this is the rest of my thought verbatim.

If that turns out to be the case. And it’s more like, “Those you can’t do but have a clear picture of what they should do and how that doing should be done, they just simply lack the talent to do it, teach.”

While I cannot recall specific names at the moment (though Wayne Kirby, currently in the Indians’ organization, comes to mind), many hitting coaches in the Majors and Minors were never considered great hitters (yes, there were the Rod Carews, but just as many, if not more hitters NOT of that caliber), yet they teach others how to hit.

The reasoning I’ve heard behind it is, they weren’t able to be productive by just sticking with one method; they had to experiment with several methods and try everything to get as much talent as they could from their skills. This is why they often make better teachers, even if their playing careers weren’t especially noteworthy.

Conversely, with all due respect to Eddie Murray, just because you have a great career doesn’t automatically make you a good teacher; Murray was mentioned on a few occasions as having trouble connecting with some of his hitters on teaching instruction, and as we know, his offensive results while being the Indians’ hitting coach were mixed (though how much can be attributed to him directly, positively or negatively, is debatable), yet he was one of the best hitters in the history of the Major Leagues, and a major reason why he is now in the Hall of Fame.

Therefore, it wouldn’t surprise me, based on Sowers’ ability to think through the process and experience the difficulties he has experienced, if Sowers became a solid pitching coach one day, at either the Minor or even the Major League level.

A pitching coach who comes to mind who mostly gets solid reviews, yet was never a GREAT pitcher, was LHP Bud Black – I know many reports when he was with the Angels gave him rave reviews on how he handled the pitching staff and got them to execute their games, but Black himself as a pitcher was never a GREAT pitcher. A solid pitcher, certainly, but not a GREAT pitcher that deserves to be in the Hall of Fame.

Therefore, you don’t have to play (bat or pitch) great to be a solid, good, or even great coach at the same skill, especially since it’s about the process of getting the most talent out of your skills that coaches help players do, not just the end process itself. Those players that have to try several methods to get the most out of their skills seem to often make better hitting/pitching coaches than the stars whose natural ability was displayed on the field easily by just utilizing one method because most players have to work at finding the method that works best for them to help refine and display their natural ability consistently, and that often means trying many methods to see what works best for them. A hitting/pitching coach that has gone through that process is often better at showing a young player how to do that than a hitting/pitching coach that only employed one method to achieve great success.

Just my 2 cents.

I assume what is meant by ceiling is something like a 90º (maybe 95º?) projection or so. That is, the top of the range of outcomes that don’t have a crazy-small probability of occurring.

The more information you get about a player — generally the longer he’s played and the more levels he’s played at — the narrower the range of likely outcomes becomes, because the less uncertainty you have about him. For any given player, the entire range could shift up or down as well, but when you’re aggregating over an entire group of players, the middles should stay about the same on average, and the main change should be in the ranges.

Now, I suppose if you really mean the entire AA and AAA rosters, you also have to take into account the fact that some of the AAers will never make it to AAA, and so their middle is actually lower, but I assume we’re talking about prospects here, and not all minor leaguers, in which group the attrition from AA to AAA is likely to be pretty small.

I’d be curious to hear your input when you’ve had a chance to mull it over.