… aaaaaand shall we agree to never speak of Jeff Keppinger, again? I think so.
Right now, all of Bay City Ball’s authors are preparing to hash out the prospect list for 2012. I’m very excited about this, especially as we now have a writer who actually watches a lot of minor league games. That should lead to an interesting shift in perspective.
To get warmed up, I thought it would be useful to take a quick look at how we did last year.
| Bay City Ball’s 2011 Top 15 SF Giants Prospect List | |
| Rank | Name |
| 1 | Brandon Belt |
| 2 | Zack Wheeler |
| 3 | Gary Brown |
| 4 | Francisco Peguero |
| 5 | Thomas Neal |
| 6 | Jarrett Parker |
| 7 | Tommy Joseph |
| 8 | Ehire Adrianza |
| 9 | Jorge Bucardo |
| 10 | Eric Surkamp |
| 11 | Brandon Crawford |
| 12 | Hector Sanchez |
| 13 | Jose Casilla |
| 14 | Mike Kickham |
| 15 | Charlie Culberson |
Guys Who Played Above Their Ranking: Joseph, Sanchez, Surkamp, Brown.
Guys Who Played Below Their Ranking: Parker, Neal, Culberson.
Pitchers Dun Got Hurt: Casilla, Bucardo.
Self-Backpatting – Chris really pushed for Tommy Joseph, who had a nice season at the plate and improved his probability of sticking at catcher. I was big on Hector Sanchez, who was also having a good, if very weird, season before the Giants began moving him around every two weeks. We may have overrated Culberson, but we didn’t overrate him as much as many other people. This isn’t our first time at the Cal League breakout rodeo. We also ranked Surkamp pretty aggressively, and I think he’s already beat even our expectations.
Self-Faceslapping – There’s no ranking on here that I think was unjustified. Parker was our biggest non-injury whiff, and he still remains the kind of high potential, high probability of bust player that will do that to you. Leaving Brett Pill off of the list was perfectly defendable. He was about to turn 26 after a pretty mediocre PCL season. Still, Brett Pill had 53 useful plate appearances for a big league team, which is 53 more than I would have thought. Kudos to him for that. We were also a little down on Brandon Crawford, and I wouldn’t classify his time in the big leagues as total disaster. In fact, our chief worry with Crawford was the strikeouts, and he only struck out in 14.1% of his plate appearances (compared to 22.5% in the minors). I’m not terribly optimistic about either Crawford or Pill going forward, but so far they’ve done better than I thought they would have .
Overall, I’m pretty pleased with the list. I think we had more surprise hits than unjustifiable misses. But as always, the point is more to learn and think about the way players develop than to have the perfect set of numbers next to the perfect set of names.
