Rule 5 draft

The Rule 5 draft is coming up in December.  Now's a good time to take a look at the Brewers' 40-man roster.  According to the rules, anybody with 3 years professional experience that is not on a team's 40-man roster is eligible for the Rule 5 draft.

Just to update everybody with some recent minor transactions: we added side-arming lefty Randy Choate from Arizona's AAA team, purchased the contract of AAAA slugger Brad Nelson, DFA'ed Mike Jones and signed him to a minor-league contract.  I think this still leaves us with 2 or 3 vacancies on the 40-man.

I'm assuming we purchased Nelson's contract to protect him from the draft.  Does anybody seriously think we might have been at risk of losing him?  

We also DFA'ed Mel Stocker after last year's cup-of-coffee.  Stocker was given some love as the best minor league baserunner at the AA-level (BP password required).  He's entering his age-27 year and IS (I believe) eligible for the draft.  

Anybody care to speculate on who else we might lose to the Rule 5 draft?  A quick glance at our rosters shows potentially interesting throwers like Mike Jones, Vince Perkins & Marino Salas (hard throwers, but hardly top prospects at this point in their careers).

Anybody know about players we could target?  After watching Josh Hamilton in Cinci last year, it's hard not to wonder what he might have looked like patrolling our LF next year.  Is there a 3B down on somebody's farm that could keep us from signing Pedro Feliz?

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