Oh, one more thing.
Continuing from yesterday. Once again, here are all the Rangers who have made the Baseball Prospectus Top 101 prospects since they started ranking them in 2007.
This will, again, point out how inexact of a science the baseball draft is, and the business of grading prospects is. These picks were made by a publication and by writers who specialize in this sort of thing. This is their bread and butter. Their reputation, and revenue, are on the line.
So how did they do?
Taking a look at the Ranger evaluated over the 13 seasons, which coincidentally coincides with Jon Daniels’s tenure as the Rangers general manager, thirty-six different Rangers prospects made the Baseball Prospectus Top 101 list.
Eleven of those thirty-six players you can honestly say paid off in one form or another and were accurately diagnosed: Volquez, Feliz, Andrus, Davis, Smoak, Holland, Ramirez, Odor, Gallo, Mazara, and Guzman. This doesn’t mean they were or are going to be superstars, or even perennial all-stars. It’s just that, you can say each of these eleven had or are having a degree of success as a major league player.
Thirteen of those thirty-six were busts, either never panned out at all, or never developed into competent major leaguers: Hurley, Beltre, Main, Teagarden, Perez, Scheppers, Olt, Sardinas, Gonzalez, Choice, Jake Thompson, Tate, and Ortiz.
That leaves twelve of the players the jury is still out on, either they haven’t been in professional baseball long enough to be called up, or they have been called up but it’s still too early to call which way their careers will go. They are: Profar, Alfaro, Brinson, Williams, Mendez, Jurado, Traveras, Tejada, Calhoun, Matuella, Martinez, and Bubba Thompson. If the above percentages hold true, that means more than half of the twelve players that the jury is still out will never pan out. The other half will.
They can rank them all day. But more often than not they never materialize.
Baseball is hard.