ESPN: BTF: Futures Game shows promise (INSIDER REQ)

With baseball’s All-Star Game only a few days away, the hype machine is in full gear. While “This Time it Counts” is firmly entrenched in my addled Gen-Xer brain—along with other slogans such as “Where’s the Beef?”—the actual All-Star Game is no longer the game that I look forward to the most in mid-July. For my money, the All-Star Futures Game is the must-watch game of the week.

[...]

For each player I’ll give a ZiPS “best guess” for how they are likely to do in the majors if called up in 2011, and for what their peak season could look like, assuming that they play for their current parent team. Projection systems tend to be fairly conservative given the uncertainty of events years down the road, but they also present a dose of reality for much-hyped players such as Cameron Maybin of the Florida Marlins.

Also have a Lee piece filed, but I try not to bug you guys with too many things that require registration (though you can usually get it for $15 or less!), so I probably won’t link to that.