I’m not sure if you got my response about Juan Mercado. He’s now the Pirate Latin American Scouting supervisor after having handled that position for the Cardinals.

The top 10 sorted out by team is only useful to see where you have a potential suplus or weakness.

The top 100 is only expected to graduate 45 or so into the Majors and some of them will be set up men, LOOGY’s or just average major League starters as well. there are only 750 jobs in the Majors and lots of guys play for 10 or more years so it’s unrealistic to think that 100 jobs open up every other year or so.

Prospect evaluation is the hardest part of the job but even just one big hit can fill a teams need at one key spot for a decade or longer so if you can hit big twice a year that can really impact your teams chances in the future.

That’s the difference. That also helps them tremendously in making trades. Guys like Anthony Gose and Jonathon Singleton were highly desired when Gillick or Amaro rang up another team. Dominick Brown is another guy in that mold, so was Ryan Howard.

Their guys, when they do make it can run down a flyball, steal a bag or fire a rocket from RF. They expect to have a higher bust rate, but they also expect to have well rounded position players at 6 spots in the line up and sacrifice some D for big power at 1B and LF which is a very typical philosophy.

We’ve done an overall very poor job in the first round for a very long time but our results in the 2nd and 3rd rounds have been far far worse if you can believe it.

The last useful player we got out of the 2nd round is Todd Hundley drafted all the way back in 1987.

Other than a couple years of Joe Smith the last useful player we got out of the 3rd round was Rick Aguilera all the way back in 1983.

Hey there’s nothing wrong with getting something useful out of the 7th and 13th rounds but when your bombing out every single year in the 2nd and 3rd rounds and only rarely hitting in the first and that’s with taking the “safer, closer” choice, I don’t know what to say.

There is no doubt that some here will claim these are outstanding results but compared to the Phillies big risk/big reward strategy that garnered them Jimmy Rollins, Randy Wolf and Scott Rolen in the 2nd round since 1993 I’d disagree,

Other than Angel Pagan we haven’t hit on a 4th rounder since Mike Jorganson in 1966. As for the 5th round we have to go all the way back to Burt Hooten in 1968. Too bad we didn’t sign him, he was a HS “kid”back then, guess we should have taken the “safe” one dimensional college player who makes it to the Majors so often like we usually do.

880 at bats later, this man is a 227 hitter ansd 28 hr… where’s the apology BASEBALL AMERICA???? not to mention all the others who were not mention

All because of WHERE he was drafted which is based on the scouting report they used to decide that WHERE!

He does interviews with the players that tells me a ton more about them than anything BA’s list does!

BINGO, kinda like a kid with a 4+ ERA in single A being the best pitcher in the minors is a stretch… they base it on “high ceiling” which makes them FAIL everytime..

COUNT THEM!

So this way your entire LIFE might not be as big a waste as your reply was!

Petey, I don’t think it is about being Infallible but about garbage in garbage out!

There really isn’t a lot of data to judge what a prospect can do or where he might go!
They use scouting which is a very subjective not objective art they also use draft position and number of plusses found in those scouting reports as a barometer of HOPE! WHich is the overwhelming criteria they use to rank! How good COULD he be, not really how good is he NOW!

It will come up with the right answer provided the team that took him and the scout that described him were correct in their subjective opinion!

A guy drafted at the top of the first round (that isn’t a headscratcher) will automatically place that kid at the top of most of those rankings even a day before he has taken a professional AB! (See Nimmo) And he will stay there until something happens to ruin that hope! (See F-Mart)

If you rank based on the possibility of events that haven’t happened yet your kind of asking for failure when those things don’t happen!

If the rankings were based on MiL Stats preformance and progress as opposed to potential they might have a much more accurate ranking system!

We have right now 4 1B man in our starting 8. That doesn’t happen when you draft for top quality and all around talent, it happens when you draft one tool college position players.

Tell you the truth Ike Davis is without a doubt the most well rounded of all the first basemen we have in our starting lineup having plenty of experience at RF and even the mound before becoming a pro. It’s just the fact that he is a really good 1B man while the others aren’t that makes him the ideal starter there.

An argument both ways can be made about the college pitcher (more developed/more abused) but no argument in favor of the one dimensional college bat holds any water and yet that is what we have continually drafted and the few times we’ve deviated it’s been for HS guys without college committments that didn’t require a larger bonus than the typical truly talented HS kid asked to give up his college education.

This past season we finally started taking some extraordinary HS talent in the middle rounds and consequently moved our draft price tag all the way up to 21st out of 30. previously we around 29. Big market club yeah right!

The middle round talent in HS kids like Tuschak, Evans, Marquez, Robbins (dns) and Diehl is off the charts and no more likely to bust than millions of one dimensional 21 and 22 year olds we’ve selected in years past but the real benefit is not in how many make it up here, it’s in how much they produce when they get up here and not in just one specific area but all the way around. BA, power, speed, arm, defense, instincts, the whole gamut, and in how long they’ll be in their prime up here. Not just a guy who you have to hold your breath on half the time. Those guys are fine in and of themselves as bench and role players, capable backups and well conceived platoons but a whole team full of them as starters is just not acceptable.

