Bill Conlin: Baseball prospects? Depends on the height of your ceiling

JUST AS YOU WERE starting to get over the Cliff Lee trade, you got a fresh knee to the groin.

MLB.com is out with its 50 best 2010 minor league prospects list and ESPN.com's Keith Law, a ballwriter, just tossed his Top 100 at the well-punctured dartboard. A couple of weeks ago, AOL's Fanhouse published its Top 100 list.

Throw a few thousand grains of salt on these subjective and, in many cases, premature ratings of players anywhere from a few months to a few years from the major leagues.

Let me use South Jersey's first-ever first-round picks to illustrate the point.

Bill Rowell, a 6-5, 205-pound third baseman from Bishop Eustace Prep, was the ninth pick overall by the Orioles in the 2006 amateur draft. Four seasons later, Rowell has yet to play an inning above Class A. He is probably one more bad season from being dealt or quietly released.

Making both the Fanhouse and ESPN Top 100, however, was Millville High centerfielder Mike Trout, a fleet lad with power and a first-round Angels pick last June. Trout did everything in the short-season rookie Arizona League but hit with home-run power. But, hey, when Mike signed he was still 17.

Is it fair to put an 18-year-old as high as 49 (ESPN) and 52 (Fanhouse)? Shouldn't we at least see how he does in a full-season league?

You'll moan with despair if you take the ESPN rankings personally. But Fanhouse will make you feel better about the Cliff Lee and Roy Halladay deals that involved seven top Phillies prospects and three Mariners minor leaguers.

ESPN's Law gives props to Phils untouchable Domonic Brown (No. 14) and handed-off-to-Oakland Michael Taylor (No. 24), but he buries the key to the Halladay deal, Kyle Drabek, at No. 40. And he strands catcher Travis D'Arnaud, a key member of the same package, at No. 99.

Ah, but here comes the part that will peeve your pinstripes: Of 100 names, not one of them belongs to Phillipe Aumont, Tyson Gillies or J.C. Ramirez. The Mariners trio drew a blank from ESPN.com.

But Fanhouse's Frankie Piliere, a former Rangers scout, treated the Aumont, Gillies and Ramirez-for-Cliff Lee and a bone-spur-to-be-revealed-later, the deal that raised so many hackles, with a modicum of respect.

He rates Aumont No. 29, which is higher than he pegs Michael Taylor (No. 38), and Gillies makes the cut at No. 50. Ramirez is a raw "power arm" and is not considered list-worthy at this time.

The Aumont evaluation opines, "[He is] not as far along in his development as Kyle Drabek but the raw stuff stacks up with anyone." If you go on YouTube and search for Aumont's clips, you'll see a tall, raw-boned lad with good mechanics and a definite power arm.

As for Gillies, Fanhouse ranks his analog, Phils minor league stolen-base king Anthony Gose, at No. 46, citing his pure basestealing speed and howitzer arm. Gillies sits four spots behind his fellow centerfielder, despite posting much better numbers in the high-Class A California League, a full level higher than Gose's Lakewood club. Gillies hit .341 with 44 steals and nine homers.

All of this wild surmise, of course, swings like an expensive chandelier above two words:

High ceiling . . .

That is the promissory note scouts affix to so many seven-figure bonuses. High ceiling is why the Phillies selected a fast and powerful Brooklyn kid named Anthony Hewitt out of swanky Connecticut prep Salisbury School in the first round of the 2008 draft. It was a Spider-Man reach. But let the record show their second-round pick was Gose. Meanwhile, Hewitt was carrying the dreaded breaking-ball virus - Swing Flu - and has been an error machine at third. But he's got all those exciting tools and a ceiling so high Michelangelo would need an extra tall ladder to paint it.

Let me use my man, Michael Taylor, and the Phillies' man, Domonic Brown, to illustrate how the high-ceiling thing plays.

Everybody rates Brown, drafted late and from under the grasp of a University of Miami wideout ride, as a better prospect than Taylor. Michael was drafted out of Stanford's excellent program. In other words, he was already several baseball classifications ahead of a kid who brought only raw skills to the game.

Taylor has advanced five levels in 2 1/2 minor league seasons. In 2008 he batted a combined .346 at low- and high-Class A, making both the Sally and Florida State League All-Star teams. Last year, he hit a combined .320 at Reading and Lehigh Valley with 20 homers, 84 RBI and 21 stolen bases, despite playing in just 116 games.

The rap on Taylor (and this will make anybody who played ball in the 1960s and '70s retch)? He concentrates too much on putting the ball in play. A man who is 6-5 and weighs 250 should be pounding more homers, right?

See, you have to remember that this kind of maybe-he's-reached-his-ceiling thought is coming from the same body of experts who decided that Ryan Howard would never have the bat speed to hit major league fastballs. "Look at how many of his homers go to left," they would say.

Dom Brown has yet to pay his skills forward. He has had two straight solid seasons, showing flashes of his occasional power, burner speed and big rightfield arm. But only flashes, like the distant flashes of what my grandmother used to call "heat lightning."

Just don't assume that Domonic Brown is a year away from playing an outfield corner here, not when there is an All-Star there named Jayson Werth, who has already paid to have his own high ceiling gilded. And will get his payback with interest.

Send e-mail to bill1chair@aol.com.

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