2011 Baseball Prospect List-- Who's in and Why

The complete list consists of players named in 7 different lists, Baseball America Top 100, Baseball Prospectous Top 101, ESPN Top 100, Project Prospect Top 100, AOL Top 100, MLB Top 50, and Minorleague Balls, the last list doesn't consists of an overall ranking but rather a top 20 list for each team with a grading system. All names included in each of the six ranking lists are included, and every with grade B- or above in the final lists, summing up to 349 players.

The six Top 100/50 ranking lists is pretty consistent and consists of only 160 players, spreading out to around 6 years of cards published. I believe this is not enough to cover my basis because the 3 Bowman set each year already put more than 100 new prospect autograph into the field each year, and Elite's got more than 200. Although some of these are just fillers to pump up the set and press, obviously more than 30~50 of them deserves attentions, but if I only use the Top 100/50 lists, that'll be the only ones I can cover. So the Minorleague Balls grading system is a wonderful and nessesary implement to the list. I did add the BP star ranking lists of two stars and above, but it turns out they are almost all included in the MB list. I know BA also does a Top 10 list for each team with additional Best Tools list, which could add plenty more names to my list. But these lists are by teams, and doesn't provide a comparison between teams on a overall league level, also the tools list consists of some players with obviously no trait for success instead of the one that helped them make the list, making them marginal prospect with minimum potential at best, so I decide to leave this list out.

More than 90 percent of the players in my list already has mainstream cards out there to buy, which is important to me bacause the purpose of my list is to provide informations for sports card investment and not just how they might contribute to their teams. A player can have a great season in the minor and red hot during his initial month of called up, but it would not be very useful for the card community if he's got no cards out there to buy and sell.

The lists from other mainstream sites are useful not only because they provide a great insight on prospect scouting, but also because they provide the named player with publicity in the prospecting community, which might just be as important to his card value as his on field performance. So my list should cover most if not all prospects that would perform well, and gather enough hype to reflect on the baseball card market during the present season. Which I hope will be useful information to myself and fellow prospectors.