Keep voting for #19 below.
I’m thinking of putting together a “reading room” page on the top with a listing of sabermetric research regarding prospects or at least somehow prospect related. Please share with us in the comments what you can dig up along those lines. For example, I found a really interesting article by Victor Wang about the value of Top 100 prospects. He also recently had this article regarding the draft over at THT. I’m looking for stuff like the dollar value of draft picks, minor league equivalencies and so on. If it’s prospect related..well..you get the idea.
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I’ve never thought sabermetrics and minor leaguers mix well. I mean sabermetrics rely so heavily on statistics and sample size. With prospects, both of those ingredients are flimsy. The statistics may not be accurate because they are constantly changing how they play trying to learn new things. And the sample sizes are very small compared to major leaguers due to switching leagues and sitting on the bench to give another prospect at bats.
Thanks, Erik, for the link to Wang’s work–I hadn’t seen that study before, but it confirms what we all (should) know intuitively by now (i.e. even the highest-rated pitching prospects have a *much* better chance to be complete busts than stars, or even regular rotation contributors.)
Of course, nothing will ever stop people from overvaluing a hard-throwing arm, since velocity intoxicates. ;)