For me, Ace pitchers trumps any other prospect, typically. Ace pitchers can control a game on a very regular basis. A hitter could hit 4 HR each game and the team could lose 5-4 each time. Extreme example, I’ll grant, but read up and study Pure Quality Starts metric that Baseball Forecaster created and keeps track of.. The best pitchers, like Lincecum and Santana can pitch a quality start 70-80% of the time. Most regular pitchers can only do that 30-40% of the time, if that.

More importantly, the best pitchers avoid what they term a disaster start, which I think is a major cause of a pitcher having a horrible ERA overall. Ptichers who can minimize these types of starts can have very good ERAs.

And Stanton still strikes out way too many times. Don’t get me wrong, he’s good. Just that I think top pitching is more valuable.

I think that he’s held up rather well for a 19 year old in the FSL. He had a terrible start, but has brought his numbers back to respectable territory (he’s been very good in June and July). With his defensive reputation, I think the ranking is defensible.

People seem to overreact to a bad slump. The guy is just a streaky hitter. I don’t see that being a downfall. People also seem to be down on him because he strikes out a ton, but everyone knew he would when he was drafted. He’s still having a pretty nice season overall.

I do worry about his defense though. I think its a foregone conclusion he’ll have to move to 1B. That hurts his value quite a bit.

with the points above, but I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call it “awful.”