Prospectus Toppus Hundredus
Big Gorilla Hauls In, Falls in Line
He's a heck of a hitter, but is troublesome Pirate slugger Pedro Alvarez really the fourth-best prospect in all of baseball? Baseball Prospectus thinks so.
Baseball Prospectus (BP) announced their Top 100 Baseball Prospects for 2009 yesterday, and the list manages to include a few surprises despite its overall consensus-towing line.
Baseball Prospectus, for you youngsters out there, is one of the granddaddies of prospect analysis, and their list of baseball's most promising is always one of the most vaunted and looked-forward to in the business. Of course, these days, by the time their final list is published, the overall prospect community has already pretty much come to agreement, and the interest value left from their list is more a matter of comparing the places they agree or differ with the established consensus.
BP says that their list (original article here) "represents the best balance of skills analysis and performance analysis in the industry", and from a gestalt perspective, they do seem to value raw talent, skills development and statistical projection in a more or less equal blend. They don't seem to adjust much for opportunity, but in this era when prospects are routinely bundled off to other teams with very different circumstances, that isn't necessarily a bad thing.
The BP list starts with everyone's favorite twosome, catcher Matt Wieters and pitcher David Price , and doesn't do much veering from expectations after that. BP towed the consensus line on a number of players, with a top-20 that looks an awful lot like everyone else's. Every player in our combined top-30 is on BP's list somewhere or other, and most of them are very close to where we've all known they'd appear for months. On the day BP published this list, in fact, they nailed the consensus position of Colby Rasmus (8th), Dexter Fowler (12th), Tim Beckham (15th), Jordan Schafer (50th), Jake Arrieta (52nd) and Jeff Samardzija (85th).
On other players, though, BP has different opinions, ranking them far higher than any other prospect ranking system to date. BP is really high, for example, on pouting Pittsburgh draftee Pedro Alvarez (4th overall), mercurial Texas pitchers Neftali Feliz and Michael Main (6th and 66th), Florida corner-slugger Matt Dominguez (26th), Dodger pitcher/third-baseman Ethan Martin (59th), and young Rockies flamethrower Joulys Chacin (27th). In each case, BP is ranking these players much higher than anyone else.
On the downside, BP's Top 100 has some conspicuous absences, players that did not crack their list at all. The biggest surprises here are Tampa pitchers Jeff Niemann and Jeremy Hellickson, who can be found somewhere between 30th and 50th on most other scorecards. Seattle wunderkind Carlos Triunfel , who some scouts call the best pure hitter they've ever seen, also doesn't appear, and if you're a fan or family member of slugging Rangers catcher Taylor Teagarden or potential Rockies closer Casey Weathers , don't get your hopes up. They're not in BP's top 100.
We've added BP's rankings to our own (and everyone else's) for your enjoyment and comparison. You'll find them underneath each player's capsule profile and also combined on our Matrix page, which lists all the major ranking systems in handy chart-form.
While BP's input does factor into our Scouting Book Combine rankings (you'll see many players jump up or down a few notches today because of this), we're also standing by our own weights, and we're looking forward to watching these players shake out and shake up the league in the years to come.
The only heavyweight left to weigh in with their rankings is the always-tardy Baseball America. Based on the trends to date, though, we're not expecting too many surprises there. By the time that particular Bible arrives in mailboxes across America, the dust has pretty much already settled.