That’s what has continually caused us to go for the expensive quick fix from outside the organization and those guys have on average busted at least as often as the average top talent HS kid and they cost you Major league baseball games while their doing it. Even the expensive salary dump or FA who does come over and play well is frequently down the hill in three years and for every Beltran or Piazza there’s 4 or 5 Castillo’s or Bays’ and without the Alfonzo/Ordonez and Reyes/Wright the Piazza and Beltran doesn’t provide enough of a difference anyway to make the investment worthwhile from a winning standpoint.

That alone would make this team a solid consistent contender every year, and years in which we get nipped at the wire would number among our worst seasons, not our best.

Omar Minaya did do the first part of the job. Thanks to him we do have a surprising amount of depth but most of it is fringy,, incomplete, one dimensional or questionable in a number of ways. When you get past Familia, Harvey and Wheeler there’s no one that really makes another team salivate. Intrigued perhaps but that’s it. If I had to put a number on it I’d say 18th is where we stand and that’s after adding a strong draft class in 2011 and Wheeler.

Better than where it was when Minaya got here though that’s for sure but the reality is every team (other than the Chisox) have at least 3 top prospects and many have more than three.

Offensively LH hitter Juan Centeno appears to be a Josh Thole clone so even if he does make it up here it’s just a defensive upgrade which is vital but makes for an ill conceived roster. He’s also always been the #2 catcher with just 150 games total over 4 full seasons behind the plate which in our system really says a lot. I’m very much looking forward to seeing him work with Harvey and Familia and perhaps Wheeler if he gets up to AA.,

So far Francisco Pena’s been a bust but with catchers you just never know. Plenty of IFA’s have been in their teams systems for 8 or 9 years before making it and competently handling the most important chores demanded of a catcher.. It already appears that Francisco has inherited his fathers bat but if he were to add his fathers GG defense he and Centeno could be a workable situation. Cordero and Maron could possibly be more than that but at A+ and A- in 2012 are still miles away. Plenty of baseballs top catching prospects were signed out of Latin America during the years that Minaya was here and this area and the failure to adequately address it will haunt this Franchise for years to come although Steve Phillips busting on 15 out of 17 1st, 2nd and 3rd round draft picks from ’98-’03 has more to do with it than anything else. This is a clear example of how years upon years of **** drafts just kill your organizations chances even 10 years down the road.

SS Willie Tovar a 2008 IFA from Venezuela and only 19 last year in the Sally League will be at the very least an outstanding glove at SS which alone is good enough to win with but he’s also getting everything he can right now out of himself offensively so with just a little growth over the next couple years could put himself into serious contention. At 20 in A+ this year he might be over matched and still be a viable candidate going forward and there is even a chance that Evans moves to catcher so if Tovar does force his way up we could have a number of options available. The trick is to not just count on one guy for every spot like we did with Ike, Havens, Tejada, Pena and Fern because not all will make it and fewer still will make it big.

Valdespin has the athletic ability to play SS and the bat to be much better than average. He did show signs of getting serious last year and if he ramps it up in that area, commits himself to being a lock down SS, gets better control of the strike zone and drops the Hansley Ramirez act he could really force himself up here in a big way. At 24 this year 2012 is bigger for him than just about any other minor leaguer in our system.

Loved Oquendo. Going with a platoon at 2B and 3B made us skimp at backup MIer which Oquendo would have been perfect for and was a bit of an achilles heal for those mid 80′s Mets which didn’t come back to bite, but could have like it did in ’00. Overall he had a pretty damn good career and even continued it into the coaching ranks.

I’d rather have had Reyes here for 4-5 more years but with the 12th, 35th, 65th and 88th picks in the draft I’m very interested to see how we do. One thing I cannot understand is how Cuddyer, Bell and Willingham garnered their former teams a better pick in the supplemental round than Reyes got us. That makes no sense.

Toronto, as usual snagged a few extra supplemental round draft choices by “losing” 3 type B’s and it’s clearly a strategy they’ve been working for a while now, even picking up guys after the season, declining their options, paying their buyouts, offering arb and snagging prospects drafted anywhere from 32-60 for “losing” guys like Frank Francisco, John Rauch, Jose Molina, Scott Downs, John Buck, Kevin Gregg, Miguel Olivo, Marco Scutero, Rod Barajas over just the last two years. Not sure if that’s still a viable strategy with the new CBA but having nine extra sandwich round picks over a two year period can only move your farm system in one direction. Clearly there are no flies on AA when it comes to committing to the farm or the owners of the Blue Jay’s either in paying for the buildup and it really hasn’t come at a cost to the Major league team at all as their 4 games over .500 in the last two years even while playing a full 33% of their schedule against 3 of the best teams in baseball.

Thanks Pete for another great article.