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Michelle and I are leaving for vacation this weekend. We're going to Michigan. We are heading to Frankenmuth, Mackinaw City, Mackinac Island, and Sault Sainte Marie, to name a couple of places. One of the real highlights of our trip, though, will be seeing Kelly Hunt play for the West Michigan Whitecaps down in Grand Rapids. Kelly is leading the team in RBI's this season. I am going to try and post a link here.

http://milb.sportsnetwork.com/merge/tsn ... x?team=L06

Kelly played for the Oneonta Tigers last season. They play in the New York-Penn League, a short season league that includes the Mahoning Valley Scrappers, for those of you in the Youngstown area. The short season allows for the guys like Kelly who just played a season of college ball. The next step up for Kelly would be Detroit's Class A Advanced team in Lakeland, FL. I am hoping he can bypass that team and go straight to Erie, the Tigers AA Affiliate. That would mean we could see him play against the Aeros at Akron. After that, it's the Mud Hens, then the bigs! One step at a time, though. Anyway, we are really looking forward to seeing Kelly play and will attempt to say hello at some point before or after the game. He will notice us as we may be the only people in the ballpark with Orange & Brown on. Sure would be great to see Kelly make it to the big leagues! Flipper or one of the other posters here on AZZ had a good point that is in Kelly's favor, and that is that the Tigers don't appear to have a big power-hitting guy in their system right now. I've tried to keep up with Kelly's stats and he is improving. Hopefully he continues to get to the next level.

Good to see a former falcon baseball player doing well in the Tigers farm system. We all know the Tigers and their organization need all the help that they can get. I hope Kelly continues his success.

Cleveland = most tortured sports city in America. Not only do they lose championships, they give them away. That is my favorite quote ever.

Go Falcons 4,
All that matters is that the Indians are contenders and the Tigers are pretenders.....see you next week.

Hey Everyone!

Michelle and I are back from our vacation up in Michigan. We went to the Whitecaps game on Wednesday 8/18. Kelly was 1/4 with a basehit. He did well in the field and made some nice plays at first base. It has to be nice for their infielders to have a big target like Kelly to throw to. We arrived at the park in time to hear the pa announcer introduce the starting lineup. Kelly was introduced as "The Big Nasty." West Michigan defeated the Beloit Snappers 5-2. We got to talk to Kelly after the game and he noticed our BG attire right away. We told him we made sure he had some home games when we planned our vacation. I think he was surprised to see some BG fans there and thanked us for coming. He also signed a couple of programs for us. We are keeping one of them and are going to give the other one to someone in the athletic office for a prize at one of the pinnacle events or something. It was a good week to go to one of his games because Kelly was on the front of this week's program. Anyway, it was a great night to be at Fifth Third Ballpark in suburban Grand Rapids, MI (does Fifth Third Bank have a monopoly on minor league baseball stadiums or what ... Grand Rapids, Toledo, Dayton). Anyway, I'll cut myself off here. Hopefully Kelly can continue to move up the ladder. As I had said in my earlier post, the next stop would normally be Detroit's Class A Advanced team in Lakeland, FL, but it wouldn't be unheard of if he went from Grand Rapids straight to the Class AA Erie Seawolves. That would be nice as the BG fans and alums from northeast Ohio would be able to see Kelly when the Seawolves take on Akron at Canal Park.

"That would be nice as the BG fans and alums from northeast Ohio would be able to see Kelly when the Seawolves take on Akron at Canal Park."

Thanks for the update Ed! Good to hear you and Michelle had a good time.

I'd be down at Canal Park if Kelly was coming to town.

GO BG!~

Mike -- Ditto for us on Kelly! If he makes it up to Erie, we'll be checking out the Aeros schedule to see when he is coming to town! From what we learned on the news last week (Brad Fanning did a nice piece on Kelly Friday night on the Toledo news), the Tigers organization knows who Kelly is. Hard for the higher ups to not notice his 80+ RBI's this season for West Michigan.

Kelly finoshed the regular season with 21 HR's and 102 RBI to go along with a .275 average. The 21 homers destroyed the team record of 17 set by Rob Fick 7 or 8 years ago.

The ballpark in Grand Rapids is a graveyard for hitters, so Kelly's stats have surely gotten the attention of the Tiger's upper management. Detroit doesn't have too many pure power hitters in the system, so Kelly could rise pretty quickly

Flipper -- I was going to post about Kelly's season, but you beat me to it! Here's a link anyway.

http://milb.sportsnetwork.com/merge/tsn ... x?team=L06

Another thing of note is that the West Michigan Whitecaps won the Midwest League Championship last month. Nice season for the team and Kelly. With the numbers Kelly put up this past season, it will be interesting to see where the Tiger organization places him next spring! Hard to miss the numbers that he put up, that's for sure!