I put this on one of Fla-Giant's Winter Lines yesterday, but as that's off the front page at this point, I thought I'd make it it's own Fanpost for those who didn't see it and might want to comment.

The BA Giants Top 10 List for 2011 is:

1. Gary Brown
2. Tommy Joseph
3. Heath Hembree
4. Joe Panik
5. Francisco Peguero
6. Andrew Susac
7. Eric Surkamp
8. Kyle Crick
9. Ehire Adrianza
10. Hector Sanchez

For those wondering, though the Giants list isn't announced on the BA site until 12/14, the print edition with the entire NL West division is out, and interestingly in a twist, most of the rest of the division's lists are dominated by pitchers, while the Giants (and Padres) are dominated by position players. Arizona's list is pretty clearly the class of the division. SD has pretty good depth. LA, Colorado, and SF are all a little thin though each has some interesting names.

Having looked at just how productive the Top Prospects were, the next logical step was to cross-check against the Active Career WAR leaders to see how many really productive players were missed in these Top 100 lists.  I did this incrementally, so I'll just throw a couple of charts in here at this point: Active players with career WAR above 50 and above 30, and above 20, separated into groups of Top 2, Top 10, Top 20, Top 50, Top 100 and Unranked.  I'll cop to a minor intrusion here: there were two active players last year with career WAR >30 who predated BA's Top 100 list: Ken Griffey, Jr. and Jamie Moyer and I handled them in two separate ways. Moyer I simply took out of the equation, because although I know he was a decently heralded prospect with the Cubs I have no good guess whether he would have been a Top 100 prospect.  But Junior I included in the Top 2 list, because, being a reader of BA in the late 80s I'm satisfied that they did consider him the #1 prospect in baseball without a doubt.

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There are 19 players with career WARs over 50, and 3 of them (Jim Edmonds, Mariano Rivera, Jason Giambi) were never on a Top 100 prospect list (though ironically Jeremy Giambi was).  Down a notch to >30 and you get a similar percentage of players from the Top 100 (45 out of 55). And, for the most part, all of these lists show a steady upwards progression of average WAR as you move through the lists from Unranked to Top 2 (with one notable exception I'll get to in a minute).

It's really not until you get down to the 10-19 WAR range and even more so at 5-10 range that you see a real incursion of Unranked prospects as you can see here:

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or with even more of a breakdown here:

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So, it's in the very solid 5-20 range that the middling prospects make their major league marks.  One thing we see immediately here is the inverse TINSTAAP principal. Tthe list of Unranked prospects who appear high on the Career WAR lists is littered with slightly less heralded pitchers from the great Mariano Rivera and Trevor Hoffman, to the very very good Tim Hudson and Mark Buehrle.  In fact, as an aside, for people who insist that you don't need great stuff to be a successful major league pitcher, the Chicago White Sox staff is your mecca.  They field a starting 5 with poor K rates, mediocre BB rates, and unimpressive GB rates who still seem to regularly enjoy a great deal of success.  I'd say that Buehrle's 42.60 and John Danks 17.20 were probably the two most shocking numbers I saw in all this digging (well, there's Darren Oliver's 16.1, too, but I'll get to that in a minute). 

Second, less dramatically but still I think quite perceptible, these lists do clearly point to an undervaluation of patience as a major league tool by the scouting community.  Looking at the Unranked players at the the Career WAR >30 lists we see Jim Edmonds, Jason Giambi, Jorge Posada, and Placido Polanco, and moving over one column to players who were clearly underrated in the bottom half of Top 100 we find guys like Chase Utley (#81 prospect), David Ortiz (#84), Jim Thome (#51), Bobby Abreu (#38), and of course, the great Albert Pujols (#42), all players who showed advanced plate discipline as minor leaguers and all players who have outpaced the scouting consensus of their tools by, as Grant so rightly put it last year, not swinging at crap.   An apologist for BA and the scouting community might note that had the Cardinals found any live body that could stand near 3B in spring training of 2001, Pujols would no doubt have had the opportunity to leap up into the top 10 with another great year.  But really, the scouting community had two chances to get it right with the greatest hitter of his generation and they whiffed pretty significantly both times, first with his 13th round draft placement, and second with his #42 prospect ranking after destroying two levels of A ball in his only minor league season. 

Essentially, if you have a career WAR above 25 and you weren't a Top 100 prospect you can be grouped into one of three categories: 1) the volatility of pitching prospects; 2) the undervaluation of patience; or 3) you're Omar Vizquel.

