Prospect Wil Myers and others head to Tampa Bay for James Shields and Wade Davis.
In the past an as recent as Monday, I’ve referred to so many Mets fans being “prospect drunk”. What I mean by that is that they insanely go berserk for these overly hyped prospects who to a great degree never pan out. When the Royals traded Myers and and some other prospects to the Rays for two quality major league pitchers who are not number two and five starters in their rotation, many in the Mets blogosphere and twitterverse went ape shit. (pardon the phrase).
It’s as if they completely devalued the only two sure things in the deal; major leaguers James Shields (15 W, 3.52 ERA, 1.16 WHIP, 223 K, 59 BB) and Wade Davis (2.43 ERA, 1.09 WHIP, 11.1 K/9, 157 ERA+).
Almost as if on cue, I came across this post by SNY’s Ted Berg on his blog Ted Quarters who writes:
This is as much for me as it is for you, as I’m as guilty as anyone of getting caught up in the hype around big-name MLB prospects. But most MLB prospects suck, and it’s important we not lose sight of that.
I don’t know why that’s important. Actually, it’s not important all you want. Continue overhyping prospects all you want. But before you start swooning for some dude with a cool name and a strong reputation that you’ve never seen play, you should probably check out this post from Royals Review last offseason.
Players ranked in Baseball America’s Top 100 prospects “bust” — i.e. contribute little to nothing at the big-league level — nearly 70 percent of the time. 70 percent! And Baseball America is awesome at what it does. It’s just that trying to figure out which baseball players will be good and which will suck is an extraordinarily difficult task.
Ever so eloquently, he makes my point and also links to a post that most Met fans need to read, if only to bring them back to earth on the subject of prospects and hype.
I’ve said this before, but I feel very bad for pitching prospect Zack Wheeler who seems to be the poster boy for this future Mets renaissance that is coming in 2014. Or is it 2016 now?
As if he already doesn’t have enough weight on his shoulders from the burden of being Sandy Alderson’s lone quality acquisition, and one that cost the team Carlos Beltran who has posted an .879 OPS as an ex-Met, the expectations for Wheeler keep piling up and up. Some already are penciling him into the opening day rotation if you can believe that.
We need to stop gloating over these prospects who essentially go poof in the night more often than not. The last two number one Mets prospects; Lastings Milledge and Fernando Martinez are now playing in the outer reaches of the Twilight Zone.
Lets temper those expectations and lets stop going cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs over other team’s prospects too. They bust equally as much as Mets prospects do.
