Punto4MVP's Top 50 Prospects

Martin Perez seems low to me. What is he 20 y.o. now?

Helps explain placement, provides interesting opinion, etc. When it’s just a list, I always wonder why the author thinks a block of ordered prospects from a guy without any professional credibility is worth my attention.

list.

One of the issues I have with lists like these is that they just end up parroting the conventional wisdom, with the author’s bias forming an echo chamber on guys he likes (George Springer) or dislikes (e.g. Vizcaino). I don’t think Punto4MVP has watched either player enough to come up with a cogent, well-reasoned opinion on why Springer is ahead of a guy like Marisnick or why he thinks Vizcaino will end up in the ‘pen. When asked for a rationale, he’ll just echo what someone else has written in the past as a justification for why his bias leads him to rate a guy higher or lower than the conventional wisdom emphasizing/discounting strengths/weaknesses as he sees fit for a particular prospect.

I don’t mean this to single out Punto4MVP. It’s a pretty solid list that won’t elicit too much controversy. It’s simply that the vast majority of the lists that get posted on Minor League Ball or elsewhere don’t provide much rationale even when they claim that they do. The “rationale” is simply an echo of something the author heard somewhere else. When repeated enough, that echo becomes a prospect’s reality rather than anything resembling an original opinion.

It always blows me away when a top 15 list guy like Rick Porcello or Cameron Maybin is called up and I see them for the first time. Porcello’s reports listed him as a “front-line starter” or “potential ace”. When I saw him for the first time, though, I had a difficult time seeing him with more than a mid-rotation upside. And it blows me away that so many people have echoed what they’ve heard that he’s a #1 or #2. Maybin is a different animal. He’s starting to fulfill the potential that made him such a highly rated prospect. It’s taken multiple years of development, though, to get to this point. When he was a prospect, I don’t think Maybin was ever a better prospect than what Anthony Gose is right now. Gose is still quite raw with significant flaws, but Maybin was probably even less polished when he first came up. Somehow, Maybin was in the BA top 10 in successive years while Gose will be ranked significantly lower on almost every list this year as he was last year.

I could be wrong. Maybe someone can cogently articulate why they think Maybin was that much higher-rated than Gose. Perhaps the prospect class was THAT much weaker making Maybin look better by comparison. Or perhaps there are other reasons I haven’t gleaned from the same publicly available (or paywall) scouting reports everyone else has seen. I don’t think that’s the case, though.

I think everything becomes an echo chamber, and people’s opinions of a player’s strengths and flaws are too slow to change in the face of the wider social opinion. The consensus becomes an anchor, tying down people’s opinions to a point that might or might not be appropriate when analyzing the factors upon which they judge a prospect. Opinions are viewed as bullish or bearish relative to the consensus, but it’s very rare to get a widely divergent opinion that’s grounded in solid analysis.