It's done, for a week or three until it all starts over again. The Minor League News MLN FAB50 Baseball 2007 rankings are a labor of love, lunacy, and learning. This is the fourth year for our merry little band of grizzled minor league beat writers to play David to the ESPN-backed Goliath, Baseball America.
I'm happy to report that, since we started the FAB50 back in 2004, to replace our old player of the year format, we've given ol' BA a few good black eyes with our slingshot.
In 2005, for example, they pronounced Delmon Young to be the best player in baseball. We agreed that he was pretty good, but we were curious as to why his organization wasn't paving the roadway between Montgomery, where he was playing at the time, and Tampa Bay for his express ride to the 40 man roster.
The secret seemed to be in Young's temper, which we heard flared up in the clubhouse, and, more publicly with an umpire in the Southern League. So, we knocked him down to number two in favor of pitching phenom Felix Hernandez.
By Spring, Felix is sporting bling on the cover of ESPN the Magazine while BA's bad boy was still cooling his heels in the minors.
Around the same time, BA issues its spring beauty pageant. Again Young is tagged as the No. 1 player. We're shocked, quite frankly, because we keep hearing that he's on the slow boat until his maturity gets a better grip on his temper.
That shock turns to downright relief that spring, when the news breaks internationally that a player has tossed a bat at a replacement umpire during the minor league umps strike. That player?
Yep. Delmon Young. We had to rank him No. 2 again, as he drew a whopping suspension and a $140,000 fine for the bat blow out. By late July, he and fellow Bad Boy Bulls BJ Upton and Elijah Dukes held a press conference trying to break out of the minors by force, practically daring the Devil Rays not to promote them. Stephen Drew was our No. 1 pick for 2006, headed like a lightning bolt for the Arizona Diamondbacks.
This year, our No. 1 is Evan Longoria, also, ironically of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, but without the fire-breathing personality. We did a feature called "Longoria" on him back in 2006, when he blew through the California League with the Visalia Oaks on the way into Montgomery to play with the Class-AA club.
He spent the first half of the 2007 season with the Biscuits as well. Yesterday he got the call to Triple-A Durham. The Devil Rays don't generally hurry players, but it is only a matter of time before Longoria takes his place on the bag at the Trop.
Longoria is another in a line of great picks that we can be proud of. Sure, we take our hits and flames from every corner. When you establish a list, it is the unwritten law to have everyone pick at it.
I already have a few testy emails from scouts whose opinions we solicited, but whose judgment on a few players didn't line up. I get my usual flames from fans who can't believe that we had the audacity to forget their favorite player, who is far more gifted than the other 50 clowns on our list.
Some well meaning types will go after us for picks. I had a scout who was particularly pissed off that we picked Ian Kinsler as a major leaguer. Sadly, we were listening to the Rangers farm department who seemed very high on Kinsler even when some of the scouts weren't. He's still playing for the Rangers in Arlington, unless something happened at the trade deadline that we missed.
Yes, we're human, we make a few mistakes, or we get intel on players that doesn't pan out. We listened to the hype on BJ Upton back in 2004, and discounted his naysayers, even though they made some good points. Our bad.
The FAB50 is a movement and talent ranking. Notice we put movement first? For good reason. You don't have a home, then you could be Babe Ruth, but you're still Babe Ruth in the minors.
These days, with a lot of mediocre players on long, costly contracts, no one gets sent down. We call that the "green cap." it's the glass ceiling of player development. A lot of great players get stuck and rot on the farm waiting for a spot. Don't believe me? Ask Joe Thurston, who keeps trying to find a major league home full time.
Then there are the mediocre players like catcher Dioner Navarro. Not a Hall of Famer in my book in any age, but Tracy, the former Dodgers skipper, put him up so high on a pedestal that you needed a helicopter to interview the kid. This was, after all, the Yankees prospect dispatched to the Dodgers in the big trade that sent the Big Unit, Randy Johnson, from Arizona to the Bronx. How can you not put him on a list of fast-track players? Talent be damned, the guy was going somewhere. He was promoted, flamed out, and traded to Tampa. We just worry about them making the majors, and he did that, as promised.
One other reason to love the MLN FAB50, aside from the full-length features and super-trading card-type 17" photo layouts we do on players, is that we are independent. BA was once independent like us. Now they're very corporate, and part of the same system that they were taking pot-shots at back when they were small and hungrier, and Sporting News were the big fish in the sea. MLB clubs use their rankings in discussions about player value with agents. We think that keeping that status as 'the' discussed list can rose-color a few glasses. Young would be a good case in point of that.
While I would love for Scott Boras to shove one of our articles under George Steinbrenner's puss as proof of his worth, I'm not allowing anyone on our FAB50 Committee, either in baseball or hockey, to feel pressured into using more of the major market club's players or putting a player someplace that might be a little more optimistic than their true value.
With special thanks to our draft expert, Lary Bump, who spearheads the FAB50 Committee on the baseball side, I have to say that our player picks are pretty darn good, our takes fresh, and our insight into the organizations, good and bad, is something you won't find in the sanitized world of the politically-correct publications.
Minor League. MAJOR ATTITUDE™. That's the motto that let's us provide you with the kind of minor league coverage that you'd expect from a major league publication.
To go to the MLN FAB50 Baseball 2007 rankings, click here.
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