Mets Community Prospect List 2010: #13

Rob and Acer. I have likewise been voting ratliff fior a few polls now.

The above may make some of the secondary ratios seem less important than they are. All it really means is walk rates ALONE aren’t a strong predictor. Used in conjunction with age and production, they are very valuable.

Consider what causes these correlations. In A+ or AA, there will be very few young players, under 21. Suppose there is a small number of top prospects that age, who get advanced quickly, put up poor numbers initially (slug around .350 for example) then later go on to break out as top guys. How does this affect correlations? Well, there’s a small number of these players, but they will be large percentage of players under 21, so age will have a strong correlation. And they make a small portion of players who slug .350, so it probably doesn’t hurt correlations for slugging too much. There are enough older players with high slugging who succeed to offset them. They have a little more effect on walk rates. Many (most) of those teenagers who go on to succeed have poor walk rates. There are also many more older non-prospects with good walk rates, then there are non-prospects with good slugging.

This doesn’t mean that walk rate isn’t a critical separator if you confine it to older players in upper levels who are showing adequate power. But whether the rate is age/experience appropriate is critical.

Some of these things would look different if looking at lower levels. With more younger players, you might find that xbh rate becomes more useful (more doubles later turn into HR), and that BB rate becomes less useful, etc.

i put him above vaughn because they both had great seasons but Ratliff was at AA all season and vaughn was in short season. but i was just really impressed with cohoon’s season. i mean, he dominated savannah for the first half of the year then got bumped to AA and (predictably) struggled at first but adjusted and was very good again at the end.

“Fell out of love with baseball.” I’m not sure that accurately captures what happened: the guy refused to answer the team’s calls. Not so much as a breakup text. For a long time no on knew where he was. It was a total Ray Finkel situation.