Q&A: Kevin Goldstein on Mets Minors and Draft
Last week at Baseball Prospectus, prospect guru Kevin Goldstein announced his Top 11 Prospect List for the Mets.
…i had the chance to talk quite extensively with Kevin about the Mets organization, his rankings and the draft…it’s a long interview, so i broke it up in to three parts…the first of which will run today, which deals with the team’s overall system and the coming draft…tomorrow i will talk with him about the team’s position prospects, and on Thursday i will talk with him about the pitchers…
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Jordan Zakarin: How would you rank the Mets’ system pre-Johan deal, and now post-deal?
Kevin Goldstein: Before, pretty bad, but not awful. Now, really, really bad, and one of the worst in the game. But then again, the team just picked up the best pitcher in the game.
Jordan Zakarin: In your article, you said they were bad, but a very different bad than the Astros, because they had young players. Who are those young kids that you think could make a big jump?
Kevin Goldstein: Well, again, the emphasis is on COULD. The Astros don’t have young high-ceiling talent to rank with SS Wilmer Flores and the ’07 draftees like LHP Nathan Vineyard and RHP Scott Moviel. And there is still hope for some of the young, raw talent that dissapointed in ’07, like C Francisco Pena and SS Juan Legares.
Jordan Zakarin: It sounds to me like the Mets are willing finally spend on the draft…is this draft deep enough, or are there a lot of guys demanding big bonuses, that will drop down to the Mets at 18 and 22? I guess that’s hard to predict now, but can they potentially get a big pull from their early picks?
Kevin Goldstein: It’s a fairly deep draft talent wise, but it’s hard to figure out who’s going to be the bonus problems until we see how they play this season. I think we are going to see fewer big bonus drops than we have in the past, because I think we are going to see fewer teams toeing the line.
Jordan Zakarin: Any idea where the Mets will focus on, position wise, and college-or-high school wise?
Kevin Goldstein: In general, they don’t play that pigeonholing game, and fewer and fewer teams overall do. They’ll take the best player available, regardless of position and/or source, and that’s the right way to do things.
…once again, big thanks to kevin, who took out a big chunk of time to do another interview with me…
…it seems that the Mets still have some decent prospects, it’s just more an issue of a lack of real close-to-the-majors, high-ceiling guys…the thing is, kevin is more optimistic than i had anticipated about the big picture, maybe because the big league team has a real chance to win…but, there are some younger, further away, high-ceiling guys there, which is better than having just a bunch of future utilitymen…
…as i keep saying, this draft, in which the Mets will have three picks inside the first 33, will be very, very important…
