In the US, you have organizations like the AAU and NCAA to work on players.

That plus a few other competent starters in addition to your drafts can get you can get you a full team built up over just a 6 year period with plenty of guys available to trade for where your prospects haven’t hit.

Our results with Fern, Flores and Pena to date are just a reflection of not having signed enough guys and a few of them are among the best prospects this team has in Mejia, Familia, Flores, Lagares and Valdespin (signed at 19) There’s also some others in Urbina, Tapia, Cordero, Aderlain Rodriguez, Armando Rodriguez, Luis Mateo and Jose Garcia.

Arguably the only strength that this farm has is in it’s depth and you take away those guys and we wouldn’t have any hope for years and years and it’s not like our drafted prospects have come up here well polished and ready to contribute either.

Properly developing any of our prospects has been a systematic failure for 25 years now with just a couple of exceptions here and there.

Between regular season, spring training, fall ball, winter ball and off season training regiments, guys don’t have a chance to heal and rest up for the coming year.

Flores has 3 chances, 3B, LF, RF. He does play an awful lot of baseball. Full season ball stateside and all season long in Venezuela. He also looks like he doesn’t work out very much. maybe just a break from the game and and a rigorous off season conditioning program would be beneficial. Or maybe he’s doing both who knows. Baseball is a tough game and sometimes the harder you try………

The winter league team he plays for is La Isla Marguerita which is a real party spot for vacationing Venezuelans which wouldn’t be the worst place to play but still and all if your 20 and have a couple of Bolivars…….

Kingsport, Brooklyn and Savannah at 16 is just idiotic. He should have been learning skills either in the Met camp in the DR or extended ST stateside. I really think that Wilmer’s apparent stagnation is at least partly due to zooming him instead of grooming him which for a team with so many weak spots year after year is really inexcusable.

He’s on the 40, has good hands and a good arm, has always been a good RBI guy which means he at least doesn’t shrink in those situations and is only 20 years old. No choice but to do everything possible to prepare him over the next couple of years and that might mean having him skip Winter ball. He’s been playing 11 months a year since he was 16.

Funny thing is that’s where I started when I looked them up on Baseball Reference. I was thinking the same thing and figured Flores’ numbers wouldn’t compare to Cabrera’s but would be similar to Alfonzo’s. I wanted to look up the numbers first so I had evidence before I got ripped for being too optimistic even comparing Flores to Fonzie.

I was surprised to find Cabrera’s and Alfonzo’s minor league stats to be the other way around and how similar Cabrera’s stats were to the numbers Flores has put up the past three years. It almost seems like something clicked for Cabrera when he turned 20 and everything came together at that point. We can hope the same happens for young Wilmer but I agree, even if he repeats Fonzie’s time with the Mets, I won’t be disappointed.

For the sake of comparison, I took a look at two other guys:
Player A:
Age 17 (Rookie and Low-A): .259/.338/.347, 2 HR, 28 RBI
Age 18 (A): .268/.328/.382, 7 HR, 66 RBI
Age 19 (A+): .274/.333/.421, 9 HR, 75 RBI

Player B:
Age 17 (Rookie): .331/.433/.423, 0 HR, 27 RBI
Age 18(Low-A & A+): .350/.382/.436, 1 HR, 44 RBI
Age 19 (A+): .294/.366/.409, 11 HR, 86 RBI

Player A seems like he’s comparable to Wilmer Flores. Player B seems like he’s a better pure hitter than both Player A and Wilmer Flores. Player A is Miguel Cabrera. Player B is Edgardo Alfonzo. In other words, the jury is still out on Wilmer, as it was on Miggy and Fonzie at the same age. A lot can happen in the next few years, as the career paths of Cabrera and Alfonzo over the past decade or two show us.

Flores’ talents (if they develop) won’t be needed on the big league level until 2014 or so anyway. If he arrives sooner than that, it’ll only be a bonus. In the meantime, we should cut him some slack and let him develop at his own pace.

The problem isn’t signing 16 year olds (there are other problem tied to that). the problem is hype and improper development.

And straight up player comps are horribly unfair. No one is going to be the next Cabrera/Reyes/ Pujols. Let him be Wilmer Flores, whatever that ends up being.

still, it is silly to expect a guy to be a productive ML by age 20 or else he is a washed up bust.

Of course Flores needs to show development at this point, and turn tools into production on the field, but he could spend the next 3 years in the minors and still come up at a relatively young age.

So maybe he never lived up to the THM hype, so just ignore him and let him play in the minors to see what he can become. Put him at 3B and let him learn