KoK Prospect List Preface

The 2010 Kings of Kauffman prospect rankings are locked and loaded.  My list is in pen and tomorrow I will reveal prospect number 17 with a write-up with all the bells, whistles, and information I can muster.  Before I start publishing the player profiles one by one, I wanted to take a moment to go over my methodology and explain why the 2010 list will be seventeen players deep.

Dealing with the last item first, I originally set out to come up with a prospect list of either 15 or 20 players depending on what felt right to me.  When I had fifteen players selected, there were two other guys who I felt deserved to be included in my rankings and deserved a full write-up.  My initial reaction was to move my list to a top-20, but after filling slots 16 and 17 I hit a wall.  For slots 18-20 there were a bevy of guys who merited consideration, but no one really stood out to me.  Instead of tacking on three profiles to have a universe pleasing top-20, I decided to stick with 17.

With that out of the way, we come to my methodology for ranking players.  Since I don’t have direct access to scouts or representatives from any organizations, the scouting reports I rely on come from published reports and the thoughts of other writers.  Naturally a player’s statistical performance also plays a large role in my rankings, but stats of course have to be evaluated under a microscope while factoring in age, competition, and environment.  A player’s trends and position(s) are other elements that get thrown into my mix.  Then when everything has had a chance to simmer for a while, I throw in a healthy portion of my own gut feeling.

I looked at a number of prospect rankings while gathering data and I want to give them all some love here, even though I will be referring to them in each of the profiles where applicable.

Baseball America and the Baseball America Prospect Handbook
Diamond Futures
Royals Review and the work of NW Royal who bravely went 60 deep in his rankings
The Royal Tower
The excellent work of John Sickels (Minor League Ball and The Baseball Prospect Book)
Scouting Book
Baseball Prospectus

In addition to those sites, I utilized multiple search engines in an attempt to uncover nuggets of information on specific players.  Naturally those nuggets will be linked to and mentioned in the individual player profiles as necessary.

One of the things I found when putting together my rankings and doing my research is that there is a group of twelve players in the Royals organization that are in everyone’s top 14 and while the order changes from list to list the names remain constant.  After the first dozen there is a fair amount of variation in the rankings from 13 to 30, and beyond, depending on the source.

As I head off to work on the profile for KoK Prospect #17, the last three spots if I had gone with a top-20 would have been.

#20  RHP-Patrick Keating (20th round pick in the 2009 draft)
#19  RHP-Louis Coleman (5th round pick in the 2009 draft)
#18  OF-Jordan Parraz (Acquired via trade from Astros for Tyler Lumsden)

(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.)