Sox on Deck

BP’s Red Sox Top Prospects

By Dave B. | November 7th, 2007

Recently, Kevin Goldstein of Baseball Prospectus put out his top 11 prospects in the Red Sox system. The list can be found here. If you don’t have a subscription to BP you can not read the write up, which are very good. I suggest everyone gets the subscription, lots of great stuff.

Clay Buccholz
Jacoby Ellsbury
Justin Masterson
Jed Lowrie
Ryan Kalish
Michael Bowden
Lars Anderson
Nick Hagadone
Oscar Tejeda
Josh Reddick
Che-Hsuan Lin

Not a whole lot sticks out at you as shocking. Everyone knows that Ellsbury and Buchholz are the cream of the crop. On the flip side, but this point everyone has heard of the emergence of Hagadone, Tejeda, and Lin. I would have had Anderson higher, but i can see how he is ranked 7th. He has yet to show that his power potential is anything more than just potential.

If there are surprised, it would have to be Kalish and Masterson. Kalish surprises me in the sense that he has not done much of anything in professional baseball. It is true that this season his line was a very impressive .368/.471/.540 over 87 at bats. His season ended short because of a wrist injury. In Kalish’s first season he put up a pedestrian .659 OPS. It is hard to argue with KG on this one though. Kalish has all the potential in the world, it is just shocking to see him so high before really showing this potential.

I have to disagree with KG on Masterson being ranked higher than Bowden, as well. Bowden pitched in Lancaster and Portland last year, the same as Masterson. But Bowden managed to have a better overall ERA (3.34 to 4.33) every similar WHIP (1.25 to 1.27) and had more strikeouts (128 to 115) over 11 innings less. On top of this, Bowden is about 7 months younger than Masterson. I feel like this is reaction to Masterson and the similarities he has to Wang and Carmona. It appears that hard sinker pitchers are the new hot commodities. That must be the justification KG is using for putting him so high.

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