Do I have your attention? Let’s talk about Tyler O’Neill. Let me rephrase. Let’s talk about why Tyler O’Neill is going to be the best home-grown outfielder Safeco Field has seen since Junior left. After seeing him at FanFest today, it seems clear that there may be seasons in which he has more dingers than he does words spoken in public, but he came off very well and he and his bulging neck vein (seriously, he should get that thing looked at) will look to prove he deserves his #36 prospect ranking and then some.

Tyler O’Neill made a gigantic jump forward in 2016. Here’s a quick look at his hitting line over the last two years--remember, this is comparing A+ in 2015 to AA in 2016:

Any one of these changes would be exciting in isolation; take them all together and a high strikeout, fringey looking guy is suddenly a top 50 prospect whom Jonathan Mayo of MLB.com described on twitter as a "freak of nature" (in the fun, name-your-firstborn-Tyler kind of way, not the "why am I thinking about buying a game-used Chone Figgins jersey at FanFest as a novelty" kind of way.) So this made me wonder: how common is this, and what do guys who do this end up doing? Here’s a list of the top 14 positional prospects in 2010 (top 14 because 14 of the top 20 were hitters), combined with their single best year-over-year minor-league change--all data thanks to Fangraphs, the prospect list thanks to Baseball America:

Try to ignore how many of the failures on this list did it as Mariners. Just admire how great we were at acquiring top 20 prospects! There are a few good takeaways here. The biggest one is that every single success on this list, save the unfathomably weird Buster Posey, had a season that was an unqualified step up (a) in each of these categories (or at least was neutral in one and positive in the other two) (b) while moving up a level. Look at this:

"But wait!" says the reader, "Sample size!" Here, I admit, you have me. This is 14 prospects in one season, and only three of them really did what Tyler O’Neill did in 2016. Pulling this information out of prospect pages is an extremely time-intensive task, and out of the cascades of baseball prospects it truly is easy to pick out a few good or bad examples to drive home your preferred point. But even if you limit yourself to the top 20 prospects--really only taking the cream of the crop, the "can’t-miss" (lol) guys--this always, always, ALWAYS holds. It would be tedious and boring to run through this fully over and over again, so let’s just look at another year: 2012, which had a fantastic list of top 20 prospects:

In the data I’ve given, Jurickson Profar is the only player I’ve identified who matched this pattern and did not turn into a bonafide star. Two things about Jurickson Profar: (1) we don’t really know what he is yet, since he’s barely been able to crack the Texas lineup, and (2) he did this in 2010/11 at A-/A while aged 17 and 18--the lowest level and youngest age of anyone I looked at who did it.

No one has a foolproof method for identifying which prospects will be stars; that, or my mind has erased the memory of Dustin Ackley and Justin Smoak hoisting the Commissioner’s Trophy. The consistency of this pattern, though, is disconcerting--I searched through lists of failed prospects and still couldn’t break it. Fangraphs’ minor league records only date back through 2006, so I can only look so far, but it remains striking.

Of course, this fanpost is idiotically obvious. Players who make a major step forward in the minors are way better than those who don’t? Say it ain’t so! At this moment in Mariners history, though, it’s fun to note that Tyler O’Neill just joined a club whose members include Bryce Harper, Mike Trout, Manny Machado, and Giancarlo Stanton--and no failures. It also tends to explain why in all the turmoil of the 2016-17 offseason, Tyler O’Neill has been a constant rock of sinewy neck muscle. He’s going to absolutely murder baseballs in Seattle.