Not how he’d do it now.

I doubt most people successfully nail it though.

After that it’s a big mess. I don’t know where I’d slot most guys. Raben, as I’ve said on multiple occasions now, can’t hit LHP for shit, and Poythress got home runs in a lot of cheap places, this past night excluded.

I’d put Chavez in the top ten I think. I’d probably put Liddi in there too, and Lueke. Robles, probably, and Paxton if/when he signs.

I probably shouldn’t even be thinking about this as my mind’s too muddled to even really remember who all we have at the moment.

No one’s ever looked at him and seen anything better than average power at best.

A few years ago, maybe. But now whenever Goldstein goes gaga over some toolsy teenybopper, he’s usually met with “there goes Goldsteing acting all prospect pedo again” derision.

I’m pretty sure he was above-average. Same with Paredes now. But if you’re talking strictly starters, that’s another matter.

fuck that I give my self a W+, because my self awareness is so off the charts it jumps from A and starts going through the letters all over again.

Someone brought beer to lab today.

He’s been 2/3 at first, 1/3 at catcher, where he’s been not horrible (45% CS!)

His defense isn’t bad though. He’s played center a couple of times, though I wouldn’t exactly peg him as an above-average corner OF.

Tenbrink isn’t a good defensive third baseman. The tools are all there but the results are inconsistent. One play he’s Brooks Robinson and the next he’s Tui.

The only reason I did was because the guy was the pilot of the original Mike Wilson bandwagon way back in 2006 when he was trying to convince me and everyone else that he was way better than Balentien.

The good that came out of it is that I managed to develop a stock answer that I’m just going to copy and paste from here on out whenever it comes up. Before anyone asks for it…

I don’t know how the org views him, aside from they’ve put him on the 40-man before. It’s a unique situation because the M’s have been able slot in bullpen arms that are quad-A types for lack of better options, but their outfield is considered to be fairly set. It’s also hard to just say “oh, he’ll DH” because there’s still Smoak and Branyan to consider.

What I would say is that the M’s are looking at an offseason where a number of prospects are going to need to be added. Most of the international prospects we have save Triunfel need to be added. Liddi, Pineda, Robles, Peguero if he actually interests anyone, Johermyn Chavez, and probably Cleto, along with domestic acquisitions like Lueke, Lawson, Dunigan, Mangini, and Hill.

In order for Wilson to keep a spot they’d have to believe his short-term contribution outweighs their long-term contributions. I’d say that one likely scenario would be that he picks up some starts and has a small opportunity to prove himself before the M’s make their final decision on him. At this point, it’s been more or less established that he can hit and walk, but his ability to stay healthy (quad injuries) and age work against him to the point where I’d say he’s in the wrong org with all these other guys needing to be added. I think he’ll end up in the major leagues yet. With us? I’m not so confident.

Liddi’s skills appear to just not be as good. When you talk about the top 10 performances in MWL as a teenager, Franklin is certainly in there.

The first, of course, is that a guy who has played a position for all of four months after not being on the middle infield since high school is not only terrible defensively, but will never show anything more than what he is showing at present even with practice.

Secondly, as a corollary to that, is that the scenario he presents, worst-case as it is, overlooks or discards the notion that Ackley, with his decent footspeed and good instincts, could also conceivably make a good defensive CF if he didn’t work out at second. But I’m guessing that same suggestion would be dismissed as either taking too much time or with the earlier “he’s bad now, why would he ever get better?” rhetoric.

A third point that I’d make is one that I guess Dave and I have both honed in on lately. Dave points to the precedents of Jeter/Roberts/Erstad and cites other examples with the claim that good OBP bats often hit for more power down the road. I’ve gone another rout and pointed out that Ackley didn’t start to hit for power until his third year in college, losing nothing from his average in the process, and proposed that he could be one of those wiry hitters who manages more power than one would immediately think given their build because the bat control is so damned good, and he’ll start turning on pitches when he’s good and ready. That’s probably a point we’ll have to keep pushing in order to keep expectations realistic.

Anyway, guys like that are part of why I stopped hanging around Sickels’ blog years ago. It’s weird to me because you have a large subset of people there who know enough to recognize certain names that most baseball fans wouldn’t even know, bu by and large they still tend to make crazy and uninformed decisions about them (i.e., Tyson Gillies is the number two prospect in the system)