This year’s Major League Baseball All-Star festivities kicked off Sunday afternoon in Minneapolis with a pair of showcase events, the Futures Game and the Celebrity and Legends Softball Game. The Futures game pitted top baseball prospects from around the world against similiar American players. The Cubs and Twins each had two representatives in the game.

Cubs 3rd baseman Kris Bryant was on Team USA, which earned a three to two win over Team World. He says you don’t know how long you are going to play, so you try to stay in the moment. Fellow Cubs prospect Javier Baez provided all of the scoring for the World Team, hitting a two run homer on a first pitch curveball. “I knew it was going to be in the zone, so I swung out and hit it pretty hard,” Baez says.

Bryant and Baez are the centerpieces of the Cubs’ farm system, which now features several big bats. MLB Network analyst Peter Gammons says that power is typically a very hard thing to come by in the minor leagues, as he says the rarest thing in baseball right now is power.

Gammons says that while he believes Baez and Bryant are players that the Cubs and build around, they aren’t the only two big hitting prospects in the Cubs system.

Gammons does not envision either Baez or Bryant being called up to the majors this season though.

All Star events continue here in Minneapolis tonight with the annual Home Run Derby, followed by the eighty fifth AllStar Game tomorrow night.

By Jesse Gavin, KCNZ, Cedar Falls