The Mailbag - July 9, 2009

While we encourage your comments on any of our pieces, The Mailbag is your chance to directly ask questions on whatever topics that you would like to get our opinions on, or to gather more information on how we do what we do. You can pose your questions as a comment to this article, or email them directly to us at baseballnumbers@ix.netcom.com.

This week's question comes from RASTROSFAN:

I was looking over your latest Top 100 Prospects and noticed, what I thought, were oversights. Can you explain the exclusion of Bud Norris P. Hou, Reid Brignac SS TB., and Brad Lincoln P. Pit?

Remember, all of our prospect lists are based on a combination of what we call the "Two C's"--Ceiling and Certainty. Its an upside issue with all three of them…Norris and Lincoln are mid- to back- of rotation guys...from a Ceiling perspective. They are in a big group with players like Troy Patton and David Hernandez of the Orioles. You will notice that Hernandez is the only one of those that makes the list, and that is because his dominance, as demonstrated by his K rate portends good things, but any of them, if given the right opportunity could have a productive Major League career. It’s not a knock on them, they are high floor, low ceiling guys.

Brignac is a similar story, though I have never been a fan of his bat, I just don’t see him ever being more than league average at best. In other words his Ceiling is just not that high. All three of these guys would certainly be on a Top 300 list, most likely between 125-200 somewhere. I think they all play in the Majors at some point, I think they rate high on the ‘Certainty’ side of the equation, I just think they are a little ‘low’ on the Ceiling side.