Prospect Ratings, Part 3: Project Prospect
Project Prospect went up in September, and it looks so far as though it will be a worthy addition to the pantheon of prospect sites. Founder Adam Foster, who’s from Davis, California, has written for Scout.com, and the articles that I’ve seen have been well-written and informative. So far, at least, it appears that the site will be more of the same.
Foster has this approach to prospect evaluation (from the About Us article on the site):
1) Quantitative analyis can play a major role in determining a prospect’s worth, but it is to always be supplemented with at least a background in some sort of qualitative information.
2) Players can join elite prospect tiers before they have played a full season of professional baseball. I’m not going to wait for Travis Snider to get 260 at bats in the minors before I call him a top prospect so long as I have sufficient reason to think he belongs in that rank. Unearthing prospects is largely about who can find a player and determine that he is going to be at least an average major leaguer first.
3) Half of finding prospects is luck - ok maybe not that much but a lot. Prospect hunting is fun and challenging because there are so many differing opinions. Athough my tone may not always show it, I have a lot of respect for anyone who logically - in some form or another that I see fit - reaches his or her own conclusions about who the top baseball prospects on this globe are.
Project Prospect’s top 10 prospects:
1. Delmon Young, OF (TB)
2. Alex Gordon, 3B (KC)
3. Brandon Wood, 3B (LAA)
4. Phil Hughes, SP (NYY)
5. Billy Butler, OF (KC)
6. Homer Bailey, SP (CIN)
7. Andrew McCutchen, OF (PIT)
8. Cameron Maybin, OF (DET)
9. Fernando Martinez, OF (NYM)
10. Jay Bruce, OF (CIN)
There are also articles about each team’s top 3 prospects (by division). While there are some omissions (Matt Kemp for the Dodgers, Stephen Drew for the D’backs - it’s not clear whether they were omitted because they were getting significant PT in the majors this year), I think overall they’ve done a pretty good job, especially with some of the organizations without a lot of depth at the top.
Mike Emeigh
Posted: October 12, 2006 at 01:30 PM |
3 comment(s)
Related News:
Minor Leagues,
Prospect Reports
Reader Comments and Retorts
Go to end of page
Statements posted here are those of our readers and do not represent the BaseballThinkFactory. Names are provided by the poster and are not verified. We ask that posters follow our submission policy. Please report any inappropriate comments.
We did not include Kemp and Drew because they both exhausted their rookie status during the 2006 season, with 154 and 209 respective at-bats. Our lists are composed of players who will enter 2007 with rookie status. Along with Kemp and Drew, guys like Lastings Milledge (166 at-bats), Hayden Penn (58.0 innings over the last two seasons), and Matt Garza (50.0 innings) also did not qualify for our lists.
For reference, here's Major League Baseball's official rule on rookie status:
We are not using the 45 day part of the rule, which is usually most applicable with relief pitchers.
I don't have any particular problem with excluding non-rookies from discussion of prospects, as long as that caveat is clearly stated up front. Personally, I find it hard to exclude someone who doesn't yet have a major-league job nailed down, like Milledge or Kemp, from the prospect discussion. B.J. Upton was dropped from prospect-dom after he lost his rookie status in 2004, but he was in the minors for a year and a half after that, not yet a bonafide major leaguer, and I think he should have been in the discussions, because it seems frankly crazy to me to say that someone like, say, Shawn Riggans or Ben Zobrist is a "prospect" but Upton isn't. But that's just me, and it's probably better to draw the bright line than the fuzzy one, because it makes it clear who's in and who isn't.
-- MWE
I was reading your HWB dicsussion...great stuff. I'll definitely be around -- I'm a big fan of BBTF.
You must be Registered and Logged In to post comments.
<< Back to main