If you’re all about the consensus of BA/BP that’s fine, but keep in mind that a lot of that came from one or two poor defensive reports that started feeding on each other last season. Reports are much more positive this year. Oh, and there’s the whole still mashing at Double-A thing to factor in. Yes, Posey was ranked high, but pretty much every consensus top 1-2 college hitter gets ranked high before they’ve got a long statistical track record. That record’s getting longer, and I’ve yet to be convinced that Posey’s bat compares with Santana’s.

One interesting note is that the “consensus” isn’t quite a consensus. Will Lingo ranked Santana 18th last year and Posey 25th.

If you place a huge amount of value in eyewitness accounts of non-scouts, you’ll probably want to throw away John, KLaw, KG, and half of the BA staff, too. Law may have seen one or both of them once, but he’s far more reporter than observer. I’m pretty positive John and Goldstein have never actually laid eyes on either of them. John doesn’t travel the minor league circuit much at all, and Goldstein sticks to the midwest for his in-person accounts. The BA guys have all probably gotten some good looks at Santana since they’re headquartered in North Carolina, and I’m sure they had at least one or two people looking at Posey in the Cactus League, but their information by and large comes directly from scouts.

On 2, your park factor info is just wrong.

Here’s baseball think factory:

http://www.baseballthinkfactory.org/files/oracle/discussion/2008_minor_league_park_multipliers/

IE’s factors for hits, doubles and home runs: .97, .88, .74
San Jose’s: .94, .95, and .86 respectively.

Here’s Baseball America:
http://www.baseballamerica.com/today/features/040408parkfactors.html
(this one’s old, but the minor league algorithm hasn’t changed the same way the major league has, so old ones are still informative)

IE’s score (1000 = neutral): 867
San Jose’s: 950.

Here’s firstinning’s accoung of ’09 so far:
http://firstinning.com/pf/?type=basic&lg=CALIF&min=250&season=2009

San Jose’s yet to show any deviation from the mean, while IE’s suppressing hits and home runs.

I don’t know where your “far, far more common sentiment” comes from, but I’ve never seen any data that supports it.

On 3, I’m a really, really strong believer in the idea that team context shouldn’t play any part whatsoever in a player’s status as a prospect. Posey might make it to San Fran in ’10 while it may take Santana all the way until September, 2011. On the other hand, Posey also plays in an organization run by Bryan Sabean, who loves him some veterans.

There are three reasons why this should have no bearing on their prospect status:
1) it’s completely hypothetical. One injury to V-Mart, and Santana is the best catching option in the organization. Sabean goes out and gets him a veteran catcher, and all of a sudden Posey’s future is cloudy. Santana sleeps with Mark Shapiro’s wife and the organization refuses to promote him and busts him down to A-ball until he’s out of options. A lot of things involve guessing when you’re talking about baseball prospects, but at least when we talk about baseball ability we’re just guessing about a range of possible outcomes for 1 player. When you’re comparing the opportunity of two prospects to break into the major leagues given their team context over multiple seasons, you’re talking about hundreds of different variables involving multiple players at multiple levels on multiple teams, and that’s not even considering the team’s GMs. That’s a total headache. Why not stick to what we know?

2) it has absolutely nothing to do with the ability of the prospect to play baseball. Santana’s organization could block him another 3 years and it wouldn’t change the fact that he’s a damned good prospect. To use a famous example, Edgar Martinez was denied a chance at a major league starting job until he was 27, even though he was 100% ready at the age of 24. His age 24, 25, and 26 seasons, he was a major league hitter stuck in the minors. His team’s bad decision had no bearing whatsoever on his ability to play baseball, and as soon as he got his shot he started showing them just how stupid they’d been.

3) it really doesn’t effect how valuable the prospect is to their team. Suppose you’re right and Posey gets called up a half-season earlier. So what? In the scheme of a career, a half-season introduction to the major leagues really doesn’t mean much at all. In a half-season, maybe Posey hits 10-12 home runs and puts up some nice rate stats, or maybe he has an awkward transition and puts up bad numbers that year before becoming an impact player. That half-season’s pretty much irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Think about it this way: if you’re trying to decide which of two very comparable players on the verge of retirement has had the better career, you’ll pretty much never make that decision based on what one of them did by virtue of making it to the majors six months earlier.

Personally, I think Santana and Posey are pretty much a wash. Santana has a better batting eye and a more substantial track record, Posey has the draft effect going for him (and about 1000 more scouting reports as a result) and is a better defender, though not by a huge margin. If someone wants to rank one 10th overall and the other 13th, I don’t really care. What I don’t understand is the broad consensus among people here and elsewhere that Posey’s clearly in a much higher tier. I think they’re very comparable players, and would be very hard-pressed to pick one over the other. Clearly most people disagree with me, and I’ve yet to really understand why.