The Fayetteville lineup should have a lot of upside next season. Gilbert, Melton, Clifford, Whitaker, and all the 2022 later round picks who have higher than normal upside (namely Dezenzo and Price).
Do you think Miguel Ullola will start the season at Corpus? Only 20 years old, 15 SO/9, low hits allowed. He is an exciting prospect. If he can cut down those walks....wow.
Brown was top 100 for the last few years, Pena snuck in too before this year. I agree with the general sentiment that most top 100 lists are just darts at the board or hype trains for the big market teams after #20.
IMHO, no. That's not the Astros' MO to skip HiA. Javier, Valdez, Urquidy and Garcia all got at least 60IP at HiA. The Stros are much more likely to have prospects skip the higher levels if they're ready/needed. Javier only got 11IP at AAA. Garcia skipped both AA and AAA. Valdez only had 8.2IP at AAA before his first call-up. The biggest determinant for top 100 lists is usually prior hype. I.e high round draftees and big bonus IFA's. Even pop-up prospects like Pena and Brown were mid-round prospects. Low round picks and/or low-bonus IFAs rarely pop-up on the lists because prospectors don't like to go out on a limb and differ from prior scouting reports too much and/or the prospects don't stick in the minors long enough to get a thorough scouting re-evaluation (e.g. Altuve).
Baseball Prospectus had Jeremy Pena all the way up to 16 prior to the season. I believe that this might be the year though that these lists just start grading Houston prospects on a curve, especially Latin American pitchers. For this reason, I believe that Ullola may be able to sneak into some lists mid season. Maybe not just Houston guys on a curve, but they now have some examples and analytics to go by of what Javier and Garcia perhaps did in the minors that made them ultimately be guys that should have made top 100 lists and what they do that separates them from the guys like Kolek and He ry Owens and such that were making these lists but never succeeded. Just like baseball in general has gone completely analytical, it only makes sense that prospect rating sites would figure it out better as we go along here.
While I agree with the facts mostly, I disagree with the tone. Hype just another word for appeal to authority or prior performance. Players get drafted high/ get large bonuses because teams thought their prior performance was great. It should take a lot of sample size to adjust a prospect's ranking. Teams have more access to the players and should be able to make decisions more quickly. My biggest problem with prospect lists in the public are they don't appear to use stats enough for guys in AA and AAA. Their reluctance to change upper level prospects who are dominating AA and/or AAA can be baffling as projections shouldn't be able to detect a likely good/great player first (i.e., the sample size of great performance in the upper levels is big enough to adjust the ranking). For example, Pena was projected to be a 2.3 WAR SS by Steamer, but wasn't in every top 100 prior to last season. Though, some stats/projections (e.g. Steamer) for last year's data were messed up because of the changing run environment in the majors.
For the most part your points are reasonable. However minor league stats are ( for the most part) a terrible way to evaluate prospects. As you point out AA and AAA are much better than A which should not even really have stats ( just an exaggeration I know they need stats) but there are so many variables between locations and leagues and many times players are working on specific things rather than just playing baseball. All of these things alter stats and make them imperfect at best for evaluating talent.
Not sure what point you're making with that last comment. Lol, there's an inherent shittiness to public prospect rankings. If they were actually that good, they wouldn't be public. The above post touches on it, but I'm not sure dominating AA/AAA is that much more predictive than dominating low-A depending on the player/league/age-relative to league/etc... The numbers don't necessarily explain why someone is good or whether they will continue to be good at the ML level: e.g. Seth Beer and AJ Reed. The scouting report holds up most of the time.
