The Seedlings To Stars 2012 Top 100 Prospects: An Introduction
By Aaron Somers
Today is September 28, 2011, and it’s the last day of the 2011 Major League Baseball regular season. That’s depressing for those of us who are fans of the 22 teams whose seasons wrap up today, but with the season coming to a close, there’s no better time to start looking toward the future.
And that’s exactly what I’m going to do over the coming months, bringing you my Top 100 Prospects.
I’ve done Top 100 lists every year I’ve been a baseball blogger; this is the fourth. If you want a good laugh, you can go look at the first one I ever did, back in 2008. No matter what I do from here on out with Top 100 lists, I’ll never do one worse than that. Angel Villalona #1? Carlos Triunfel #4? Matt Antonelli #17? Ryan Royster #22? Approximately one zillion A’s?
Every year, I get better at them. That first year, I assembled that list in just a few hours and wrote the whole thing in one sitting. The last two years, I published the lists in groups of ten, taking more time to work out placement and consider just about everyone and everything worth considering. And this year, for the first time, I’ll be publishing an article on each player. That’s 100 player profiles, hopefully one each day, starting tomorrow with prospect #100. I’m excited–I hope you are too.
I put a lot more work into this year’s list than previous years, and I feel like I have much better control over it. Last year, for example, I put a bunch of short-season players on the list merely because of crazy statlines; this year, I’ve put much more time into really breaking everybody down and comparing all the prospects. As a result, I don’t think any of the players on the list are going to be shocking selections. I do have a history of leaving certain highly-touted prospects off the list entirely, some (Kyle Drabek) looking more prescient than others (Brett Lawrie) at this point. There may be a couple of those here (I still don’t buy Casey Kelly or Aaron Hicks), but by and large, I do feel this year’s list will induce fewer groans than those in years past. Heck, I’ll just say it right now–Yankees fans will be upset at where I ranked Jesus Montero. That’s seriously the only thing that I think will really stir the pot here; there are a number of players I ranked much higher than most, but I find that excessive optimism meets less opposition than excessive pessimism. Because I put so much more time into assembling it, I also feel very prepared to defend my rankings, so if you disagree on something, by all means say so, and I’ll try to further clarify my position.
Now, I can’t tell you how to interpret the list, but I do want to urge you to look beyond the mere numerical rankings. Certainly, they’re interesting and spur discussion, but ultimately, they’re rather semantic. After all, anybody in the top 100 prospects is very good and has a number of positive attributes. If you think I ranked a player too high or too low, that’s absolutely fine–I’ve been way off on a number of guys in the past, and I’m not going to pretend the list is perfect. Ultimately, though, what matters more than the rankings are the profiles themselves, where I actually break down the strengths and weaknesses of the player. Predicting prospects is an extremely inexact science. For example, let’s say I ranked the Rockies’ Edwar Cabrera in the top 50, claiming that his arsenal and command would allow him to keep a high strikeout rate as he moved up, as well as citing comparable pitchers who made that work. Somebody else could come along and point to other data that showed Cabrera would have trouble moving up, and leave him off the list entirely. If both predictions could logically follow, then it’s tough to declare the ranking “stupid.” Again, I don’t anticipate that happening much, if at all, this year, but I do want to urge people to look beyond the headline and more into the analysis. I certainly weight traits differently than many people do, so I naturally come to some different conclusions. Sometimes my zanier ideas come to fruition, and other times I’m proven to be quite foolish. Anyway, that’s enough of being defensive–just a friendly reminder to keep an open mind and try to understand where I’m coming from before judging merely on the numerical rankings.
If I do accomplish my goal of publishing one player writeup per day, the Top 100 will ultimately conclude in the first week of 2012. When I do finish publishing the list, I plan on looking at some other aspects of it in the month of January–I’ll examine some of the players I considered but snubbed, look at how the list breaks down by organization and position, and some other things. That’s four months into the future, so it’s all tentative, of course, but that’s my plan as of now.
In case you’re wondering, yes, this list is basically all mine, so Wally and James may not (and almost certainly don’t) agree with all of my rankings. In fact, I’m sure Wally will be engaging me in the comments of some of these!
That’s it for this introduction; it’s not like a Top 100 list of anything really needs 1000 words to set itself up, and I’m getting dangerously close to that threshold. I’ll be back tomorrow morning with prospect #100–make sure to check it out!