Over the course of the offseason, I spent a lot of my writing space doing lists of the best player at each position in each system, along with five starting pitchers and two relievers.
With those lists, I attempted to stay true to my own personal ideas, rather than simply going with the masses on everything. It makes for more arguments, perhaps, but at least it’s less vanilla. And, of course, providing an outlandish ranking will result in one of two things–either I’m wrong and I learn that I shouldn’t be so deviant in such a case, or those who initially disagreed can look back and maybe use my initial ideas to see where the eventual outcome came from.
Of course, underlying all of that is the fact that prospecting is a crazy game. Bad predictions can be proven right, and good ones can be proven wrong, because sometimes things take unexpected turns.
Anyway, after that long and overly personal setup, I’d like to discuss one of the more out-there rankings I made in those offseason writeups.
My Blue Jays writeup was a bit of a mess, actually. For one, I left Brett Lawrie out entirely. And while I thought he was overrated entering the season (which he’s since emphatically disproved), his omission was an accident–I had forgotten about the offseason trade that brought him to Toronto.
Accidental or not, that made me look pretty bad, but any remaining slack I had with reading Jays fans was definitely undone by this:
"SP1: Joel Carreno. Carreno put up some incredible numbers in High-A this past season; just a handful of pitchers could stand with him statistically. That led me to rank him the 53rd best prospect in the game:Carreno, on the other hand, lands here due mostly to his stats. You can’t just ignore a guy who whiffs 11.31 batters per nine in High-A, even if he’s 23. 173/30 K/BB ratios don’t come around often at any level, and Carreno has more “stuff” than, say, [Twins righthander Liam] Hendriks, dialing his fastball up into the 92-93 range and throwing a power slider to go with it. Double-A will be a big test for Carreno next year, as he could move into the top tier of pitching prospects if his success continues, but a [Padres righthander Simon] Castro-esque dropoff would be fairly catastrophic, as he turns 24 in March.Upside: 8.7, Downside: 5.5SP2: Deck McGuire. The Jays’ first-rounder in this year’s draft, McGuire is a four-pitch righty with above-average attributes across the board. He has yet to make his pro debut, but he was a big favorite of mine from the 2010 draft, and could settle in as a solid #2 starter, or even a staff ace if his stuff improves a bit. Having him fall to 11th overall was a bit of a steal.Upside: 8.8, Downside: 4.5SP3: Kyle Drabek. I’ve written enough about why I don’t put Drabek higher than this before, so let’s focus on what he does do well. He throws a nasty low-90’s heater with explosive movement, and a curveball that showcases slider velocity (sitting in the low-to-mid-80’s) without sacrificing any break. That’s a damn good place to start, and Drabek’s already passed the Double-A test at age 23. While his stats, particularly the K/BB, trail his stuff quite dramatically, it’s certainly possible he could fix that, particularly if Drabek’s changeup comes around. Drabek threw well in the majors late in the year despite never seeing the PCL; that improves his downside dramatically.Upside: 8.5, Downside: 6.6Yep, I ranked Joel Carreno–a guy Baseball America didn’t put in the Blue Jays’ top 30 prospects–as Toronto’s best pitching prospect, and left Drabek (often ranked as a top-20 overall prospect) off my top 100 entirely, and put him behind both Carreno and McGuire.Let’s ignore McGuire–who’s pitching solidly in High-A in his first pro season–though, and just focus on Carreno and Drabek, half a year after I wrote the above.Carreno wasn’t discussed much in prospect circles following 2010. He’s a fairly small righthander who, in 2009, put up middling results in Low-A as a 22-year-old. Scouts liked his slider, but between his underwhelming changeup and small frame, nobody–not even his own manager in High-A last year–saw Carreno as a major league starting pitcher. The thought was that maybe he could be a Michael Wuertz-esque bullpen slider specialist, but even that was a stretch.To be fair, small two-pitch righties aren’t exactly something to drool over, and Carreno’s age (23 last year) and cozy park and league made it easier to write his