm system was just ranked #1 in baseball.

The Dodgers have a lot of good prospects in their system…enough that you could put together half a team with them.

C – Russell Martin
3B – Andy LaRouche
2B – Delwyn Young
1B – James Loney
SS – Joel Guzman
OF – Andre Ethier
SP – Chad Billingsley
SP – Greg Miller
RP – Hong-Chih Kuo
RP – Johnathan Broxton

Which of these guys will turn out to be the real deal, I don’t know, but there sure is a lot to pick from. It should also be interesting to see where people finally land if they make it to the big show. Guzman and Young are both at positions that may not be free for several years and there is talk about moving them to the outfield. I think with Furcal, and hopefully a strong return by Izturis, some outfield work for these guys would be good. Especially considering Ethier is our only big prospect in the OF, unless I’m missing one.

While I’m looking forward to this year, I can’t wait to see how things shape up over the course of several years. As young guys start to make an impact, the Dodgers can turn around and spend some money on a REAL big bat (ie not JD Drew). Young players that are making less free you up to spend more on single positions. That is why the Yankees pay out the ear…they have no farm system and want a star at every position.

It’s always exciting to watch a homegrown talent come into their own. Here’s to a ROY in the next couple seasons!