I was reading over the list of the top 30 pitching prospects that Project Prospect recently released, and while I thought it was a pretty solid list, I thought they left out one very important prospect that has also failed to appear on almost every other prospect list that I've seen so far.
While a lot of young pitchers drafted in the 2007 draft have received most of the fanfare, in 2008 Jairo Heredia -- a very talented but unheralded international signee in the Yankees farm system -- made a very strong case for himself to be included in the discussion of elite young arms in baseball. Below is a list of several young pitchers that appeared on the top 30 list at Project Prospect, the ranking they received, their 2008 stats, and finally the 2008 stats for the Yankees new young stud.
Of the pitchers included in the above list, I think Bumgarner is the only one that Heredia can't currently compete with. Otherwise, he posted very competitive numbers all around at A ball, and did so at a year or 2 younger than all of the other pitchers on this list. While I can't really say that he's absolutely better than any of them, I do feel like he obviously has equivalent talent and he deserves to be mentioned along side the other pitchers. Leaving Heredia off of just about every major top 100 prospects list seems like a mistake to me, and I think we'll see him rise quickly up the ranks over the next year.
...Read more
No comments:
Post a Comment