MVN - Most Valuable Network

John Sickels gives his Top 20 (or so) Tiger prospects

John Sickels recently released his Top 20 Tiger prospects. While I don’t have a problem with Sickels or his website - quite the contrary - I’m going to take this opportunity to say I simply don’t like prospect lists.

I’d much rather just see a grouping of a team’s top prospects presented with a discussion of the skills they bring to the ballpark and their likely contribution to the club at some point down the road. Maybe sort them by position or age and then just let the reader go to town.

To put them in a list and say x is better than y, especially when x and y play different positions, just mucks up the conversation to me. Just tell me about x and then tell me about y. Then we’ll discuss our thoughts on the two and it’s usually pretty evident who’s the better prospect. If it’s not, who cares?

Another thing I don’t like about prospect lists, especially when they’re presented without comment, is it’s so difficult to discern the reasoning behind them. How does the author treat a AA player who’s a sure thing to get to the majors but unlikely to be a star as compared to a Lo A player who’s about a 50/50 to flameout but could also become a superstar? Such things can be explained, but then the conversation turns to the explanations and the ranking system and there’s all the muck again and we’re no longer really talking about prospects.

I guess the best way to sum up my thoughts on the matter is to think of a movie review. When I read a movie review, I like reading the critic’s thoughts on the movie and hearing them parse out the things that did and didn’t work for them. If they do their job well, I shouldn’t really need to see how many stars, or roses, or thumbs up they give the movie. It should be evident from the text of the review.

If I really need to try to decide whether a critic liked one movie better than another, I can just read both reviews. It just seems to me like it’s a rare instance where I should care which one the critic thinks is better. Now just think of prospects as movies and you pretty much know how I approach talking about prospects at this site.

Now, since prospect lists are so popular I should probably clarify a couple things at this point. I don’t make prospect lists because my heart’s just not in it and writing stuff you’re not into is a pretty sure way to get crappy writing. But that doesn’t mean I think people who make or enjoy prospect lists are deficient in any way.

Lists obviously serve a purpose. If you don’t want to invest the time learning about prospects, they’re a perfectly acceptable way to get an idea of the names in the system you should know. A lot of people don’t want to, or just can’t, sit down for an hour and read about prospects. They’d prefer to just be told who’s good, how good they are and maybe a little bit about why. For God’s sakes, it’s just baseball and that’s all the time I can commit to it, they might say.

That’s fine and completely understandable. But if you’re not just somebody wanting cursory knowledge of the system or somebody who just wants to know who to watch when you go to a Mud Hens or Whitecaps game… if you are willing to invest the time for a deeper knowledge of the system, what’s the point of ranking these guys? I just don’t see it and you can feel free to comment if you do.

Okay, enough talking about prospect lists in general. Let’s talk about the specific list put out by Sickels. I actually feel silly critiquing a list after having just explained why I don’t like them, so I’m not going to say much. I just have a couple problems with general concepts presented.

In a system as weak as the Tigers, I simply do not see how you can say Matt Joyce isn’t one of the best prospects. He has skills and a track record that suggest he will someday, probably relatively soon, be valuable to the major league club. There just aren’t a lot of guys in the Tiger system you can say that about confidently.

The other thing that bugged me was the mention of Noah Krol as a top prospect, but the exclusion of Erik Crichton. If you look at their 2007 seasons side by side (both pitched well in Oneonta), their draft position (three rounds apart), their ages (both were born on June 6th, but Crichton one year later) and a description of their stuff, I simply don’t understand how you can bring up one and not the other. Sure Krol is taller, but Crichton is younger and if I’m not mistaken, it was Crichton that BA said they considered including in their Top 20 of the NY-Penn League list.

Those were the two things that jumped out at me. Other than that I’d probably quibble a little over placement and grades given, but that would lead to me making a list of my own and considering the argument I just made, I’d then have to punch myself in the head.

Before I let you go, I’d just like to close this out by clarifying that Sickels does say these rankings and grades are preliminary. I have every confidence that the kinks and wrinkles will either be ironed out or rationally explained when he releases his book.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 at 11:17 pm and is filed under matt joyce, noah krol, erik crichton, Prospects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.