By David Groveman December 14, 2020
Perhaps no one in the Mets360 family feels more strained for baseball than the Minor League baseball guy. While the Mets have drafted, scouted and seen some key players successfully ascend to the majors (Andres Gimenez) we have so little to base our 2021 projections on, since we’re starved for the statistical reporting that most of that analysis is based on.
Still, we press on and look to the future with what scouting we can glean and the dusty statistical analysis of 2019. Sites like Metsblog.com and MLB.com have posted their opinions on who belongs in the Mets Top 20 Prospects but I want the Mets360 opinion, and for that I turn to Brian Joura. Brian and I have been providing an offseason Top 50 prospects list for years and I was hoping we could at least compare notes on where we, and the baseball world, see the state of the Met’s Top 20 going into the 2021 season.
David: Starting things off, Brian, what do you see as the biggest issue with updating our rankings after a “lost” minor league season?
Brian: In ordinary times it’s extremely difficult to make these types of lists. Now, it’s more foolish than ever to think you can come up with an accurate ranking. Does an older guy, like Harol Gonzalez, have less of an issue with missing a year than a raw young guy, like Blaine McIntosh? Does a guy who spent time at the alternate site, like Luis Carpio, have a leg up on Shervyen Newton, who didn’t? And what about the 2020 draftees? Does it hurt them more or less than the 2019 guys?
On top of all of that, we don’t know how the elimination of short-season teams in the New York-Penn and Appalachian Leagues will affect the development paths of younger prospects. My opinion is that on the whole it might be beneficial in the long run to do drills and work on specific things but it’s silly to think that no one will be hurt by not playing competitively in front of crowds.
David: That actually leads to a pretty tremendous question I’ve been asking myself since the minor league season of 2020 was canceled. Each season the players drafted only get a glimpse of minor league play and so, I don’t anticipate any ill effects from the “Lost Season” with players like Pete Crow-Armstrong, Alexander Ramirez, J.T. Ginn, Robert Dominguez and Isaiah Greene seeing their way into most Top 20 lists without any stats to back them. I worry about players like Matthew Allan, Francisco Alvarez, Josh Wolf and Freddy Valdez who showed promise but didn’t get to see any game action last season. Who do you think suffered the most from not being able to play and why?
Brian: There are several groups who were really hurt. There are the older prospects, who needed all of the planets to align correctly to have a chance to force themselves into the picture. Scott Ota was drafted because he’d sign for next to nothing. But then he had a great debut in 2019 in Kingsport. Now he’ll be a 23 year old in Low-A. That’s not good. Gonzalez repeated Double-A in 2019 at age 24 and had a good season. Now he’ll be at Triple-A at age 26 with no MLB experience. He already had the deck stacked against him as a short RHP and the layoff only makes his road harder.
Then there are the younger guys who had good reps but didn’t get off to good starts. Can Gregory Guerrero get back to the promise that had him get a better signing bonus than Gimenez? Newton had a lost year in 2019 and then saw Gimenez had a breakout year in 2020, making the SS picture even more crowded.
But the ones I worry about most are the ones who were injured in 2019 and essentially have two lost years of development. Raul Beracierta, Stanley Consuegra, Desmond Lindsay, Bryce Montes de Oca, Juan Uriarte and Chris Viall among others.
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