Tigers Minor League Baseball Blog

While the fact that Jair Jurrjens was the consensus number four prospect on all three prospect lists by itself isn’t particularly interesting, the fact that all three prospect gurus had a different guy at number three ahead of Jurrjens was.  The net result is, three fourth place finishes gets you number three just for being consistent.

Jurrjens was signed by the Tigers out of Curacao in 2003 and he made his minor league debut in 2004.  He split time between the Gulf Coast League and Oneonta and while he was very good in the GCL (39 strikeouts vs. 10 walks in 39 2/3 innings) he struggled at Oneonta where he kept up his strikeout to walk ratio but gave up 50 hits in 39 innings.  In 2005 he was promoted to West Michigan where he had a solid season.  He struck out 108, walked 36 and had a 3.41 ERA in 142 2/3 innings.  Then in 2006, he had good stints at both Lakeland and Erie.  Jurrjens changes speeds very well, can touch the mid-90s on the guy and more importantly, he keeps the ball down.  Oh yeah, and he just turned 21 in January so he’s plenty of time to develop still.

Kevin Goldstein speculated that Jurrjens will return to Erie to start the 2007 season but if shows signs of dominating, he could find himself at Toledo pretty quickly.  Again, the Tigers are pretty deep when it comes to starters so they have time to let Jurrjens find himself in the minors.  While on a lot of teams, you might see a mid-season 2008 debut, with the Tigers deep pitching you probably won’t get to see much of Jurrjens on the Tigers until 2009.  Although that’s fine because he’ll still just be 23.