stats off as the product of a bunch of non-sustainable factors.Drabek was the polar opposite. Ironically, he’s about the same size as Carreno, but with him, his lack of size just made his plus stuff so much more interesting.Where the love for Drabek sort of lost me was that he, like Carreno, didn’t have too much of a changeup. Yes, Drabek has an extra tick or two on his fastball, and his power breaker is right there with Carreno’s slider, but plenty of pitchers throw 93 with a good breaking ball and don’t become aces–take James McDonald, for example.I would’ve been fine with the Drabek hype if, like Carreno, his performance indicated that his stuff played, but instead, as I said in the above quote, his results in Double-A weren’t anything to write home about. Of course, there was talk of him working on a cutter all year, so I figured he might disprove me once he mastered that pitch.Fast forward to today, July 12, 2011, and Carreno is humming along in Double-A. He’s 24 and thus a bit old for the level, but his strikeouts have stayed at the same super-elevated level, with 115 whiffs in 97 1/3 innings. He’s got some work to do on his control (49 walks), but it’s easy to see him becoming a mid-rotation starter who occasionally puts up 12 Ks in a game. Carreno’s allowed just 65 hits, and batters are hitting .189 against him.At the same time, Drabek has taken a well-publicized nosedive. He walked more batters than he struck out in the big leagues, almost completely ditched his curve in favor of the aforementioned cutter, still couldn’t develop much of a changeup, and was ultimately sent to Triple-A after fourteen sub-replacement level starts. He only managed to put the ball in the strike zone 34% of the time, which just doesn’t play, particularly since he induced chases at a below-average rate.Now, Drabek’s back in Triple-A, and he has a 7.02 ERA in four starts, as walks have continued to plague him. Yes, he’s a level above Carreno and a few months younger, but the gap between them is beginning to close.That’s not to say “I told you so!” with these players. Do I feel like I look smart(er than I initially did) for my rankings? Yeah, but I look equally bad for, say, underrating Lawrie and Anthony Rizzo, or placing Jason Knapp and Manny Banuelos in my top ten prospects.And, even though my initially concerns probably seem a bit more legitimate now, stranger things have happened than Drabek getting himself back together, learning a changeup, and coming back to dominate, or Carreno hitting a wall in Triple-A.But I think it’s undeniable that this is a case where the underlying performance indicators for these two players were excessively overlooked, which caused them to be far more separated in rankings than they should have been.I mean, in a lot of respects, they’re very similar. Both are short righthanders with low-90’s heat and a good breaking ball. One had middling results at an age-appropriate level, and the other had great results at a level he was too old for. Putting aside all the hoopla, there really shouldn’t have been that big a difference in how people viewed the two players. But Drabek had a big and well-publicized run in High-A in 2009, right when the “WILL HE BE TRADED FOR Roy Halladay?!” headlines started popping up and inflating his status to something that his subsequent statistics indicated he really didn’t deserve. The guy’s struck out 7.7 batters per nine exactly once in his half-a-decade minor league career, after all. Carreno’s struck out under that figure once.So, just as Lawrie and Rizzo showed that average low-minors stats don’t doom a prospect to an average career, Drabek might just be showing us that such a red flag still should not be entirely overlooked.Published on 07/12/2011 at 6:04 PM EDTLast updated on 07/12/2011 at 6:04 PM EDT Carreno, on the other hand, lands here due mostly to his stats. You can’t just ignore a guy who whiffs 11.31 batters per nine in High-A, even if he’s 23. 173/30 K/BB ratios don’t come around often at any level, and Carreno has more “stuff” than, say, [Twins righthander Liam] Hendriks, dialing his fastball up into the 92-93 range and throwing a power slider to go with it. Double-A will be a big test for Carreno next year, as he could move into the top tier of pitching prospects if his success continues, but a [Padres righthander Simon] Castro-esque dropoff would be fairly catastrophic, as he turns 24 in March."