Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Mets' Farm System

Well, the Baseball America, John Sickels and Kevin Goldstein Prospect Lists have begun to come out, so I think that it's time to dive into some prospect talk.

The Mets have a pretty solid farm system, with a combination of talented pitchers and an assortment of high-upside position players, although overall the system doesn't have much pitching depth. The Mets have pitchers Jennry Mejia, Brad Holt and Jonathan Niese leading the way, along with a solid group of positional players, highlighted by Fernando Martinez, Ike Davis, Wilmer Flores, Jefry Marte, Josh Thole, Ruben Tejada and Reese Havens. Only Martinez, Davis, Niese and Thole are remotely ready to play in the majors, and the team saw rough performances from Flores and Marte in the lower minors, so there's still a lot of projection in this system.

Certainly, the clear problem with New York is that they don't choose to take advantage of their financial power in the draft. They made nice choices lately with Davis, Holt and Havens, but they've consistently chosen to spend their big money on Latin prospects such as Martinez, Mejia, Tejada, Flores, Marte, Jose Reyes, Carlos Gomez, Francisco Pena, Anderson Hernandez and Deolis Guerra.

While that has worked out fairly well for the Mets, they've failed to take advantage of their massive advantage is resources in one of the easiest places to do that, the draft. They have a solid farm system because they've made a couple of nice draft picks and a couple of the the Latin signings have worked out thus far, but there's a lot of projection in the system and the Latin American talent well could run dry if they go through a run of bad luck.

The Mets could have a consistently great farm system like Boston's if they were willing to spend big money in the draft, and for whatever reason, Omar Minaya and company have chosen not to do that. Personally, I'd love to know why.

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