Conor Glassey spent five years working at Baseball America, covering the draft and contributing to their annual Top 100 prospect list. He now writes at his own blog and tweets from @conorglassey. This article was published on his own site last week, and is being re-published here with his permission.

After the surprising news of Robinson Cano signing a 10-year contract with the Seattle Mariners worth $240 million, it got me thinking: Did you know that Robinson Cano never cracked Baseball America’s Top 100 prospect list? You probably did because Larry Stone wrote an excellent article about Cano that mentioned it. After realizing that fact about Cano, I decided to take a look, position-by-position, at who else can make that claim.

By no means is this me being critical of BA’s rankings (in some of which I was lucky enough to participate). Dating back to 1990, Baseball America’s Top 100 list is the cornerstone of the industry, with the clout to back it up. Player rankings of any type aren’t easy to put together, but I have always felt (before, during and after my employment there) that Baseball America has the best process for their rankings. In many ways, BA’s annual Top 100 list is the culmination of the entire season of work—an exclamation point on another great year of covering amateur baseball and the minor leagues better than anyone else. But everyone can always improve and I’ve always felt that you learn more from mistakes than you do from success. This is an article I wanted to do during my time at BA, but never had the time.

Of course hindsight is 20/20 and this list isn’t about pointing out individual players that didn’t make any of the lists. Rather, I’m just trying to determine if certain player profiles are slipping through the cracks . . .

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Yesterday, I noted that the historical average set by the Hall of Fame was to induct between 1-2% of the total population of baseball players, and that was fairly consistent throughout history. In response, some commenters noted that expansion and specialization meant that perhaps the inflation of the number of players hasn’t led to a proportional inflation of worthy of Hall of Famers, and wondered what the data looks like if we exclude the legions of middle relievers who bounce around the game but obviously aren’t in consideration for election to Cooperstown.

This was a good point, and a potentially interesting challenge to the idea I put forward yesterday. Perhaps the change in roster construction in the modern games means that we should be electing a lower percentage of players now than we have been before. Maybe the correct model isn’t total percentage of all players, but total percentage of all players who had long sustained careers that would give them at least a fighting chance to end up on the HOF ballot.

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With the baseball off-season moving into a little bit of a lull, the next few weeks of baseball writing often take on a decidedly Cooperstown-centric swing. Hall of Fame ballots have been mailed to the 600 or so voters, and they have until December 31st to decide how to fill those ballots out, so those of us with some semblance of a platform usually try to influence the voters while they have the ballot in their hands. For instance, Jay Jaffe penned this excellent piece on Mike Mussina’s candidacy, and anyone who is planning to vote for Tom Glavine but not Mussina should read that and reconsider.

I probably won’t join the lobbying for any specific players this year. From my perspective, there are something like 15 to 19 reasonably justifiable candidates on the ballot, so lobbying for one player out of that bunch is necessarily lobbying against some other viable candidate. So, instead, I’m simply going to try and provide some evidence that will hopefully convince my fellow members of the the BBWAA to stop waffling and start voting in worthy candidates.

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Free agent closers are the most expensive single player type in baseball. When Matt Swartz did his price calculations for different positions a couple of years ago, he found that teams were paying approximately three times the average $/WAR for relievers as they were for the general population of players. And a disproportionate amount of the money going to relievers was paid to the “proven closers” who hit free agency coming off strong seasons with big save numbers. While solid setup guys might collection a few million and get a two or even three year deal occasionally, big name closers were racking up paychecks that paid them like above average everyday players, with the crazy Jonathan Papelbon contract ($50 million over four years) as perhaps the height of the market’s absurd closer valuations.

The days of Papelbon-style contracts for brand name closers seem to be over. Last year, Rafael Soriano got the largest contract of any free agent reliever, at $28 million for two years, and besides Mariano Rivera’s final one year contract with the Yankees, no other reliever got more than $7 million per year. This year, Joe Nathan was the #1 closer on the free agent market, and he signed for $20 million over two years after the Rangers opted not to make him a $14 million dollar qualifying offer. Nathan’s age was always going to keep him from getting a long contract, but Nathan isn’t the only closer on the market, and now Grant Balfour is showing that the market for closers might not be what it used to be.

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Yesterday, Major League Baseball officially announced their new agreement with Nippon Professional Baseball regarding the transfer of players from Japan to the U.S. The most prominent change in the rules is the $20 million maximum fee that NPB teams will receive, and this is the aspect of the rules that has drawn the most attention. However, there is another significant change to the rules that is worth looking at, especially because of its potential long term ramifications on domestic players already under contract to MLB teams.

Under the old posting system, the move of a player from Japan to MLB was somewhat akin to a trade, only with MLB teams using cash instead of players as the currency to acquire the player’s rights. The system wasn’t that different from what we see in minor trades between MLB teams, where a player’s rights are transferred from one club to another in exchange for a small cash payment. In the last year, players such as Chris Nelson, Mike Carp, Casper Wells, and Travis Blackley have all been traded for cash, as their rights were sold from one team to another in exchange for monetary compensation. The posting system was basically just this kind of trade, only magnified, because the players getting posted were usually quite good.

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A couple of years ago, Logan Morrison was one of the best prospects in baseball. Before the 2009 season, Baseball America rated him the #18 prospect in baseball, and before the 2010 season, he was rated 20th overall. Then as a 22 year old rookie in 2010, he hit .283/.390/.447 in his debut, good for a 129 wRC+. He took walks, he made contact, he hit for some doubles power, and he looked like one of the game’s best young hitters.

And it’s been all downhill since then. In 2011, he annoyed the Marlins enough that they sent him back to the minors for a week to teach him some humility. His wRC+ regressed to 116, which combined with atrocious outfield defense made him a marginally valuable player. The last two years, he’s been even worse, posting below average hitting lines while struggling to play the field, and knee surgery limited both his playing time and his mobility.

So now, here we are heading into 2014, and Morrison has nearly 1,500 plate appearances, a 108 wRC+ over the years he’s spent in the big leagues, and a career WAR of +1.0. He will head to arbitration for the first time as a 26 year old who has been a replacement level player for each of the past three seasons. What once looked like a promising young hitter now looks like more of an opportunity to salvage a former prospect in his post-hype stage.

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Yesterday, I wrote a mini diatribe on the value (or lack thereof) provided by Nelson Cruz. Because he has earned the label of “right-handed power hitter”, teams are apparently ignoring the fact that he’s not actually that good of a hitter and doesn’t really do anything else to help a team win. Bat only players where the bat isn’t that special are probably the most overrated players in the game, and that is certainly a club to which Cruz belongs.

That description also works pretty well for the eminently available Mark Trumbo. His name is perhaps the most popular of the morning, as the Diamondbacks are apparently working multiple avenues to try and acquire his power from the Angels in exchange for some of their excess pitching. Keith Law has even reported that there’s a chance that they could get the White Sox involved in a three way trade in order to find the right fit to help them acquire Trumbo, and it seems likely at this point that the Angels will move Trumbo in a quest to upgrade their rotation.

If the reported price tag of Adam Eaton and Tyler Skaggs is even remotely close to true, it seems fairly clear that the Diamondbacks are drastically overrating the value of Mark Trumbo, an unsurprising result given that he possesses the skillset that is most often overrated. To give up a prospect like Skaggs for the right to swap a speed-and-defense +2 WAR player for a dingers-and-ribbies +2 WAR player suggests that the Diamondbacks are following the trend of putting far too much emphasis on the ways players create runs and not the amount of runs they create.

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