Sounds fun. Two overall brackets … hitters and pitchers. Each side of the individual brackets divided into NL and AL prospects. Ultimately, the top two prospects — one from each bracket; a pitcher and a hitter — have a World Series showdown.

But… Based on what? Community polls?

Think of it like World Cup Qualifiers. Each position’s top 10 (top 2, judged by you, would get byes) prospects fight for a spot in the “finals”. Top 2 prospects from each small bracket advance and then a larger tournament takes place between the top 16 offensive players (not necessarily top 16, but top 2 from each positional bracket).

Pitchers would probably have to be a standard 32 pitcher bracket type of model.

The rationale for position specific is that it reduces the large amount of workload associated with having one large 64 or 96 prospect tournament, and while the same number if not more prospects are evaluated, it is easier to manage. Also, it is easiest to compare prospects of the same position because tired arguments such as the lack of value of being a defensive first baseman, that have already been rehashed to death, can be avoided.

32 in each pitchers and hitter mixed in together, last two out of each bracket in the ultimate Showdown, of ultimate destiny

Heck Yes

The best part about prospect smackdowns is evaluating/debating two relatively similar prospects. A March Madness-style tournament would be pretty boring for the first few rounds — a matchup of Mike Trout vs. Gorkys Hernandez or Jeremy Hellickson vs. Chris Withrow would be pretty lame, imo.

Make Brackets of the players origin or birthplace. Latin Players, Southeast, West Coast, Mid West, Northeast, Far West(Aisian), Canadian, Southwest, and so on. I think it would be fun to see where the majority of our studs come from and the quantity of talent from some of our regions. I think this would be different!

and isn’t the endgame for this kind of floating towards the top 5 or 10 players anyways?

 So maybe incorporate stat lines without revealing who the player is? This totally twists the nature of the exercise, and probably makes for a bit more work, but it would be interesting to see where guys landed compared with stat lines…

maybe even throw in some guys from 5-10 years ago…

it also seems like a very difficult thing to pull off. The seedings would require a lot of work to make the matchups competitive all the way through. It might be better to just do a number of smackdowns with multiple prospects instead of the standard one on one face off. Ideas could be toolsy OF types(Jennings vs. Trout vs. Brown), catchers who might change position(Montero vs. Norris vs. Myers), young LHP, upper level arms(Pineda vs. Minor vs. Britton), mid range catchers(Conger vs. Romine vs. Arencibia vs. Sanchez)…you could even do some team specific ones like Royals hitters(Moustakas vs. Myers vs. Hosmer), Braves pitchers(Delgado vs. Teheran vs. Minor), etc. My picks there probably aren’t the best options, but I think it would be easier to work out on your end John and could provide some interesting discussions.

That’s really the only way it would have value. This way we get an idea of, say, the top 32 middle infield prospects, which seems far more valuable than a list that can mostly already be assumed as it is.