well, the comment below me states that BA has rated him highly.

I’m not sure how objective Atkins is either, but he probably knows what he’s talking about. Mills was supposed to get some looks at 3rd this year, so he either sucked so bad that they pulled plug on that project or they wanted someone else to play there. If his arm were strong enough I’m pretty sure he would still be at the hot corner

Hello Jay,

I had not seen that, but I know that many have concerns about Weglarz’s defense in the OF (LF specifically), so unless Mills is a total butcher over at 1B, he probably is at least equal, if not slightly ahead of Weglarz defensively, especially since Mills was a decent 3B at one time. Weglarz’s primary defensive position was 1B in HS, and 1B does not have the same level of difficulty or value as 3B does, so that still leads me to think that Mills has a bit of an edge on Weglarz defensively, especially at this point.

Just my 2 cents – no offense.

Butbutbut.. he pitched a no-hitter that one time! And I’m sure ESPN has devoted far more airtime to Buchholz this year than it has to Sowers, thus he’s better, qed.

I remember people trashing Lester all winter about he was all Boston hype, too. Iif you’re tired of hearing the hype on espn, don’t watch it. It really is that simple.

Homer Bailey is an example of the Cincinatti hype machine.

Thanks for clarifying – somehow, I forgot him – duh!

Seriously though, he’s had a lot to go through, and that was before getting “beaned” on the head, so I’ll give him a pass for the rest of this season. Let him come back strong in either the AFL (if he’s sent there) and/or in 2009.

Just my 2 cents – no offense.

you always put things so delicately

Alright, I was dead wrong on the ages. Pure laziness on my part. I’ll admit that. And that completely alters my take on Weglarz, so you can pretty much throw away any comparison I made of the two.

I never said that a 19 year old stud would probably collapse. I don’t think I ever inferred that, either, though it might have been a consequence you pulled from my reasoning. I was a bit hurried when I wrote that post, so let me clear it up, with the disclaimer that I’m not a baseball talent evaluator:

My point is this. You have two guys at, say, AA Akron. One of them is in a level appropriate to his age at 23 and is OPSing .900, while the other one is an extremely raw 19 year old phenom who is OPSing .830 (this is a gross oversimplification). Now, I certainly would agree that in terms of player ceiling, the 19 year old has the edge. They’re both great hitters, probably, but putting up a .830 OPS at age 19 in AA is especially exciting, because you can figure that the 19 year old has a few more years to develop physically, and will benefit from the coordination, bat speed, etc. that will come with that development.

On the flip side, while the 23 year old has less room to grow and develop, he more closely resembles the player that he’s likely to become. A lot of things can go wrong in the three or four years it takes the 19 year old to physically develop: maybe he gets hurt (of course, that’s the biggie), but maybe he does just develop in a way that nobody predicted—say, he gets too big to play a position in the field, or he just develops a weird Marte-like screwed up swing, due to whatever physiological reason, or he proves to be too immature to handle the mental demands of the game, or whatever. You get the drift. I think even someone who disagrees with me on this would admit that it’s much easier to predict what kind of player a 23 year old in AA will become than it is to predict what kind of hitter a 19 year old at the same. Marte is an egregious example, but I think that there are plenty of other guys in our system who have illustrated this.

So say the 23 year old’s ceiling is, oh hell, becoming a .900 OPS hitter in the bigs, while the 19 year old’s ceiling is being the next coming of Albert Pujols, a 1.025 OPS hitter. However, the while the probability of the 23 year old reaching that ceiling and not having his career derailed because of injury or any other unexpected factor is 0.75, while the 19 year old, being a bit further away from that ceiling with a longer road to travel and a higher degree of uncertainty involved, is around 0.65. So one might say that the “expected value” of the 23 year old is (.900) x (0.75) = .675, while the “expected value” of the 19 year old is (1.025) x (0.65) = 0.666 (of course, these final numbers don’t really mean all that much—they’re just a way of thinking about the problem).

I never said that, because someone is nineteen, that they’re “probably going to collapse”. What I said was that there is a higher degree of uncertainty, and therefore the probability that they will stumble and not live up to expectations somewhere along the road is higher than that of the polished, if less talented, 23 year old.

I guess I’m not following you on this. You say that, if you have two equally talented hitters and one is three years younger, than the younger one almost certainly has a higher ceiling (agree totally) and has a higher probability of getting there (I do not agree, at least not unconditionally).