The Post-Prospects: Pitcher Edition

Sizing up the guys who have left our rankings pool for good

Photo Credit: Richmond Flying Squirrels

As is often noted around here, there’s a certain level of artificiality built into writing about “prospects.” To the degree that everybody in the game is developing all the time — and can take surprising development turns at any point in their careers — the idea that “everyone is a prospect,” as Baseball Prospectus’ Editor-in-Chief, Craig Goldstein, likes to say, is 100% true. As Giants’ fans, we had the pleasure of watching Brandon Crawford play out nearly all of his 14-year-career, and it’s worth pondering at what point in that 14 years was he not a player in development, and a player with prospects for change ahead of him?

So, yes, there’s nothing so particularly meaningful about being a “prospect” or not — and for clubs, the distinction is especially meaningless. Having young talent is important! Whether or not that young talent is rookie eligible almost never is (with the exception of players who qualify for Prospect Promotion Incentives in the new CBA, but that’s a topic for a different day). The situations of Casey Schmitt or Luis Matos aren’t so different today than they were two years ago — both are still seeking to establish themselves as major leaguers (though at their backs, they might well hear, time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near). But once they’ve crossed over that invisible, artificial line of our devising, “prospectdom,” we tend to shove them over to the side, and write and think about them differently. It’s not really fair, and it’s not really an accurate depiction of the player development world, which cares not for such things.

Still, as historians like to say, you have to bound your area of expertise somehow, and definitions of “prospect” and “post-prospect” is how we do it in this little corner of the world. So, today, we take a last look at the post-prospects. First up, it’s the pitchers who will be disappearing from our Top 50 ranks this winter. These players have exhausted their rookie eligibility, but, for many of them, their futures are still far from clear. Hey, that’s something that we all have in common with these guys. Maybe we’re all prospects, too!