But one really interesting question, for me that comes from looking at that group of Unranked prospects between 5-10 career WAR is the role played by relievers, and specifically middle relievers.  Relief pitchers are the driving force behind the rise of the Unranked players in the last two columsn, going from about a third of the 10-19 group to well over half of the 5-10.  38 of the 90 Unranked players in the 5-10 group are relief pitchers, and 31 of them are middle relievers.  In fact, of the 159 active players who have a career WAR above 5, a pretty astonishing 48 of them are relief pitchers and 41 are middle relievers (Darren Oliver, 16.1 career WAR -- who knew!).  And while most closers in the majors were minor league starters, there are plenty of guys on this list with no starting experience in the minors at all (e.g., David Riske, Mike Adams, Jose Valverde) or very minimal (Brian Wilson, Brendan Donnelly).

This really begs the question of whether prospects who are relief pitchers are undervalued, and frankly I'll leave it as an unanswered question.  Yes there's a lot of value in this area from middle relief, but middle relievers also make up the lion's share of all those Negative WAR categories above, and the great unranked of middle relief throughout the majors is also mostly a pretty motley, <0 group.  If you figure there are somewhere above 200 roster positions in the majors for relief pitchers, and further consider that most of these relievers have taken 5-10 years aggregating their WAR, then some thousand or thousands have tried to do what these 48 guys have achieved, so the flameout ratio is particularly high.  Also, from having spent time looking at all these careers, I'd say that the relievers as a group take the longest and most circuitous development curves, frequently going through several organizations before catching on, some formerly high ranked prospects who blew out there arms (like Matt Thorton and Scott Linebrink), others guys who marched up their systems in anonymity and made the best of their opportunity when it came (Brad Ziegler or Jason Frasor or Kevin Gregg).

Still my takeaway is that I undervalued, say Sergio Romo simply because he was a minor league reliever and it's pretty clear to  me that there's solid production to be gained there that I at least haven't been valuing highly enough.  And it's clear to see why the middle relief market has exploded at the MLB FA level -- club's are rightly seeing that this is an area of tremendous scarcity that can give a real competitve advantage production.  Whether or not it turns out to be a good contract, someone like Matt Guerrier whose been a little better than a 1 Win player every year in his career is scarce commodity.  And conversely it will be interesting to see if the Rays and Twins choice to not pay these guys and take the comp picks is a gamble that hurts their chances in 2011. The vast majority of middle relievers provide negative value over the long haul, which is why I suppose the relief market is going through the roof.  There's such a scarcity at the position that when you find a  Dan Wheeler (6.6), Joaquin Benoit (8.1), Jason Frasor (5.8), Scott Downs (8.4), Matt Thorton (9.5), Matt Guerrier (6.8), or even Jeremy Affeldt (6.7), you hold onto them for dear life (or collect the comp picks and smile).

And then there's one further breakdown I'd like to make. I've used the term "Unranked" pretty liberally, and that term is naturally lazy and incorrect.  There's no "Here be monsters" sign after the 100th prospect of course. This group of "Unranked" includes lots of guys who were at or near the top of their team's rankings, like Robinson Cano (#2 prospect in the Yankees system in 2005) or Dan Haren (#1 propsect for the Cardinals) who fell just a little outside the Top 100 (which tends to include the top 1-6 players in each organization depedngin on their relative strength of system).  So just to give us a better feel for what the chances are for the lesser profiled prospects, here's one last breakdown that differentiates the Unranked into an Organization's Top 5, Org Top 10, and beyond that.

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So at this point you're looking at 62 players out of 400 with career WAR over 5 who came from outside even their organization's top 10s (159 out of 400 were not Top 100 prospects).  The highest of them is, perhaps not surprisingly, the ageless knuckleballer Tim Wakefield (32.20). Only 5 other players from lower than their org's top 10 have managed to accumulate 20 career WAR: Melvin Mora (27.4), Kevin Millwood (24.2), Casey Blake (23.1), Chone Figgins (22.4), and David Eckstein (21.4 -- which just goes to show you that all those intangibles of his that "don't show up in the numbers" really do!).

So that's 6 guys out of 400 who've gotten to the 20 WAR plateau which is a heck of a career.  But in the perfectly productive <20 range there are some real fabulous stories. Casey McGehee was not only never in a Top 30, he was frnakly a pretty terrible minor league player.  Aaron Harang, as far as I can tell was never in a Top 30, nor was David Ross.  Randy Wells was the #22 player in the Blue Jays system, but then released and picked up by the Cubs, where in the 2007 Prospect Handbook he was listed 13th on the depth chart for RH Relievers in the system (the 3rd guy in that list was the #29 prospect).

