Passing along prospect rankings from MLB.com and ESPN

Last night MLB.com’s top 50 prospects were revealed on MLB Network and published on the website shortly thereafter.  Following on the heels of the MLB.com list, ESPN’s Keith Law revealed his top 100* prospects on ESPN.com today.  Each featured four Royals, but there was a significant amount of disagreement between the two lists.

*To read Law’s scouting reports you must be an ESPN insider, but if you just want to see the rankings, they appear on the right hand side.

Royals on the MLB.com (Jonathan Mayo) top-50:

#32  3B-Mike Moustakas
#33  C-Wil Myers
#41  RHP-Aaron Crow
#43  LHP-Mike Montgomery

In case you didn’t have the opportunity to watch the MLB Network special and you have 50 minutes of free time, you can click here.  If you don’t have the time, or interest to check it out for yourself, they revealed the players in groups of six and then picked out two players from that grouping to discuss more in depth.  Of the four Royals on the list, Mike Montgomery and Wil Myers received some extra love from the panel of Greg Amsinger, Jonathan Mayo, and John Hart.

Royals on the ESPN (Keith Law) top-100:

#34  1B-Eric Hosmer
#69  3B-Mike Moustakas
#75  LHP-Mike Montgomery
#87  RHP-Aaron Crow

The differences between the two lists are striking when it comes to the Royals prospects, but both did set out using slightly different criteria so I suppose in some cases that is to be expected.

Eric Hosmer is nowhere to be found in the MLB.com list, but is the highest ranked Royals prospect according to Keith Law.  To me this is inexcusable even if you attribute 100% of Eric’s struggles in 2009 to injury and vision problems.  I’m not down on Hosmer, not in the least, but considering the other talent in the organization, I don’t see how anyone can look at the candidates and pick out Hosmer as the best prospect.  Speaking of that “other” talent, how in the world did C-Wil Myers not crack the ESPN top-100?

In the end, I think MLB.com did a better job of selecting and ranking the players from not just the Royals but from all of the MLB organizations.   Actually saying they did a better job isn’t really fair to ESPN or Keith Law.  I suppose I should say that I agree more with Mayo’s rankings.  I will say that I think Law got it right when he ranked Montgomery ahead of Crow, but considering Monty is projected to be a front of the rotation guy who is probably heading to Double-A this year, he belongs much higher than 75 on the ESPN list.

Needless to say, both of these lists will be used as data points and considered when I start constructing the official Kings of Kauffman prospect list.  Speaking of which, I’ve had a few inquiries about when I will be revealing my rankings so now seems like a good time to address that.  I am hoping to start focusing more of my writing and research time to the project next week.  My current plan is to write up all of the profiles and everything in advance and then reveal one or two players each day until the KoK top prospect is revealed.  I’m also hoping to post additional daily content during the weeks that the prospect profiles are being published.  This will result in a lot of double post days, and perhaps a few triple post days as well.  Once the list is completely revealed, I will be creating a dedicated page on the site for the rankings with links to each player’s published profile for future reference.

My goal is to make my Royals prospect rankings one of the most thorough lists available,  but since this will be my first year doing my own prospect list, it is entirely possible that I will fall short of that goal.  If that happens, I can promise you it won’t be due to a lack of effort.

Anyway, I’ll be back tonight with another installment in the Market Fresh series, or the 2008 edition of Royals Rotten Decade.  It will probably be the latter since I want to get that series wrapped up before I journey to prospect ranking land and I think I’m ready to relive that season now.  If time allows, there might even be a third post published today that I’ve been doing some work on here and there the last couple of days.

(Wally Fish is the lead blogger for Kings of Kauffman and FanSided’s MLB Director.  Subscribe to his RSS feed and add him on Twitter to follow him daily.)