Much has been made this year of the influx of shiny new talent in the major leagues this year, and young players

such as Jason Heyward and Stephen Strasburg have been the talk of baseball since April. Other prominent phenoms

have recently joined their parent clubs with nearly as much publicity. Overlooked by most of baseball has been the

rise of the Tiger's rookie Brennan Boesch, who, with little fanfare, was named AL rookie of the Month for May, and

has continued his torrid hitting pace well into June.

Not only has Boesch been largely overlooked, his performance has been scoffed at by the saber-metrics police as an aberration, a nice story, but a guy not considered by the "experts" as a legitimate prospect. Boesch has been

barely noticed by prospect raters, and most consider him at best a mediocre MLB prospect, certainly not a sure

thing future star like Heyward and Florida's Mike Stanton.

Critics note Boesch's age (25) and a number of minor league stats (and the proverbial "hole" in his swing) as

worthy of dismissing him as a potential star. The statistically favorable comparisons to Jason Heyward against

real major league pitching are again dismissed as a good story, but, alas, unsustainable.

Another young star-in-waiting has reached the Major Leagues recently, Florida OF Mike Stanton. Stanton is

considered in the same class as Heyward, a can't-miss prospect with the saber-metrics pedigree to match. But let's

look at the numbers a bit and try to determine what makes a can't-miss prospect, using Stanton and Boesch's

full 2009 AA minor league stats for comparison:

At Bats
Stanton 479
Boesch 527

Runs
Stanton 76
Boesch 89

Hits
Stanton 122
Boesch 145

2b
Stanton 24
Boesch 26

3b
Stanton 5
Boesch 7

HR
Stanton 28
Boesch 28

RBI
Stanton 92
Boesch 93

SB
Stanton 03
Boesch 11

BB
Stanton 59
Boesch 33

SO
Stanton 144
Boesch 127

BA
Stanton .255
Boesch .275

OBP
Stanton .341
Boesch .318

Slugging
Stanton .501
Boesch .510

OPS
Stanton .842
Boesch .828

As you can see, their stats are remarkably similar over the course of a full season against similar levels of

pitching. So, other than the age factor, how do the experts so easily label one player (Stanton) a future star,

and doom the other (Boesch) to mediocrity at best? Are 25 year olds beyond the age of growth as a ballplayer, and

conversely, do 21 year olds always improve?  Could it be that Boesch is simply a late bloomer and Stanton is a, er, early-bloomer?

I put together this little piece not as a statistical "gotcha", but as a friendly reminder that rookie ballplayers are just

that--rookies--meaning that they are unproven and untested until they are, well, proven and tested.

Based on what we've seen far, most Tiger fans will happily take the 25 year old kid with the hole in his swing and a flair for the dramatic.