There is a lot of sturm und drang in the diaries right now about the merits of prospect lists from various analysts.

Take a step back people.

I have been doing prospect lists since 1996. You know something? No matter how hard you try, how much you study, or how much effort you put into it, you will ALWAYS be wrong sometimes. Every analyst is a human being, writing about other human beings.

Baseball America, Keith Law, Kevin Goldstein, Deric McKamey, and everyone else who does a prospect list, we all face the same challenge: predicting the future of other humans. All of us have different backgrounds, different emphasis, different ways of looking at things. Sometimes we are right, sometimes we are wrong. We all have good years and bad years. I just wrote a book with 1,074 players in it, and I've already found another 10 guys I should have written about. I'm human, Keith is human, Kevin is human, Deric is human, and everyone at Baseball America is human, too.

Does Keith overrate Mitch Boggs? Maybe. Do I overrate Jed Lowrie? Maybe. But that's what makes it valuable to have different opinions about things: insight doesn't come from conformity. It's the outlier opinions that are most fascinating to me.

And that's what makes this whole thing interesting, to me at least. If everyone produced nearly identical lists, where would be the fun in that?

There is room for all of us, in my view.