You still may have failed.

If they were right, they are geniuses, if they are wrong, well prospects are unpredictable. What can you do? It is funny that all failures were assumed to be due to lack of development on the player’s part. The orgs and the mag have no culpability.

It’s a big reason I left BA. Who’s the third-best left fielder in the Blue Jays organization? Frankly, I don’t give a shit. I remember a cover story they did way before I got there about Bam Bam Meulens. Anyone remember that guy? (I’ve been reading BA since 1988.) Subhead on the cover said – “The Next Mickey Mantle?”

Even though the lists might seem arbitrary. BA isn’t pulling stuff out of its ass. Every year, staffers get assigned teams, they call a bunch of people in the front office, they talk to scouts and say – who’s the number 1 guy? Who’s the number 2 guy? If there’s a discrepancy, you have no choice but to finagle the list. But they do a lot of work figuring out who should go on the prospect lists. That work continues year-round in various degrees – the whole point of that magazine is prospects, and no one does more comprehensive legwork in trying to figure out who the top guys are for every team in MLB. No one. The best thing about working at BA is that you can get to know an organization (not always, but sometimes), first-hand from the owner to rookie ball – players, scouts, front offices, etc. Just about everyone in MLB grants BA people more access, even over larger publications. So there is no excuse for not being able to collect information. Anyone in the minor leagues is available to talk to over the phone to anyone on staff. The major league people are left to MLB correspondents, columnists, or whoever deals with MLB on a regular basis.

At the end of the day, though, it’s a crap shoot. You draft a guy and it may take him 5,6,7,10 years to reach MLB. Who the hell can forecast something like that? It’s impossible. Then what kind of career is he gonna have after 5,6,7,10 years in MLB? That’s an additional level of impossibility to know. Even the can’t-miss guys are a crap shoot. Look at the 2002 list – Mark Prior, best college pitcher ever (they said). Cubs are set for the next decade with him, right? Ah, no. I remember one day talking to Jim Callis about Brad Hawpe. Callis said he’d never make it, his minor league numbers were inflated because he was older than most other guys there, etc. I didn’t tell him at the time, but I thought – how the hell do you know this? You don’t, so why are you pretending you do? Brad Hawpe ended up making a nice little career for himself. Nothing stellar, but I’d sure as hell like to make $20 million for 8 years of work. The one thing I didn’t like at BA was how sure of themselves they were of all these unknown quantities. I thought there was too much looking at trees instead of forest. On the other hand, the problem with working with nothing but prospects, like I said, it’s impossible to see the forest. You have no idea who’s gonna be good years down the road. You can guess, but that’s all you can do. So you always have to keep this in mind when reading these lists. No one knows what the fuck is gonna happen. But if you put THAT message in every story, everyone would stop reading.