WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? Well, as far as the Yankee minor league affiliates are concerned, the 2004 season is now officially in the books. To summarize, Columbus was a huge success as they had their first winning season in a while despite being knocked out in the first round of the playoffs. Trenton was a disappointment as their season was just perpetually frustrating due to a combination of pitching injuries and general ineffectiveness. Tampa had a great season in terms of prospect talent and performance that concluded in their being named the FSL co-champions and Battle Creek had a great season as they started off very rough due to being the youngest team in their league, but finished the year with an above .500 record and just barely missing the playoffs. As for the short-season leagues, SI was shockingly bad and the GCL Yankees were a dominant force in their league leading to a GCL championship. From the postseason series that the Yankee affiliates were involved in, Robinson Cano was the most impressive player, the 2B capped his eye-opening '04 with a 7 for 13 playoff stint. Now, about what will happen with this site. Daily updates, which were becoming increasingly rare, will now be a thing of the past as the minor league offseason begins. I will keep you updated on the AFL when that starts in the next few weeks as well as on winter league performances when those leagues begin. Until and during that span of time I'm going to be putting a lot of work into a new Top X Yankee prospect list, the final one of the year. I'm not sure how many prospects I will list, but at this point, 20-25 seems about right. You will want to keep an eye out for that towards the end of the year. I'm also going to hand out some organizational hardware. Look for Pitching Prospect of the Year, Offensive Prospect of the Year, Comeback Prospect of the Year, and Breakout Prospect of the Year awards. In addition, I will create an all Yankee Prospect 1st Team. Hopefully, you're as excited about reading about these things as I am about researching and publishing them. One more thing I am considering doing is looking back at big Yankee prospects of the past and trying to see why they failed or whether or not it could have been predicted. In addition, I may look back at guys on the current Yankee squad and see how they have performed thus far in their career compared to how one would have felt about their ceiling as they progressed through the minors. I'm undecided about this though, so if you could give me some feedback as to whether or not you would like to see that, that'd be great. Oh yeah, I almost forgot, congratulations to Dioner Navarro on his major league hit. Navarro, batting RH, singled to left last night on the second pitch of his first career major league AB. Hopefully that is the first of many. Navarro's hit was the highlight of an awful night that saw Brad Halsey perform poorly once more, though Joe Torre made a questionable move in pulling him so early in my opinion. *** Questions, comments, suggestions to minoryankeeblog@hotmail.com   ¶ 2:30 PM