TWICE AS NICE

By:  Kurt Snyder & Holly Horning

The dog days of summer during a baseball season tend to settle in about right now. But when you are watching baseball like we have witnessed in Detroit, the season seems a whole lot longer.

After the trade deadline, a franchise like ours moves all of its focus to the young guys with the big club and the future talent of prospects in the minor leagues.

With the farm system improving, so are the rankings versus the rest of the league.

So, what’s Kurt and Holly’s take on the boys down on the farm?

Should we be encouraged about the progress?

K & H  have not shared their answers to the following question for the purpose of offering a wider range of perspectives. It usually works, but let’s see how things turn out.

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The Tigers’ farm system, depending upon whom you ask, has improved and is now (mostly) ranked within the Top 10. What are our two bloggers thoughts about these rankings?

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KURT

The Tigers have made it no secret that the farm system is improving and rising in the rankings. They have made it no secret that we have a formidable starting rotation in Double A.

But during a season like this year when the product on the field is so poor and when the prospects for improvement seem so far away, so many of these players in the minors better be really good in Detroit.

I agree that the starting rotation in Erie is very encouraging, but you can’t count on all of them to take their games to Detroit and star in the big leagues. It could happen and it would be a hell of a story, but it just doesn’t happen that way. We won’t know for awhile whether or not they are studs or pretenders. But I am willing to wait and see what happens.

It’s just that negativity reigns when you look at the current team and see so few pieces falling into place. You would like to say we have enough talent to fill most of them from the minors. Continued progress will tell us a lot in 2020, when we can better define the rebuild and judge the maturity of our young talent.

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HOLLY

It’s a good thing to see the Tigers’ farm system rise in the rankings and have more potential talent in it compared with the days when much of it was being traded while the Tigers searched for that elusive ring.

But we can’t take these rankings (anywhere from #12 to #6) at face value because they don’t tell the whole story or take into consideration the development process.

Each system rating takes into account different factors and only emphasizes potential and not real world stats. Many of the evaluations are based upon potential talent, depth, impact players vs. elite ones, proximity to the majors and the balance between pitchers and position players.

One thing you will notice as you peruse the multiple standings is that the most successful teams with years of competiveness tend to sit towards the bottom because they have either traded or called up their top prospects while those teams near the top are most often associated with rebuilding or losing seasons. Therefore, you can’t equate the higher rank with guaranteed success once the player is called up.

Because the Tigers have now had several #1 picks and close to it, they receive the most points (100 bonus points for each) for these players which boosts their standing among other teams. This means that many of their points reside only with a handful of players and not – what is ideal – a lot of qualified impact players which we see in the Tigers having only 3 players in the Top 100.

It’s a huge jump from potential to reality which is what has me concerned considering that the Tigers, for years, have successfully developed very few quality players (JV, Castellanos, Granderson) and even those they have traded (outside of 1 or 2) haven’t been difference-makers for other teams.

My biggest worry resides with the developmental process within the minors because if the Tigers don’t address and overhaul their shortcomings there, these rankings really won’t matter much at all.

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