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Walt Nolen
Pitcher -- Chicago Cubs
Walt Nolen is a 23 year old pitcher in the Chicago Cubs organization.
In 2004, Walt's first season of professional baseball, he posted a 3-1 record with a 4.28 ERA while striking out 32 batters in 27.1 innings for the Arizona League Cubs.
Journal Entry 5-04-2005
Hello everyone, My name is Walt Nolen and I am a relief pitcher for the Chicago Cubs low A affiliate, the Peoria Chiefs. I'm 23 years old and married to my college sweetheart named Chelsea and we have a 10 month old daughter named Holland.
I've been asked to chronicle some of my experiences as a minor league ball player by this website and hope I can give everyone a good idea of what it's like being part of the Cubs organization and being a minor leaguer in general.
Too start things off, we are 22 games into our season and haven't faired to well in the win column yet, sitting at 8-14. I totally believe we will make major improvements when everything comes together.
We play lights out one game and don't pitch to our capabilities, then next game we pitch great yet seem to find a way to take ourselves out of it.
In my opinion we have had a shot to win every game we have played so far. With the coaching staff we have and the players at their disposal we are capable of great things. So, keep watching and I'm sure we are gonna make a run here soon and turn it around.
So far from a personal standpoint, it's been a little up and down, I'm sitting on a 3-2 mark with a respectable ERA around 2.77.
I was part of a no-hitter earlier in the year, where I added three innings and then contributed one inning to a one hitter, so it's been eventful.
Watching some of these players has been more rewarding than playing. I mean watching guys like Ryan Harvey, Eric Patterson, and as of late Sean Gallagher has been an amazing sight to watch. I honestly have not seen a pitcher dominate this many starts in a row as Sean has. Luckily for me I've grabbed a win in two of Sean's starts so his success has also helped me.
For the rest of this week, May 4-8 we play the Fort Wayne Wizards and the Kane County Cougars so I'll get a chance to see many good players and even the first pick of last year's draft, Matt Bush.
It's been great so far to see some of the talent in this league. For me that's the biggest change I've seen was the change in talent from the lower levels and the size of the strike zone seems to have shrunk to a smaller version of itself. Oh well, what are you gonna do about it? I surely can't change it, so I'll just keep trying to throw strikes.
Well that's it for now guys, I hope I have been somewhat informative and will keep posting once a week. Thanks for reading. See Ya!
Walt
You may email your questions for Walt Nolen to WaltNolen@topprospectalert.com
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