Baseball America has started its top 100 prospect list for 2006. No Cardinals in 51 through 100, and there probably will be only one (Anthony Reyes, duh) in the top 50. Baseball Prospectus has its top 50 out, along with their methodology (no roundtable this year evidently; both articles are free and on my computer at least there are ads for the BA Prospect Handbook). Reyes shows up 25th at BPro, even though he's a flyball pitcher. I don't know who has the best list, and I've reached the age where I don't care. I do tend to pay more attention to BA though, because their "scouty" information is something I can't find at the Baseball Cube.

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In spite of the fact that it's the busy part of the year for me, we've been interviewing for summer internships. We have a lot of candidates for these positions, so we tend to weed out folks based on certain facts. If the applicant's GPA is around 2.0, or the applicant has no computer skills beyond Internet Explorer or the resume was written in crayon, then that person probably won't be allowed in the interview room. Once candidates make it past that first cut, we try to flesh out their resumes and find out a little about their makeup. After all, part of the goal is to find candidates for permanent positions and in the long-term, attitude will likely play a significant role in career-building.

We go to a bunch of schools to do this and no one person wants to conduct all those interviews, necessitating a committee approach. One day the committee was discussing one strange candidate, when I found myself thinking "Put a Milo on that one." Unfortunately nobody else on the committee had read Moneyball, so my extraordinary wit was wasted. It did occur to me though that what we're doing is basically the same thing as evaluating baseball prospects. We use facts -- stats really -- to cut down our work and then we try to figure out what's important -- sometimes it's qualitative and sometimes it's quantitative -- from there.

All this may be obvious to you, but I've had minimal interest in the whole employer-employee mating ritual, and so I'm happy for the framework to rely upon. For example, I won't get carried away with our prospects, even the toolsy ones, because odds are they won't be superstars. I won't get carried away with any one aspect of a candidate, as again, odds are they'll need other skills to be successful in our field. Finally, no matter how good our process is, we're going to get some duds and we're going to miss some good ones. We do the best we can, but of course we're not handing out million-dollar bonuses to our picks, so there's not quite the drama of Beane's war-room. It is nice however to find some work-use for all the time I've spent thinking about baseball.