by Mike Rogers

With the talk of Stephen Strasburg’s starts in 2008, as well as how his opening start of the 2009 campaign, and some of the work I did breaking down the Padres 2008 draft (albeit, with tweaks I’ve made to my system since writing those, the numbers have changed a bit)  being bandied about ’round here, I’m coming by with some more college statistics-related things.

First up, Myron and I penned an article for Rich Lederer’s fantastic Baseball Analysts website. It basically is an outline of adjusting college offensive numbers to the best that I know how at this point (suggestions are aboslutely welcome).

Some good work has been done recently over at Project Prospect:

-Top 30 pitching prospects.
-Top 50 pitchers under the age of 25.
-Some article comparing the Mets 18th overall draft pick, Ike Davis, and the Mariners’ 66th overall draft pick, Dennis Raben. I bring it up because this cool guy is also writing this linkage post.

But the one that made me most excited: Lincoln Hamilton’s 2009 Draft “Big Board.” This is definitely subject to change, as all ‘big boards’ are, throughout the college season. I plan on manually entering in the numbers of college hitters (and pitchers, though I’m FAR less comfortable divulging that info at the moment since there are so many things that goes into evaluating pitchers) starting in early-to-mid March and tracking it every couple of weeks — I can bring some updates here. There’s also a thread on Lincoln’s article over there. If you’re not a member of those forums, and like studying prospects, I really would urge you to join. The articles are great, but that forum is civil, well-run, and is built on the accessability of the writers, and depth of knowledge of all the people that post there. A ton of great discussion that isn’t always prompted by the site’s founders. Even if you just want to lurk and read the discussion going on, there’s a ton of links, valuable information, and nice breakdowns by guys who do actually have scouting backrounds and/or current jobs as part-time area scouts. Great stuff.

Also, Project Prospect has started rolling out their annual Team Top 5’s (plus 3-5 honorable mentions), which will then lead to their Top 200 Prospect List. I will be doing the Padres top 5 over there.

Speaking of Prospect Lists, a little publication I like to call Baseball America released their top 100 list which means all of the big guns have released their lists. Baseball Prospectus and ESPN (A.K.A. Keith Law) already released their lists and the Sporting News released a top 50 earlier.