According to Lee Sinins's ATM Reports email today, the A's made some cuts. Javier Herrera, Hiram Bocachica, Danny Putnam, Raul Casanova, Adam Johnson, Alex Santos, and Mac Suzuki are all gone.

Herrera is the A's second-best prospect by Baseball America's reckoning, but he's an all-tools guy so far, and even BA admits that he's had trouble translating that into performance thus far. In other words, don't be surprised if he's 17th on the list next year, and completely off it the year after that. BA notes that he could be a 30-30 guy in center field, a rare commodity, but couldas and shouldas and wouldas aren't worth much in the big leagues.

Danny Putnam's more of my kind of guy. BA describes him as "short and squat" and notes that he'll "need to pay better attention to his conditioning" in the future. Moreover, he has an excellent pedigree. He was drafted out of Stanford after having been a high school star at Rancho Bernardo in San Diego, a school that's produced six first-round draft picks since 1995. Also, his high school coach was Billy Beane's coach as well (though at a different San Diego school). Most importantly, his career isolated OBP is .097.

Casanova's a 32-year old catcher with 947 major league at-bats in his career. His professional debut was in 1990, with the GCL Mets, a team that also featured an 18-year old Brian Daubach. He's a low-average guy (.232 career in the bigs) but he's got a .068 ISO-OBP and a .167 ISO-SLG. In other words, he's Oakland's kind of fourth-string catcher. His numbers are remarkably similar to, for example, Sal Fasano's.

Johnson's another San Diego product (Torrey Pines), and a Fullerton grad. He comes from Minnesota's system, where he posted good strikeout numbers, but not much else.

Santos is a Miami grad originally from the Tampa Bay system. Some of his peripherals look fine, but considering that he was a minor-league closer last year at the age of 28, I think we can discount the idea of him playing a major role in an Oakland stretch run any time soon. Or any time ever.

I talked a little about Suzuki previously when he was profiled by one of the newspapers. He'll sit around in Sacramento and need about four starters to get hurt for him to get a shot.

Technorati: Oakland A's, Javier Herrera, San Diego.