Nuts, just submitted this link.

Watch the video for yourself. It is truly the Citizen Kane of amateur prospect hype videos. Well, OK, maybe not Citizen Kane, but at the very least the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Core strength!

Somewhere, Kenny Powers is drinking a beer and nodding in approval.

I didn't think it was possible to have a 20-minute baseball video have so little baseball. I've been familiar with Cespedes for about a decade and watched mostly out of curiosity, but I kept waiting and waiting and ... nope, no real skills presentation. Maybe he's tired of pelota and is trying out for the NFL. It's a hell of a Combine video.

Cespedes, who claims to be 26 years old (ages of Cuban defectors have been notoriously inaccurate) .

He's 34, pass.

Nickname: "The Human"

Heh, I was just coming to submit this.

Marlins? Nats?

Yeah, Joe, I was thinking the same thing. The guy keeps himself in impressive shape (although I'm always amused by dudes who load 1000 lbs onto the leg press machine and then only do a partial rep) but this video could have been 75% shorter and still had twice as much baseball.

For all the Cuban baseball experts out there, how would Cespedes compare to Leonys Martin who the Rangers signed?

I compare the Cubans to the Japanese. Name one Cuban defector from the past twenty years that has some kind of impact on the MLB.

Livan Hernandez servicable pitcher
El Duque Hernandez average pitcher who pitched well in the post season
Ariel Prieto, Fernandez (Giants) sucked
Rey Ordonez several solid years with Mets; couldn't hit a lick
2 current White Sox players: Cuban Missle (Ramirez) and the Fat Guy (Viciedo) jury still out. Although Ramirez is established and Viciedo played 29 games this past season.

Overall I think the talent in Cuba is overrated. They always mentioned that there is enough talent on the island to stock major league teams but I don't see it. The argument will that these players only leave the island when they have already peaked but Livan was in 19 or twenty when he left and recently there has been others who have left in their peak years or when could be considered projectable.

Really the only one that has made a impact and that's because he has been hyped, has been Chapman but that has been only because he is throwing over a 100mph and strikeouts.

Ichiro is the only superstar from Japan that has continued his legacy in the US. Hideki Matsui is a nice player but his exposure has been the fact he played in New York for the Yankees. Dice-K had a terrific year for the Sox and a couple of other solid years but overall has not lived up to the hype.

The argument will that these players only leave the island when they have already peaked but Livan was in 19 or twenty when he left and recently there has been others who have left in their peak years or when could be considered projectable.

You really believe his stated age? He's 36 now?

I think you have to add 5 years to each Hernandez brother, and probably at least 3 to every Cuban.

There's a lot of impressive talent in Cuba, but the league is so big (16 teams), the schedule so burdensome (essentially year-round), and the talent level so watered down due to defections, that it's almost as if Cespedes had played the last 5 years in the NY–Penn League. As Cuba is learning the hard way with worse and worse finishes in international events, it's hard for players to improve when they're stuck playing in a watered-down league in which they face only one or two ML-caliber pitchers per week (or, for pitchers, one or two ML-caliber hitters). Add in the long downtimes between defection and the start of a U.S. pro career—Cespedes will head to spr. tr. having not played a game in almost 12 months—and it's little wonder so many players underperform.

The strangest thing is how MLB scouts are such slow learners. The same scouts hyping Cespedes in Goldstein's and Passan's articles last night are the guys who told us Chapman would be atop an ML rotation in April 2010, Iglesias and Hechavarria would be playing shortstop in the ML by the 2010 All-Star break, etc., etc. We've all seen how that's worked out. I really like Cespedes, but at age 26, the margin for error with him is much smaller than with Chapman, Iglesias, et al. Cespedes certainly has All-Star potential, but it's hard to see him as a starting CF for a good ML team in April 2012.

Nomo had a pretty good career in the majors, although he didn't live up to the hype after his rookie year. Still, he had 3 or 4 All Star-caliber seasons.

Kendry Morales is probably the only impact position player from Cuba over the last few years. Unfortunately after one All Star-caliber season he had a freak celebration accident.

Contreras had his moments but also some struggles.

During the 2009 WBC, I seem to remember Yulieski Gourriel as being thought of as Cuba's big-time player. I was kind of disappointed to google him and see that he's a 1984 birthday -- any chance he ever comes over?

#9 - Voros mentions it, but Jose Contreras had a stretch from mid-2005 to mid-2006 where he was utterly dominant. All told, he's had a pretty good MLB career, given how late he got here -- close to 20 fWAR in nine seasons (some being pretty partial).

#12 - I don't know if this qualifies as "impact", but Alexei Ramirez has now put together two consecutive four-WAR seasons. Even if you dock him some runs based on skepticism over the defensive metrics, he's still a solidly above average player.

There have been quite a few Cuban defectors who've had respectable careers. Problem is, they all tend to be hyped up so much that, no matter how they do in MLB, they end up being considered busts. It's already happening with Cespedes. The Washington Post says Cespedes is "regarded as the second-best player in Cuba behind third baseman Yulieski Gourriel," which is silly both coming and going. If that came from an ML scout or exec, he should be fired (or at least kept far away from his team's international-scouting checkbook).

I remember a long time ago, before boxing was completely dead, when the top Cuban boxers would defect to the US one of the things that was generally considered to be an issue was that their lives had been so controlled and regimented in Cuba that when they came to the US and didn't have their lives so completely regimented that they tended to let their training go in favor of partying too much or even just getting lazy... a bit like college freshmen after leaving their parents' house. Have we heard about this being an issue with the Cuban baseball players?

El Duque was better than an average pitcher for the Yankees, and probably would have been even better had he come over before his mid-thirties.

Not saying that means Cespedes is a star. It seems pretty ridiculous to me to predict a player's success (or lack of) due to where he was born rather than his talent.

Isn't Yunel Escobar a defector? I don't actually know his story, just that he's Cuban.
He's been better than Alexei Ramirez I'd say.

Shame that Barbaro Canizares ended up just being a AAAA king.

Yuni Betancourt is a meh Cuban defector.

There have been quite a few Cuban defectors who've had respectable careers. Problem is, they all tend to be hyped up so much that, no matter how they do in MLB, they end up being considered busts.

Right, what percentage of the actual top talent from Cuba or Japan makes its way over to the U.S. at an early enough age to justify those kind of expectations?

#17: I don't think it's about where he's born; I think it's about where he's played ball. We don't have a lot of data, I admit, but looking at how other Cuban players have translated might give us useful data points.

Cuba is worse, of course, because it's more or less closed off to us.