Some interesting info via an Acta Sports press release:

In the just-released Bill James Gold Mine 2010, Bill James ranks the quality of young talent on each of the thirty major league teams. This is the third year for his newly-developed “Young Talent Inventory.” The Tampa Bay Rays rank #1 in overall young talent (up from #3 this time last year).

“We begin by assigning to every player in major league baseball an “Inventory Value”,” James says, “based on his age and major league performance. We figure two scores for every major league player, an “Established Value Score” and a “Youth Score”, then we put these together into a “Youth/Value Score” or Inventory Value.”

As James notes, “Competitive teams don’t have as much room to let young players thrash around, and consequently most of the top teams don’t show as having a lot of young talent. They may have the young talent; it just isn’t in the lineup yet.” That having been said, here are his rankings of the Young Talent Inventory of all 30 teams (with their rankings last year in parentheses):

1. Tampa Bay Rays (3)
2. Colorado Rockies (8)
3. Minnesota Twins (1)
4. Arizona Diamondbacks (2)
5. Boston Red Sox (10)
6. San Francisco Giants (22)
7. New York Yankees (29)
8. Texas Rangers (19)
9. Chicago White Sox (25)
10. Florida Marlins (4)
11. Los Angeles Dodgers (13)
12. Philadelphia Phillies (20)
13. Atlanta Braves (9)
14. Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (11)
15. Kansas City Royals (5)
16. New York Mets (16)
17. Chicago Cubs (26)
18. Seattle Mariners (18)
19. Milwaukee Brewers (6)
20. Baltimore Orioles (24)
21. Oakland A’s (12)
22. Toronto Blue Jays (28)
23. Washington Nationals (23)
24. St. Louis Cardinals (14)
25. Pittsburgh Pirates (17)
26. Cleveland Indians (7)
27. Cincinnati Reds (15)
28. Detroit Tigers (27)
29. San Diego Padres (21)
30. Houston Astros (30)

Going from #29 to #7 in a year is pretty impressive. I’m not sure how much of this is the Yankees cadre of main cogs and how much of this is players outside of that – like Hughes, Joba, Gardner, Roberston, etc. But, credit has to go to Brian Cashman for making the Yankees younger in some respects.

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This is a nice start. Related, if you’ve never read “The Numbers Game,” I highly recommend it.

In time, I would imagine that many others featured in that book will be honored by SABR too.

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Check this snip from a Tom Boswell column on the Yankees from 1979…via Dan Steinberg –

You can’t give a championship team a total face-lift. All you can do is pluck the eyebrows and touch up the makeup. If the good bone structure isn’t there, you can’t fake it….Steinbrenner adapted the philosophy that “the future is now” to baseball — signing expensive free agents willy-nilly, just as George Allen traded draft picks in Washington.

It will be interesting to see if the long-term strangulation effects will be the same. Already the Yanks look like an extreme example of an Over the Hill Gang.

That was thirty years ago. Let’s hope this year’s Yankees team doesn’t also “look like an extreme example of an Over the Hill Gang.” After all, last season, they pulled a foolie on Father Time, didn’t they?

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Good riddance to February 2010 – the snowiest month in the heart of Yankeeland history. That last big storm which left 20.9 inches of snow in Central Park made this February ’10 the snowiest month in New York City’s history.

The city’s total snow for last month was 36.9 inches – which easily beat the previous high of 30.5 inches, set in March 1896. (The National Weather Service has been keeping records since 1869.) It also topped the previous high for the month of February, 27.9 inches, back in 1934.

And, hello to March 2010 – and the start of Spring Training games for the defending World Champion New York Yankees. Man, I can’t remember the last time that turning a page on the calendar felt so good.

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Just for kicks and giggles, let’s look who were the Yankees top prospects, year by year, going back to 2001 – as they would have appeared in most “blue-chip” lists at the start of each given season.

(more…)

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