And off course, all those players who were Organizational Top 5 prospects didn't just march lockstep into the majors and take their rightful place as slightly overachieving and productive major leaguers.  There were a lot of long and winding roads, and because following some of those roads was my favorite part of this whole process, I'll end by just enumerating a few of my favorites:

Andres Torres, #6 prospect for Detroit in 2001 and 2002.  We know the rest of his story pretty well.

Ramon Ramirez was once an OF prospect for Texas in the DSL, and after being released was out of baseball for 4 years before surfacing as a pitcher in the Japan for the Hiroshima Karp. Spotted by the Yankees he rose to be their #5 prospect as a hard throwing starter. The next year he was their #23 prospect as a hard throwing reliever, and then he was traded for Shawn Chacon, Jorge de la Rossa, and Coco Crisp before finally making his way to our World Series bullpen.

Casey Blake was 25 when he made the majors with Toronto, but it took 4 more years and 4 more organizations before he ever got more than 25 PA in a season. Once he did, at the age of 29, he made them count.

Denard Span was Minnesota's #5 prospect the winter after they drafted him in the first round, thinking he was a polished college hitter.  He then proceeded to go backwards in the rankings for 5 straight years as he underperformed, until, when finally making the show, a polished hitter emerged after all.

Matt Diaz was waived by terrible Tampa Bay and Baltimore organizations, and given away by the Royals before turning into a pretty productive player in his late 20s.

And lastly, given the news of his re-signing with the Cards, let's say a cheer for the remarkable career of one Jim Edmonds. Drafted out of High School in the 7th round of the 1988 draft, he started his pro career hitting .221 and slugging .254 in rookie ball. And he followed that up with a .261/.313/.337 year at age 19.  Four more minor league years followed in which he got better and better, showing good plate discipline and an improving bat, and even a little power. Finally at age 23 he snuck into the Angels Top 10 as their #9 prospect, and later that year he began a career that has so far accumulated 68.3 WAR and a 132 OPS+.  I wouldn't be at all surprised to see him climb over 70 this year.

If all the proceeding were one of Xanthan's heat maps, than the Top 20 prospects would be a huge dark red blotch in the center soaking up most of the WAR, and the Top 100 would be lighter red around the periphery.  But these white blotches are really where all the best stories are and where you can find a decent amount of exceptional 5-20 WAR careers.

As we wrap up our prospect lists and look forward to Spring Training, this seems like as good a time as any to set down the results of a project that's been taking up an unholy percentage of my time of late.

At the start of the 2010 playoffs, I read a short, legitimately self-congratulatory note from one of the editors at BA, noting that 60 of the 200 players on the eight playoff rosters were former #1 players on BA organizational lists, and 91 had been ranked in an organization's Top 3.  These players comprised nearly all the starting pitchers and a solid majority of starting players in the playoff lineups. The notion that nearly half of all the players in the post-season had, essentially, been uber-prospects surprised me and got its hooks into me a bit. Looking into things a little further, I noticed that not only were the rosters studded with these super prospects, but even the players getting cast aside (Barry Zito, Jose Guillen, Dioner Navarro) or left on DLs (Jair Jurrjens, Justin Morneau, Chipper Jones) were former members of BA's Top 100 prospects list as well.

Well, step by step I found myself falling down a prospect rabbit hole.  I spot checked the All Star Game (80% of last year's All Stars were former Top 100 prospects, including all but 3 of the games starters; about half were top 20 and a quarter were Top 10). Then I moved on to scouring all team rosters for 2010 checking to see how many former top prospects were active in MLB last year. What I found: in 2010, not counting September callups there were 144 former Top 20 prospects, 91 former Top 10s, and 14 former #1 prospects from BA's Top 100 lists, which BA started compiling in 1990.  Not knowing whether this was a lot or a little, I went through all of those lists, and found to my surprise, that there had only been 287 Top 20, 155 Top 10, and 19 #1s in the 21 year history of the BA Top 100. 

Which meant, quick math, that half of all the Top 20s, nearly 60% of all the Top 10s, and 75% of all the #1s were active LAST YEAR!  And backing up a step, I found that about 30% of all members of the 21 year history of the Top 100 lists were also active last year.  These numbers were all much higher than I would have guessed. Prospects from 15-20 years ago were still enjoying big league careers; prospects from last year and the year before were in the bigs already.

