Aspire, we've seen -- at least in the case of the Rockies -- that what I labeled the HF ProspectBot does a remarkably good job of generating prospect ratings that are nearly identical to what the so-called experts come up with.
So there's really only two rational responses to this phenomenon:
1. All prospect ratings are pretty much crapshoots. They may be fun to look at, but ultimately they do not provide terribly useful information.
2. A totally stats-based system can, in fact, be just as useful as a system based on some unspecified mix of stats and scouting (refuting KG's statement); after all, the ProspectBot can pretty much mirror the findings of the other "systems."
I happen to think that response (2) appears to be pretty obviously correct, and that there's some truth to response (1) as well.
As for the Weathers thing: it tells us two things. First, that the ProspectBot can't account for college careers, at least not yet. So the other ratings (BA/Sickels/KG) are probably based on simply finding a reasonable slot in which to add a very high draft pick. Second -- as HF says -- it tells us that the standard prospect rankings really don't look toward any kind of projection of cumulative MLB WARP or any such thing. HF's point isn't that Weathers is a poorer "closer" prospect than Fowler is a "CF" prospect; rather, it's that a guy who can only be expected to throw 70 innings or so per year is almost never as valuable as a guy who gets 600+ PAs and 150+ games in the field. Goldstein must have a reason for ranking Weathers higher, and I suspect it is his overall "gut" feeling that a good closer is really important and that Weathers has a better chance of being a stud closer than Fowler has of being a stud CFer. Maybe that's true, but he should at least recognize the relative value of a FT position player vis-a-vis a short relief man. And he doesn't.
|