You know you don’t believe that.

For anyone that is interested, Melville recently began pitching in the Midwest League, and in 3 starts he is 1-2, with an ERA of 3.86, WHIP=0.99.

I was surprised that they did pursue(and actually sign) some of the high dollar Latin players last year. Hopefully, that is not a one year thing. But given the current state of the economy……..low hanging fruit……

I am a believer that draftees must be compared against one another no matter the position. It is all about adding value and understanding risk/return. Remember, baseball is a free market enterprise to some degree. You can address needs through trades. If your big league club is lacking in left handed batters, trade for a couple. Unlock the value you have built up in the farm to address the weaknesses you have.

Just some food for thought.

Picklefork (and the other dead horse beaters), it simply isn’t as black and white as “basing a pick on money, not talent” or vice versa. Can we at least agree on that?

Every team has a budget that is established before June (probably in the offseason). I’m sure there’s plenty of room to adjust that number up or down depending on the owners’ situation, but the point is that no team has unlimited funds to invest into the draft. Everyone agrees so far?

If that’s the case, then the goal for a (good) scouting director has to be collecting the most talent given a budget of $X,XXX,XXX, right? So even though the Cardinals and every other team seemed pretty high on Porcello and he would have been taken in the first 5 picks if money wasn’t an issue, the fact is that money *is* an issue. For every player in the draft, the organization has to decide how much of their cache they are willing to invest.

Can we at least base these kinds of discussions on these assumptions rather than the tired “talent = good & signability = bad” framework?

Finally:
Kozma deserves to be evaluated on his own merits; he has strengths, weaknesses, streaks, slumps, etc. that all have nothing to do with Porcello.
The persistent Porcello-Kozma comparisons are borderline psychotic at this point. I mean, why don’t just start comparing every Cardinals prospect to the highest-priced player they *could* have taken? Jesse Todd vs Austin Romine… Daniel Descalso vs Brad Suttle… Brett Wallace vs. Casey Kelly… Shane Peterson vs. Trey Haley… crazy, no?

The best way I can describe this is, Net Present Value (or IRR). Every major league team when they make their draft selection believes the draftee has positive NPV. Obviously, if the NPV were negative, they would not make the selection. The larger the investment, the greater the financial impact if the draftee were to fail or be a success. Clearly, the Cardinals are conservative investors. They are not willing to expose their portfolio to potential devastating losses. They prefer to make investments that will add limited value, that have moderate upside and downside potential. Opposed to more aggressive investors (Tigers) that believe the unlimited upside potential of a draftee outweighs the limited downside.

I am probably stating the obvious, but from a different perspective. It is important to understand that the Cardinals are in-fact adding value to their farm system. However, it is not as much as many people would like. We could argue that the farm is diversified enough that the Birds could make larger investments and risk in upcoming drafts and still have a portfolio with enough value to provide talent to the big league club. I just never see them pulling the trigger on a draftee with superstar potential because the risk of failure is too great.