I thought we could have some fun and channel a little Jeff Foxworthy. To lead it off and see where it goes.

Your prospect might be in trouble when: he is deemed to be the next Tom Glavine - and he's a hitter.

(More seriously: your hitting prospect might be in trouble when he's compared to Andy Van Slyke (serious Kiss of Death))

Your prospect might be in trouble when his worst off the field moment was better than his worst on the field moment (I'm looking at you Delmon)...

This may speak more to quality of Arizona's prospects, or to whether Young in underappreciated as a prospect by some (not John).

What makes Young any less special than Grady Sizemore of 2 years ago?  Sizemore is probably one of the more valuable commodities in all of baseball, and yet it would appear that Young is on track to match him step for step once he gets to the bigs....

So how is this guy not a top ten prospect?

I found Nate Silver's piece on prospect rankings very interesting and thought others may wish to take a look. This is an open article, and does not require a subscription...

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=4750

I think I have always had the view expounded here regarding prospect rankings.  

Of course this is also why I like John's approach. He has a general system he tries to follow. So players in A ball are viewed a little more skeptically, often because their projections are similar to what older players in AAA are currently doing. I appreciate the objectivity. (Although I generally adjust John's grades downward some for when he ranks AL Central prospects - I've felt Detroit, Minnesota and KC tend to be the Lucy to John's Charlie Brown on many occasions...=)

  For those who have received the book, I thought it might be fun to share what you felt were some of your favorite writeups in the book.  One of the reasons I buy John's books is for his creative descriptions and so I like hearing about players who you got a kick reading about.

  Since I don't want to intrude on copyrights, I figured we could just list the player name and then we could all look them up on our own.

  To start things off... I got a nice chuckle out of the James Loney writeup. =)

  Update [2006-2-3 20:14:19 by SLK]: Also, Bill Killian's comment provides a nice divergence.