But please do tell where that $10 million figure came from. Leaving Heyward down for a few weeks wasn’t going to give the Braves more cheap years of team control, it was going to give them one extra year of arbitration tacked on to the end at near market value rates. There’s also the fact that we’re basically only talking about money on the end of the deal (either way Heyward makes the same from 2010-2012 and I don’t think his super 2 status would significantly affect his salaries from 2013-2015) so you really should discount the difference to the present value, since the Braves will assuredly pick up some present value by bringing Heyward north with them.

I didn’t twist anybody’s argument. If anything, I’m untwisting arguments - Heyward was a very good prospect in high school (obviously, he was a first round pick), but the idea that his inferior competition prevented him from showing his true talent somehow depressed his draft stock is just hilarious. Heyward, like virtually every other high profile prep prospect out there, played in plenty of showcases where scouts got to poke him, prod him, and see him play against excellent competition. In fact, because he was so highly regarded during his junior season, if anything, scouts might have seen MORE of Heyward than most other preps in that class. If they thought he was an Upton-level talent, rest assured they would have figured that out.

I like how you listed a bunch of statistical things with Heyward, and then used that to state: “I think you really underrate just how good the scouting reports on Heyward have been since he made his professional debut.”

“As for this idea that we should discount Heyward’s performance in AA because it was only 160 ABs, I just can’t agree in this case.”

Discount it? No. Forget about it? Never. Put it into proper context? Sure, that sounds reasonable. I have a very high opinion of Jason Heyward. But I will admit that between the two of us, I wasn’t the one who said that he’s the “greatest 20 year old hitting prospect of the past decade”, or the one who said that former No. 1 overall prospect Alex Gordon “couldn’t hold Heyward’s jock strap in terms of hitting”. I was not the one who said that “Heyward is on a completely different level than [Justin] Upton” with regard to plate discipline and selectivity at the plate, nor was I the one who talked completely out of my ass by suggesting that college experience and statistics don’t really matter. That last one wasn’t really relevant to the present conversation, I just thought it was funny enough to be worth repeating.

Anyways, your entire last paragraph is just more hype about Jason Heyward’s Magical AA Stint. I don’t get your fascination with it as compared to, say, the 189 ABs he had just last year at a lower level where he had an excellent-but-not-quite-otherwordly .888 OPS. I’ll even let you weigh the AA stint more heavily, but you can’t ignore the other stuff.

Heyward could certainly turn out to be truly excellent, perhaps in short order. But frankly I really do wonder what the reaction is going to be like if he ends up being merely a “very good” player, say in the mold of Jermaine Dye before all the injuries. Will we say that he’s wasted some of his talent, or would we realize that just maybe we jumped the gun a bit in our desire to believe that the present is always greater than the past? Inevitably this is going to happen, if not with Heyward than with somebody else. You can certainly argue it’s already happened with Alex Gordon.