That's when I went pretty much whole hog, running down as best I could the story on every Top Prospect in BA's history, cross-checked against their plebian counterparts, all in an effort to find out, as best I could, what being a Top Prospect really means.  My measure in all cases was the player's career WAR as per B-Ref.  Herewith, some of the things I found out:

Just for fun, I'll start with plotting the career WAR of all the #1s and 2s:

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So here I think we have a pretty good visual summation of what most of us feel to be true of prospects -- you're going to miss more often than hit, but the potential to hit huge is extraordinary, as 4 of the 19 #1s have already put up career WARs over 40, and two more will almost certainly sail past 40 in 2011.  The complete list:

Steve Avery (11.3)
Todd van Poppel (-2.1)
Brien Taylor (0)
Chipper Jones (80.1)
Cliff Floyd (27.3)
Alex Rodriguez (101.9)
Andruw Jones (59.9)
Ben Grieve (6.7)
J.D. Drew (46.8)
Rick Ankiel (8.1, though I added together his pitcher WAR and hitter WAR to arrive at this value)
Josh Hamilton (15.7)
Josh Beckett (22.7)
Mark Teixeira (36.7)
Joe Mauer (38.7)
Delmon Young (-1)
Daisuke Matsuzaka (9.8)
Jay Bruce (4.9)
Matt Wieters (3.7)
Jason Heyward (4.4)

On the #2 line the spikes are Chipper Jones again, Vladimir Guerrero (59.2, he and Andruw Jones are thus far, the greatest 1&2 combo by far), Paul Konerko at 22, and then two youngins, King Felix with 24.2 and Evan Longoria at 18.1

Of course, that's not much of a sample, so next I looked at the career WAR of all the players ever listed in BA's Top 10s, Top 20s, and Top 100s, separated out into categories of progressive production. 

Obviously, there's no way around the fact that these are all moving targets, since so many of these guys are active.  But to avoid counting Jesus Montero as a guy who never played in the majors, and making Jason Heyward mix in with Rey Ordonez, I cut these charts off at 2006. So by way of Giant's reference, that means Matt Cain is included in these numbers, but not Tim Lincecum.  The Top 10 in 2006 was Young, Justin Upton, Wood, Hermida, Drew, Liriano, Billingsly, Verlander, Milledge, and Cain, which struck me as a decent compromise between seeing enough of an outline of career paths and just having too little information to learn anything.  In the case of the Top 10 players, this left me with a total of 127 players.

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So the numbers on the left hand side are Career WAR and on the righthand side number of players.  And the thing that really surprised me here was just how good the production ultimately was.  This chart includes 127 prospects: 6 of them never played in the majors and a further 16 produced negative value once they got there (hey, Mark Lewis!).   But 10 have career WAR over 50 and 25 are over 30.  And most importantly, the most common outcomes lie in the middle where very solid to outstanding players live, from 5-29 career WAR.  Those three categories accounted for just over half of all Top 10 players (65 out of 128).   Over half of all these players (68, or 54%) have had careers of over 10 WAR, and there are 9 more currently in the 5-10 range who I expect will make it over 10 before the end of their careers -- guys like Justin Upton (8,4), Rickie Weeks (7.9) Gavin Floyd (9.2), and Brandon Phillips (5.1).  If Hank Blalock could throw one more decent season out there he could slip over, too, but I'd say that's not too likely at this point.  Still we're looking at somewhere in the area of 60% of all Top 10s producing over 10 Career WAR.

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For the most part, this pattern still holds true for all the Top 20s, though there's a pretty big leap by the 0-5 career WAR players at this point (up from 12% of the whole to 18%), the chart is still mostly dominated by the middle outcomes, which still account for 45% of all the players, while the upper echlon groups, >30 WAR suffer only a slight decline from 20% of the whole to 17%.  This is now a sample group of 232 players.  At this point still 50% of all the players have produced career WAR >10, and 65% have produced career WAR >5.  And again, some of the younger players can be expected to move into higher brackets as their careers take shape. J.J. Hardy for instance, currently sits at 9.9 WAR and Michael Cuddyer at 7.5, while a couple of these careers are really still just starting out -- Ian Stewart for instance.

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By the time we arrive at the Top 100, predictably the lower outcomes really start to take over the chart. So for instance, the top two columns here, the >50 groups, added only 10 members to their ranks, going from 16 to 26, while the bottom two, the Less Than Zero bunch, zoomed up from 46 to 282!  Still even at this level, just less than 40% of all the players have accumulated >10 Career WAR, and 67% are above 5.

