Baseball Prospectus' Top 11 Boston Red Sox Prospects

by faketeams on Nov 6, 2007 1:20 PM EST in Baseball Comment 6 comments

Baseball Prospectus' Kevin Goldstein has his Top 11 Boston Red Sox Prospects up. There is no surprise with the top two players, but sinkerballer Justin Materson at #3 may be more eyebrow raising. He struck out 115 in 153.2 innings of work between AA and AAA. That is not the ratio I normally associate with major league success

However, I suspect the high-profile success of the Yankees' Chien-Ming Wang and the Indians Fausto Carmona has made the groundball-inducing pitching prospect a more attractive option for long-term success.

I do wonder if this is the discovery of a new market inefficiency or a mistake of using the success of a non-representative sample to make an incorrect valuation.

RK	PLAYER	POS
1	Clay Buchholz	RHP
2	Jacoby Ellsbury	CF
3	Justin Masterson	RHP
4	Jed Lowrie	SS
5	Ryan Kalish	OF
6	Michael Bowden	RHP
7	Lars Anderson	1B
8	Nick Hagadone	RHP
9	Oscar Tejeda	SS
10	Josh Reddick	OF
11	Che-Husan Lin	OF

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Hmmmm.

I don't think this is necessarily a bad list, bu there are some philosphical differences I have with Goldstein on just what makes a "4 star prospect". To me, Justin Masterson is not one of the Top 75 prospects in the game, and with the 4 star ranking he gave him, that puts him in the top 75-80 range. I do like Lowrie a lot, and think that the Sox will call him up in 2008 at some point if they can unload Lugo because he has enough arm strength to handle SS and had a solid breakout year in 2007, with a statline between AA and AAA that resembled this:
.298 AVG
13 HR
47 doubles
.392 OBP
.502 SLG

He doesn't have any speed to speak of, probably ranking as a 55 on the 20-80 scale, but he gets on base a ton and gives the Sox some options as another player who was brought up through the system and is ready to contribute.

Back to the article, however, I think Lars Anderson is too low here, and still believe him to be the best 1b prospect in the Sox system.

My list would probably look like this:
Buchholz
Ellsbury
Lowrie
Masterson
Anderson
Bowden
Hagadone
Craig Hansen
Ryan Kalish
Ryan Dent

by thomasps3 on Nov 6, 2007 2:48 PM EST reply actions 0 recs