Gammons Heaps Praise on Several Young Sox Hitters

In his latest blog over at ESPN.com, Senior Baseball writer Peter Gammons took time out of his usual busy schedule of fawning over the Red Sox to write about young and breakout players he watched over the past several weeks of Spring Training. Surprisingly, the White Sox (specifically Gordon Beckham, Josh Fields, and Alexei Ramirez) got some love.

Beckham got the most air-time, being named as one of Gammons' Most Impressive 20 (or so) young players he saw in action, and favorably compared him to other young and immediately effective players like Evan Longoria or Chase Utley, all of whom he describe have "the big league player walk." Fields and Ramirez were highlighted as 2 players he feels will have breakout years in 2009.

Always nice to get some national publicity, I'm still not expecting much out of Fields, but if he can be effective with the bat and adequate in the field, I'll be very happy. As for Alexei, if 2008 wasn't a breakout year for him, then I'm very excited to see what he can do in '09. And finally, while I'm happy Beckham will be in Birmingham this year to fine tune his game, it's also nice to see more and more people take notice of his intangible gifts, the gifts that help make good ballplayers great. You can't go wrong with guys that both traditional scouts and statheads simultaneously drool over.