Synchronicity. I recently caught an interview with Alex Anthopoulos where he was talking about young talent. He challenged the interviewers to examine any of the Top 100 baseball talent lists over the past 10-15 years and consider how few of those players - even the highly touted prospects - make it to the majors and how far fewer perform up to the levels projected.
Baseball talent evaluation, like any evaluation of human performance in any setting, is a knotty exercise - even within a season as you point. Corbin Carroll's regression this season is an additional warning of how long establishment of a stable performance trend takes and the perils of too early declarations of success. Consequently, acquisition strategies remain exceedingly fluid. High school versus college, age versus development, scouting versus data, traits versus production, pitchers versus everyday players, positional value versus best player available, etc.
The scarcity of high-performance talent is a key reason most rosters are typically comprised of a small number of high impact players with a much larger number of fungible players who can be churned in search of incremental gains each year.
As for the future, Anthopoulos' comments strongly suggest that the recent media infatuation with adding Draft picks to trade deadline deals is likely to be of little tangible value outside of additional content for providers and media outlets and those ever so popular but specious "report cards."
Synchronicity. I recently caught an interview with Alex Anthopoulos where he was talking about young talent. He challenged the interviewers to examine any of the Top 100 baseball talent lists over the past 10-15 years and consider how few of those players - even the highly touted prospects - make it to the majors and how far fewer perform up to the levels projected.
Baseball talent evaluation, like any evaluation of human performance in any setting, is a knotty exercise - even within a season as you point. Corbin Carroll's regression this season is an additional warning of how long establishment of a stable performance trend takes and the perils of too early declarations of success. Consequently, acquisition strategies remain exceedingly fluid. High school versus college, age versus development, scouting versus data, traits versus production, pitchers versus everyday players, positional value versus best player available, etc.
The scarcity of high-performance talent is a key reason most rosters are typically comprised of a small number of high impact players with a much larger number of fungible players who can be churned in search of incremental gains each year.
As for the future, Anthopoulos' comments strongly suggest that the recent media infatuation with adding Draft picks to trade deadline deals is likely to be of little tangible value outside of additional content for providers and media outlets and those ever so popular but specious "report cards."