The other thing I'd note about this group, is that that huge swath of Negative WAR players does not solely represent washouts or 4A guys.  Yes those types are reasonably well represented, but I have to say it's astonishing how many of these are players who had long major league careers, 6, 8, even 10+ years, all the while accumulating by tiny increments more and more negative value, like Jacob Marley forging his chains for the afterlife.  The vast majority of those players were 1) middle relievers, 2) middle infielders, and 3) catchers.  And as long as I'm pointing this out, it's worth a mention here that Neifi Perez did NOT finish with a negative career WAR by BRef's measurements, clocking in at a solid +0.1. Heck Enrique Wilson managed a -4.5, and at least by this standard the clear standard bearer for horrible major leaguer has to be Juan Castro (NOT a top 100 prospect) who is currently working on a
-10.4 career WAR that is more than twice as awful as any other active player. 

In the end, of the 273 Top 100 prospects between 1990-2006 who have produced 0 or negative career WAR, ONE THIRD (90) had careers that stretched out over at least 6 seasons (and there are many more who are still active and might well end up with that kind of career).  The majority of those played in over 500 games or pitched in over 75.  Which I guess means that these prospects lists have not only produced the majority of great and good players over the last 20 years, but probably also the the majority of really bad ones (as it's probably the same tools which caught scouts eyes in the first place that keep getting them jobs on major league rosters after several years of sub-productive play).

But I digress.  The next step, of course, was to cross-check these prospect lists against allt he non-prospects, to see how many great, good and decent major leaguers were NOT Top 100 prospects.  But as this has gotten pretty long already, I think i'll save that data for a second post if people are interested.

But before ending this I will make a couple of other observations.  First and foremost is the logic of TINSTAAP. There's a definite seeable difference between the fates of the uber prospects and their uber pitching prospects brethren.  Just looking at the #1 and 2 chart at the top, it's noticeable that the highest mark for any of the pitchers comes, amazingly enough, from 24 year old Felix Hernandez at 24.2, having zipped past Josh Beckett last year.  In all the average career WAR of all the pitchers in the Top 2 spots has been 9.7, while the average for the position players has been 24.3 (and hey way to bring that curve down Delmon!).

Of the 976 players listed on Top 100 Prospects lists between 1990 and 2006, only 12 pitchers managed career WARs as high as 30 (Kevin Appier, Mike Mussina, Pedro Martinez, Derek Lowe, Andy Petitte, Bartolo Colon, Roy Halladay, Javier Vasquez, Barry Zito, C.C. Sabathia, Roy Oswalt, Carlos Zambrano) as opposed to 54 position players. Only 23 others even made it to 20 WAR (a list that includes Matt Cain, and soon, Tim Lincecum!) compared to 43 of their position player contemporaries.  Of course, part of this has to do with position player's increased opportunity to pile up WAR, but it also points at the relatively spottier success ratio of the pitching prospects (who litter the Neg WAR category).  One more snapshot: 9 of the 11 Top 20 prospects who have never appeared in the major leagues were pitchers.

And lastly, of course, all of these numbers will look better 15 or 20 years from now when all these careers are finished.  The players who are populating the Neg War and 0-5 categories have a tendency to get to where they're going pretty quickly, since they're landing in such a narrow field.  Sure some of the guys currently at 0.2 will flip to negative and vice versa, but essentially, the players who are going to move the needle in all this are the one's with the upward mobility. In just 2011 we're likely to see Evan Longoria and Tim Lincecum, and maybe Josh Hamilton move out of the Teens range past 20 career WAR, while Hanley Ramirez  and Adam Dunn plow past 30, perhaps taking King Felix with them. Mauer and Texiera and Utley and will plow past 40 WAR, Damon will flirt with 50, Jones and Vlad and Abreu with 60, Manny with 70.  Heck, with any luck Delmon Young and Homer Bailey might even pass 0 and head into the positive.   Inevitably, these numbers will all look better in time.

Brian Sabean phoned in an interview with XM's Baseball this Morning and as, I don't believe they archive any of their baseball channel shows (and it was about 5:00 a.m. SF time), I thought I'd jot down a few of things he had to say before I forget it all.

