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Originally Posted by M2
Excellent points Steel.
I was really impressed by John Sickels going back to review how his top prospects projections panned out. BA's greatest fault is that it never audits itself. It takes no responsibility for its bad projections or investigates what caused those bad projections in the hopes of avoiding similar ones in the future.
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Sickels impresses me as well. The very fact that he's willing to have a mock amateur draft with us dumb fans is a real big deal to me. Rather than being stand-offish, Sickels is engaging and introspective. More than anything else, that allows him to not spend half his time trying to figure out how to excuse away his misses.
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But I came to the conclusion a number of years back that what it's doing isn't trying to determine who the actual best prospects in a system are. It's publishing the values of baseball's futures market. What BA just told us isn't that Homer Bailey is the Reds' best prospect. It told us that he's the Reds' most valuable prospect.
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Oh, no doubt. I just wish they'd use this disclaimer:
"Baseball America does not specialize in ranking prospects based on probability. That is, we have no idea whether any of the players on our lists will ever manifest their skills in a way that would allow them to actually hit, play defense, or acquire Outs for their MLB ballclub in the future. We do, however, like their physical tools and think they look hot in jeans."
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Guys who seem overvalued like Szymanski, Perez and Pelland probably are the prospects the Reds should be looking to put into deals this winter.
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There will always be a market for players whose tools outweigh their baseball skill because there are always going to be some number of teams who value the potential of tools over the projectibility of performance. Unfortunately, the current Reds front office makes them one of those teams.