The Chicken Friars Top 100 Padres Prospects List–An Introduction

It’s no secret my productivity is down on this site this month, as I’ve had a few stretches where I’ve gone a couple days without posting, mainly only writing series previews and wrapups.

I haven’t been completely slacking off with respect to Padres coverage, though: I’ve just been spending a lot of my prospect research time putting together a Top 100 Padres Prospects list. Now that we’re past the signing deadline, and we know who will be a part of the organization from the 2010 draft, I can move forward with beginning to disseminate some of my rankings.

The way I’m going to do this is by writing one “player profile” at a time, much like what you’d see in the Baseball America Prospect Handbook, if you’ve seen that (and if you’re interested in the minors and haven’t read it, then I highly recommend it). I’ll try to write about one per day, but I might need to take a day off here and there, and some days may see me go on a big writing blitz and knock out three or more profiles. I’ll have a nice link list to all the profiles, and this introduction, at the bottom of each profile, so it should be nice and easy to navigate around.

A few things I want to emphasize about this list:

1.) These rankings were finalized today, August 17, 2010. If a player gets hurt, has a huge slump, or gets really hot in the next couple of weeks, that performance won’t move him up or down in the rankings. They’re set in stone now.

2.) I feel that the rankings themselves shouldn’t be too much of a point of contention. It was very difficult to rank these prospects. I feel like some of the guys in the 80s are often considered nice prospects, and others in the 30s and 40s are unknowns to most fans. It’s tough to weigh all the factors together and come up with something, particularly when you’re dealing with guys like Donavan Tate, Aaron Poreda, Kellen Kulbacki, etc. They’ve all had huge issues in 2010; do you downgrade them a ton, keep ranking them based on ceiling, or what?

As a result of this, I really would like the majority of the discussion about these rankings to be about the profile itself, not the number attached to it. If you think I ranked Tate way too low (and many likely will), but you agree with my assessment of his upside and downside, then fine. Tate could be a star, but he may never stay healthy, and he may never produce, okay? I may weigh that bust potential differently than you do, but if we agree on the basic premise of the thing, there’s no need to have petty arguments over the rankings. That’s just sidetracking from an intelligent discussion.

3.) In case anyone’s wondering, here’s a brief list of guys who just missed the Top 100 cut:

Alberth Martinez
Craig Stansberry
Craig Cooper
Uber Paz
Alvaro Aristy
James Needy
Chris Fetter
Carlos Garcia
Daniel Garce
Jorge Minyety
Aaron Everett
Dexter Carter
Jesus Lopez

The final player cut from the list, prospect #101, was Matt Combs.

So, there’s my introduction. Hopefully, you’ll enjoy my insights on who I believe are the Padres’ top 100 prospects. I really hope to see some good discussion on the profiles. I hope to get prospect #100 up in the next day or two, and we’ll take it from there.

The Chicken Friars 2010 San Diego Padres Top 100 Prospects List

Introduction
#100 Chris Stewart