On Monday, I looked at some of the things you should consider when looking at a hitter's minor league stats.  Today, I'll go into the pitchers.

Statheads almost never consider a pitcher's win-loss record when looking at a major league pitcher, and it's even less instructive when you're looking at a minor league pitcher.  And for minor league pitchers, ERA doesn't really tell you a whole lot, either.  It's nice to see a pitcher keeping runs off the scoreboard, but when you're looking at minor league pitchers, it's far more important to know how he's keeping runs off the scoreboard.

More after the jump.

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Continuing from yesterday, today I'll go over some of the things you should be looking for when judging hitting prospects.

In some ways, hitters are more difficult to judge than pitchers.  Pitchers with very strong peripherals are usually going to translate well to the majors, but many hitters who do well in the minor leagues can't translate that success to the majors.  And when pitchers fail, it usually has to do with injuries; but highly-regarded hitting prospects can fail for reasons that have nothing to do with injuries.

First, keep in mind the general concepts I discussed yesterday: consider where a hitter is, age-wise, in comparison to the pitchers he's facing; and also consider how much his home park and league are helping (or hurting) his numbers.  After the jump, I'll go into the specific things you should look for.

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So, since apparently we're about to do a new PuRPs poll, I thought I'd post a primer for all the newbies (and non-prospect-heads) who might want to submit their own ballot but don't really know what they're looking at.

Obviously, every person has their own approach to grading prospects.  It's a decent place to start with some of the other outfits that rank prospects.  John Sickels (who runs minorleagueball.com) is a great place to start; every offseason he ranks the top 20 prospects in each organization.  Baseball America posts for free their listing of the top 10 prospects in each organization, and lists the top 30 prospects in their book.

Of course, the point of the PuRPs poll isn't to copy verbatim other prospect rankings, so here's a how-to guide about how to rate prospects.  Today I'm going to begin with some basic concepts after the jump.

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Yeah, it's early to be thinking about this.  I was at spring training in 2007, and I don't think it's just a coincidence that the one year I went to spring training just happened to be the one year that the Rockies went to the World Series.  Purple Row and Rockies Nation needs me at spring training.

The good news is that I've found round-trip flights from Nashville to Tucson for under $200.  The bad news is that I'm pretty much pinned down to the first few days in March.  My spring break is from February 28-March 9, and I have to take the MPRE (that's the Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam for you non-lawyers) on the 8th.

With the 2009 regular season not starting until April 6, anyone think that the spring training games will be starting later than usual?  Am I s.o.l. here?