It's been an awfully long time since I posted anything on this blog. But it's a little upsetting to me that Billy Butler, an Orange Park native, is having a breakout season and he's really not drawing as much attention, locally or nationally, as he should. So I guess it's up to me to spread the good word.
Butler was born in 86 in OP and went to Wolfson in Jacksonville, where he played 3rd base. The Royals selected him with the 14th overall pick 2004 (which for him meant a 1.45 million dollar signing bonus, wooohoo) and as such elected not to attend the University of Florida, who had offered him a scholarship.
Butler pretty much raked throughout his minor league career and was selected to play in the 2005 "All Star Futures Game" where he hit a go ahead home run and was declared the game's MVP, and Baseball America (basically the best organization for minor league analysis) declared him in 2005 the Royals #1 prospect.
He has yet to play a full season in the Majors (in 2007 he bounced between the majors and the minors) and in 2008 he spent some time on the disabled list, but 42 games through the 09 season he has a .282 batting average, he's getting on base at a .360 clip, has 3 long balls and he's driven in 20 runs. For his career he has 22 home runs and 127 runs batted in. Baseball Prospectus (basically the best organization for major league analysis) uses something called the PECOTA system to project what players will do over the course of a season, and BP is very, very high on Butler. ESPN's projection system (which appears to just be simple multiplication) predicts Butler will finish the year with 74 RBI.
Not too many Royals fans in Northern Florida, but hey, maybe we should all go out and get some Billy Butler jerseys anyway. If you'd like to see Butler in this year's All Star Game (which will take place at Busch Stadium in St. Louis on the 14th of July) you can follow the link at the bottom. Sure would be cool if we sent an OP native to the Mid Summer classic.
http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/events/all_star/y2009/ballot_reg.html
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