To me, there is one key difference about the current & former Mets systems, especially among pitchers: Most of these prospects already have performed with advanced tools on the field. You don´t need a lot of projection like with many other prospects – which often doesn´t come.

Remember formerly highly touted Mets prospects such as:
Juan Urbina
Scott Moviel
Deolis Guerra
Matt Peterson
or way back Pat Strange

They had in common: A good secondary pitch, pretty good control for their young age, a “feel” for pitching and a fastball in the upper 80s to low 90s that was PROJECTED to add velocity once they “fill out” their “projectable” bodies.
Well, the “plus” fastball never came – or only in brief stretches of max effort. All of theme flamed out. With all due respect to Urbina and Guerra who are still active and may discover something.

Today´s group of pitching prospects is more about refining their stuff, i.e. improve a 3rd pitch, be more consistent and obviously stay healthy – but there´s no projection fantasy you need with any of them. If you look at former prospect lists, the biggest reason besides injuries for prospects to fail is that something that was projected “should grow into his body and develop power or velocity” never came. At times it does. Most often it doesn´t.

Joe Mauer
Victor Martinez
Jarrod Saltalamacchia
Matt Wieters
Buster Posey
Carlos Santana
Jesus Montero
Devin Mesoraco
Travis D´Arnaud

We´re talking about a very small select group here – because strong C prospects are quite rare. Mauer & Posey are superstars. Vic-Martinez, Carlos Santana and Matt Wieters have become well above average / All Star sort of catchers. Saltalamacchia has become a solid decent average C. Montero always had major defensive question marks surrounding himself and probably is a 1bman longterm. He´ll probably get a final shot at C this spring before the M´s pull up Mike Zunino, the other elite C prospect with D´Arnaud at some point this summer.
Finally that leaves Devin Mesoraco who has broken in as more of a backup to Ryan Hanigan for the contending Reds.

So, if you´re asking “What´s the likelihood of advanced top C prospects to become an impact player ? ” – it´s very high.
If you´re asking: “What are the odds that a highly touted young C out of the draft makes it ?” The answer is: quite low.

No such thing as a sure thing….

Who else would actually write “..the CORE salute you!”, as if he’s in some sort of Mets’ fan site militia or something?

I’mneverdoingthisagainmygod

However, in four years, we might have to face a decision on whether to change him or not… Considering the stress that catching puts on the knees, people are just worried about the knee injury he sustained.

I personally think he’ll stay at C.

Well, my bad. You’re right though…definitely looks like he added some muscle.

I’ve got both my eyes on you, Mitch…

Content is always available and with the amount of scouting reports it is very easy to come to a consensus on the overall talent of a player, and what their abilities and strengths and weaknesses actually are.

It always bothered me that there was never any Mets minor league coverage on the web. I hated having to wait for my issue of Mets Inside Pitch or Baseball America to come every month so I could read the blurbs about the Mets Minors.

After having had enough, I decided to start covering the Mets Minors on MMO and in August 2006 our first minor league recap was born. Every night during the season we had two people who ate, slept and lived the minors do a nightly report giving a full account of all our affiliate games.

We were doing Minor League Recaps years before Mets Minor League Blog burst onto the scene, and five years before Amazin Avenue started doing them.

But we never stopped there, we kept evolving because we believed first hand analysis was important. In 2008 we created our own minor league division of MMO. A staff dedicated to the minors and who attended the games, watched the games, and gave their analysis.

Finally in 2009, Omar Minaya and his staff credentialed us. With that we went onto getting credential with all of our affiliates and then search the world over to get correspondents for each team.

Today we have Tim Burns who lives in Binghamton and loves the B-Mets now and long before they were a Mets affiliate. he attends dozens of games a season and provides the best coverage of the B-Mets on the web. He actually helped build the players clubhouse. We have Andrew O’Brien who is a reporter and columnist for St. Lucie’s paper and he will again provide us with his full in depth coverage this year of the St. Lucie and GCL team. Covering the Savannah Sand Gnats is Joe from South Carolina. Our man in Las Vegas is Rob Silverman.

Last year MMO picked up field passes and credentials for 76 different games between Rookie League to Triple-A. We conducted over 100 interviews with the players and posted about 50 of them in stand alone posts. Half of our recorded interviews never even made it to the blog, but the information we learned was priceless.

All 12 members of our minor league staff subscribe to minor league packages to cover the games when they don’t attend and each night they write their own report along with accompanying news about injuries, transactions, quotes, etc. In 2012 we posted 575 of these individual reports.

Over two dozen players email the site regularly and bust our chops if we write something too critical about them, and when they get traded or released they also write and thank us for writing about them and covering them through the season. Sometimes I post those on the site.

So yes, while you’re right that most sites don’t haven’t a clue about the players they are ranking, here at MMO we are different.

We work months on our rankings because they contain a year’s worth of eye witness accounts, insights, analysis, things we learned from our conversations with players, discussions with many of the coaches who we get most of our info from, and of course our passion for our system which is why MMO is the best when it comes to Mets Minors coverage.

Last September we handed out our Metsmerized T-shirts, caps, buttons, etc. to many of the players who proudly wore them as the season wrapped up.

Anyway, that’s why we do what we do. In about 2-3 weeks, you’ll see a dozen more rankings and you can believe that many of them will include information they gleaned from a year’s worth of game data and analysis from MMO.

We were never given any reasoning behind why the players were ranked the way they were. Were certain things more heavily rated than others when you came to the final rankings? When ranking players in any type of format this should be clear, otherwise I will assume that the rankings and all information is a summary of the work that somoene else did. For instance, why is Syndergaard ranked fourth? He’s third on some lists, so why did you rank him fourth and slide Flores up to #3? Is it because you think he will be a better prospect, or did you just want to be different?