It’s a big day if you’re at all interested in the Dodger minor league system, because today is the day that Baseball Prospectus prospect maven Kevin Goldstein put out his Top 11 Dodger list. Along with John Sickels’ list from last week, that’s two of the bigger names in prospect ranking who have weighed in on the Dodgers (Baseball America will do so on January 21), so I figured now would be a good time to compare the two, particularly with a lot of discussion about Ivan DeJesus around here lately.
Goldstein’s piece at BP is behind the paywall, so I’ll only be showing the list here. If you want to see his reasoning and each player’s pluses and minuses, which is really the meat of it, you’ll need to have a BP subscription.
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Goldstein
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Sickels
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1
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Zach Lee
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2
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3
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4
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5
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6
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Zach Lee
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7
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8
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9
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10
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Nine players appear on both lists, and both men have the same players in the top six, though ordered differently. The main difference here appears to be Zach Lee, who Goldstein has ranked #1 but is only #6 for Sickels, but I wouldn’t worry too much about that – Sickels admits that he likes him better long-term than Jansen and De La Rosa, but wants to see Lee throw at least one professional pitch first.
Not found on either list? DeJesus. Sickels puts him in the “others of note” section, below the top 20, and though Goldstein also goes to 20, DeJesus’ name doesn’t appear at all. While the Dodgers system has definitely improved since a slight lull brought on by the promotions of Kemp / Kershaw / Billingsley / Loney / Martin / etc., it’s hardly Royals-level deep, so the fact that he’s getting zero respect from any of the prospect guys isn’t a great sign for him.
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Here’s a fun note from Jack Moore at RotoHardball:
Ted Lilly faced 785 batters in 2010. 218 of them reached base. Ted Lilly turned the average batter he faced last year into some sick combination of Jose Lopez (.239/.270/.339) and Aaron Hill (.205/.271/.394).
Of course, as Moore goes on to note, while that sounds awesome, Lilly’s high home run rate means that he tends to allow runs even when runners aren’t on base.
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I did a Q&A over at Giants blog Splashing Pumpkins, which is kind of an awesome name. I ended up going on more of a Matt Kemp rant than I intended, I think.