Minor League Ball daily discussion, February 15, 2017

Good afternoon everyone, and welcome to the daily discussion thread for February 15th, 2017. Spring training began yesterday, with the baseball news dominated by the elbow injury to St. Louis Cardinals top prospect Alex Reyes. As you know he’ll miss all of the 2017 season recovering from Tommy John surgery. More on Reyes on a moment for our daily discussion.

With the completion of the Top 200 and the posting of the Shadow Twins list this morning, my next main project is a report on sleepers. My goal is to have a separate article for each of the six divisions, beginning with the National League West, hopefully starting tomorrow.

Today’s Discussion Question: how much should an injury impact a prospect’s placement on a list? I had Reyes ranked as the Number One pitching prospect and the Number Four prospect overall.

When I work up the next version of the list at the end of spring training, how much should Reyes be discounted? Historically I have cut an elite pitching prospect who gets hurt by a significant amount until we get at least some information about how their recovery is going, but for Reyes that will be at least a year from now.

How much is too much to cut him? How much is too little? Would a B+ be appropriate now? A flat B? Keep in mind that while Tommy John surgery is common, it should not be considered an automatic recovery in my opinion.

What do you think?