I feel like I remember reading something on BP at some point about this, maybe it was THT or BBTF. I’ll dig around and see if I can find something, if not, maybe I’ll try to run a little study on my own and fanpost it up, looking at Top Prospects lists from the last decade or so and the success rate of different guys who took different amounts of time to get to the majors.

For the time, its certainly possible that Francoeur/Guillen developed bad habits that lead to their failures, but whose to say it happened because they reached the majors so fast? By all accounts I’ve heard, Francoeur was a guy who was always a superstar his whole life before MLB, never had a need to adjust his hacktastic ways. Maybe in a different, lower profile organization, where he wasn’t the hometown boy, he didn’t have a million people telling him he was going to succeed immediately, it would have been different. More attention would have been paid to the fact that he didn’t really excel in any one area at any point in his minor league career, and there were some glaring red flags. If he came up in KC or TB, maybe he’d have been more willing to address the issues with his approach, or the coaches would have been more likely to forcefeed him advice that he never got in Atlanta because of his instant rock-stardom. Stanton has red flags, but he also does substantially excel in one particular area, the skill he does have, he probably has more of than any other prospect in the minors right now.

What about Jose Reyes? What if the Mets didn’t call him up on his 19th birthday, proceeded to sign Kaz Matsui the following season, and left Reyes in the upper level minors for a few years, where he bounced around the infield trying to crack the roster by playing different positions, trying to become a defensive minded infielder with speed and an inability to draw walks? Maybe since the focus would have been more about finding a roster spot rather than finding a way to get on base as an everyday leadoff man, he never would have developed his solid plate discipline, which could have also sapped some of his power, since he’d be swinging at more bad pitches, and he’d never have become the star he is today.

What if Stanton gets left in the minors for two more years, destroys upper level pitching for a good portion of that, comes up, and then has the 40% K%? Do you then send him back down? Couldn’t that be as volatile a decision as “rushing him”? Instead, if you do “rush him” and he struggles (moving outside John’s hypothetical case), he wouldn’t be expected to produce immediately, so if he had to be sent down to work on something, or even if he was kept on the roster to work on things, it wouldn’t be such a blow to the high expectations placed on him.