I interpreted that as you being snide.

When you’re dealing with players who are developing on an annual basis, the trends are very helpful to look at. There is a normal development curve, but it’s of paramount importance to make sure that the player is actually following something that resembles that development curve. A lot of players hit a wall at 20 years old and never improve. Others don’t start to show promise until they’ve been in the minors for a few years. While ARL is important, ARL without showing some kind of improvement can be pretty useless.

With prospects, especially guys who came straight out of high school, you’re really not even comparing the same player from year to year, simply because the player is still physically developing. Sure, you can make some good generalizations by looking at what a player has done well or poorly in all three years, but just averaging out the three is a recipe for creating misleading statistics. As I see it, based on what he’s done each year he’s been in full season ball, it’s pretty safe to generalize that (a) he doesn’t have a great batting eye, (b) he has some trouble making contact, and © he has above-average power for a middle infielder. You can come to the same conclusion by taking the averages, but one outlier year one way or the other will skew that evaluation.

Also:

- It’s tough to take numbers in Bakersfield at face value. Yes, he did very well for the league, but due to the odd circumstances in the Cali League, there are tons of players who shine there and never do that well anywhere else, and there are lots of players who look like they should be left for dead there and then go on to do well everywhere else. While you can translate numbers from unusual hitting environments, the level of reliability for those translations is just much lower, and that has to be taken into account.

- There are measurable skills that should improve year to year (or at least remain constant) if the player isn’t stagnating. The most useful one in this regard is K/BB ratio. Despite the fact that Brignac appeared to regress a bit in Montgomery, the fact that he lowered his Ks and increased his walks was still promising. Both measures took harsh turns for the worse last year, which usually means something is wrong (i.e., the player changed their approach in a bad way, the player is having vision problems, the player can’t handle breaking pitches and just does worse when pitchers are able to throw them for strikes, etc.)

- It’s very difficult to make accurate inter-league comparisons, and most of the adjustments don’t work too well. I can see taking a three year average if you’re using fully translated statistics, but Brignac’s translated statistics don’t look too good. His statistics relative to league have generally been decent, but for the most part he’s been in relatively weak leagues in terms of prospects, and as far as I know nobody’s come up with a good way of balancing the relative strength of the players in the league.

Also, keep in mind that this will be the year that ARL catches up with him. If he doesn’t perform at least above-average for league again, his prospect stock will take a huge hit, not that it hasn’t already.

I realize some of this might not jive with the large sample police, but as someone who’s followed prospects for about 8 years and who has a background in statistical analysis (as a former experimental researcher, I understand the virtue of large samples as much as anyone), this is where I’ve come out.

What you do against more advanced competition is more relavent than what you did against lower levels. It implies you have topped out and haven’t gotten better with the competition.

Common sense, heard of it?

or is that just in relation to some other leagues.

Don’t forget to take into account the league factors. The Yankees do have a lot of parks that suppress HRs though. I remember it used to drive me nuts when the Riverdogs were a TB affiliate. Vero Beach isn’t that much of a launching pad. It’s just a launching pad relative to the rest of the league in a league that, overall, suppresses home runs, and they’ll be playing out of Port Charlotte pretty soon anyway. On average, most of the parks in the Rays system are pitcher’s parks (though two of them are ’hitter’s’ parks in strong pitcher’s leagues), though I’ll be curious to see how Bowling Green plays.

I meant doesn’t necessitate stardom more than anything. Comparing him to some other MI prospects he still stacks up well, and he’s below Escobar and Andrus on most lists I think. Do you really see any of the MI prospects in the upper-minors really becoming stars? I see him as at least as likely as someone like Escobar and nearly as likely as Andrus (who has still yet to put together a season close to as good as Brignac’s 06).