sickels, and prospect rankers in general, tend to be wildly disinterested in relief pitchers. most of the time this is justified but there are exceptions which i personally feel are fairly easy to spot which tend to not get spotted anyway. no one really puts in the effort to do RP prospects. every year a couple of guys get the Blue Chip Stamp of Approval from some secret committee - addison reed was last year's primary example. but everyone else is pretty well ignored.
for example last winter i asked sickels why strop wasn't anywhere in his orioles top 20 (even though strop had some september success in the majors, and some A-ball guys who projected as relievers did make the list) and he said he'd just forgotten about him. to his credit he frankly admitted this instead of getting defensive or making up some weird reason the ranking was actually correct. but it goes to show how dicey even the best rankings can get when you reach the RP quadrant. there are so many guys, and they're so unpredictable, it would take significant time and energy to actually survey the field properly, and the payoff would be small because even if you assess them correctly a bunch of them will change on you by tomorrow (as we see even among our fickle friends the major league relievers). so no one really does the legwork and they languish as a permanent afterthought in prospecting.
guys seem to have a particular knack for falling through the cracks when they're in the position pryor and capps are right now, or wilhelmsen and strop were a year ago - maybe 10 innings in the majors, maybe 35, you've kind of seen what they can do but they're not established as anything quite yet. at this point the fans of their own team all know them, and if they're as good as the four guys named it's hard to argue that they're not worthy of an org top 10 slot, since they're almost definitely going to produce some kind of major league value at that point, compare to the 17th OF with good power but questionable plate approach down in A-ball. but there doesn't really seem to be any national source willing to make the effort to survey all 30 teams and register those guys across the board and compare them to each other. i've been tempted to do it myself but i'm trying to spend less time thinking about baseball in general for some dumb reason of my own
Finding the Tenth
Needin' a name to go with Sickels' nine
John Sickels has four Mariners arms in his baseball-wide top 50 pitching prospects:
- Danny Hultzen, a Cole Hamels wannabe whose control hiccups were 50% a function of the fact that 90% of the PCL'ers never wanted to swing at his pitches and 10% of them never wanted to call them strikes
- James Paxton, the personal darling of SSI
- Taijuan Walker, the almost-Felix
- Victor Sanchez, who at 12 years of age could hit 90 MPH and who at 17 years of age just had an Erasmo Ramirez season
He has three Mariners bats in the top 50 bats:
- Zuumball, who is amused at the simplicity of this game
- Nick Franklin, raking PCL righties at age 21
- Brad Miller, power-hitting shortstop whose minors OBP (OBP, now) is over .400
Sickels has two other guys on the cusps of his top fifties:
- Stefen Romero, which see long series at SSI
- Brandon Maurer, longtime G-Money and Lonnie heart-throb
John Sickels doesn't have golden plates he usim' and thummim' but on the other hand, LrKrBoi29 isn't going to accuse him of being a Mariners homer. That saves us several months' worth of spitting matches over hometown bias. The above nine prospects are radar-loved, behind enemy lines.
This leaves us needing a single extra top-100-worthy M's spect in order to field a ferocious Org Top Ten comprised exclusively of blue-chip hotshots. Carter Capps has only 25 innings in the bigs. Bingo. Move him to the rotation and tell me he isn't better than at least one of the Big Three... hey, even as a reliever the guy might be 100-worthy.
... ah, that'd be too easy. If you were going to do that, Stephen Pryor also has only 20-some innings in the bigs. There y'go amig-O ... 11 prospects, any of whom might have been #2 or #3 at least in some other Mariners org list. By "some other" we mean "most other" lists. By "most other" we mean "pretty much any" org list before Zduriencik.
(Why WERE Capps and Pryor left off Sickels' lists? Somebody clue me.)
We axed G-Moneyball who he'd slot as The Tenth. He e-mailed back a yellow sticky list with the following names: Tyler Pike, Patrick Kivlehan, Julio Morban, Timmy Lopes, and Ji-Man Choi. He warned that, come the All-Star Break next season, Lopes or Pike or Kivlehan might be in baseball's top 50... he didn't toss Choi's name into that offhand list, so that's who Dr. D started with.
Whatever Zduriencik's makin' it ain't enough.
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