• Sabes is currently on a scouting trip, preparing for the June draft. The team's scouts and player evaluation team have by now come up with a list of "6 or 7 guys" they feel are solid for the #5 pick and Sabean wants to see all of them play in person "at least twice" before the end of the season. Last night he caught Gordon Beckham, in sadly an uninspiring performance ("I saw the wrong game, in scouts' lingo") and today he'll watch HS SS Tim Beckham play. Then he's off to Nashville to catch a UGA/Vandy tilt that will feature both G. Beckham and Pedro Alvarez. Sabean doesn't believe Alvarez will still be available at 5, but the hamate injury could concievably cause him to fall.
• Dick Tidrow was ga-ga for Tim Lincecum. So convinced was Tidrow that Lincecum was far and away the number 1 talent in the '06 draft, he spent much of the run up to the draft trying to figure out other team's draft strategies, obsessing over the idea that Timmy might fall to us (pretty funny story the way Sabes told it). He even convinced Sabean NOT to go to Washington to watch Lincecum, because he didn't want other teams to know how interested the Giants were.
• Matt Cain was also a Dick Tidrow call.
• Brad Hennessy apparently has yet another medical issue. Sabean opined that the reason for his fall in performance is "he's lost a bunch of weight this year and he just can't seem to keep any on him." They sent him down to Fresno, but Sabean suggested that what they really want to do is run him through a battery of tests to try to find out what's going on inside him. Sad. Poor Brad's body has been through enough.
• Alex Hinshaw has "an electric arm -- you'll see him in SF soon."
• Sabean's love of experience and moxie doesn't stop at the playing field.  Describing the front office reorg that went on this winter, he said "the great thing is we now have a whole room of veterans -- guys who've been around the block." One of those veterans Ed Creech (former Director of Scouting for the Pirates) was directly responsible for bringing in Jose Castillo, who the Giants are very happy with.
• Surprisingly, Sabean seemed to place a lot of faith in Lowry's role in the Giant's rebuilding process over the next couple of years. Lowry's "a proven winner who we're really missing right now" and who's return will make the team much better. (Personal aside, that strikes me as crazy talk in several different ways).
• Sabes thinks the Giants are the most improved team in baseball right now (from ST to now, I'd assume he meant).
• Though he grew up in New Hampshire, Sabes was raised a Dodgers fan by his fundamentals lovin' Dad (UGH!)

For those who haven't noticed, ESPN has been running an "All-Time Web Gems" for each team on Baseball Tonight and Sportscenter, and they're doing the Giants tonight.

Any ideas for the Top 3 in Giants' history?

I'm saying:

1. Willie Mays in the '54 Series.
   
2. Mays climbs over Bobby Bonds and fence to make catch.
   
3. Kevin Mitchell's bare handed grab of flyball (for sheer kitsch factor).

Anybody notice that the Marlins opted not to offer Todd Jones arbitration when they had the opportunity AFTER he'd already signed with Detroit?  In other words, in what can only be seen as a mickey mouse penny pinching move, they simply refused to take Detroit's #1 pick AND a sandwich round pick when they were there to be had, no risk, no questions asked.  How disgusted do Marlins' fans have to be this offseason?

LA tossed Antonio Perez into the deal too, for Andre Ethier.

This is from Bill Simmons most recent ESPN Page 2 column. Nice to see someone deviating from the hero line (Apart from the totally uncalled for Rick Barry comparison):

Yet another question: Is A.J. Pierzynski the most annoying professional athlete in recent memory? He's like the Rick Barry of this generation -- everything he does seems annoying for some reason, even his interviews. You can see why the Giants and Twins couldn't stand him. I don't even think he's a bad guy, he's just one of Those Guys. If you played at a $25 table in Vegas with him, he seems like the guy who would say stuff like "Wow, you're way up right now, huh?" and scream "Whammy!" every time he was dealt a blackjack. And he wouldn't even know he was being annoying, so his friends would think of convoluted ways to ditch him, stuff like, "Hey, A.J., I'm gonna go walk around, get some air, I'll be back in 10 minutes" ... and then they would scurry to another casino. That's A.J., right?

The rest of the column (on gut-punching losses) is pretty funny as well, and spares us much comment on 2002.

"Foppert could be a real coup. He hasn't bounced all the way back from Tommy John surgery in September 2003, but before he got hurt he was the game's best pitching prospect. The track record for recovery from that operation is very good, and Foppert is still just 25. If he regains the mid-90s fastball, hard slider and splitter he once had, look out. I'm still trying to figure out how Seattle got Foppert and a potential starting catcher who at worst is a good backup (Torrealba) for a mediocre big leaguer like Winn."