Enough of that. The good news is that I've been spending my extra time flipping through the 2005 Baseball Prospectus.(Who this news is good for is unclear, and the fact it's not really news should be disconcerting as well, but here we are.) Ancillary from what else I think about the book—the typos are REALLY an irritation; the Cubs chapter alone seems to have been written and edited by a pre-school Jessica Simpson—I had a few observations based on their comments, which I present for general discussion:

1) Jim Edmonds. Is he a Hall-of-Famer?

2) Vernon Wells. BP posits that his next three years are going to be huge. Opinions, Bauxites? (Try to be un-biased.)

3) BP is very enamored with Milton Bradley, claiming that all that matters is the production, i.e. OBP and slugging percentage, not the production value, i.e. the drama. Undeniably there is truth to that. But as I alluded to in my preview for the Giants, is there a statistical threshold for "attitude problems"? In other words, how good must Bradley, and others like him, be to justify the antics, which, though we'd like to pretend otherwise, are a distraction? One more easily accepts Barry Bonds, for instance, unless one is foolish enough to discourage slugging percentages that look more like defensive fielding percentages. Make no mistake: Bradley is a player, but last year his numbers (108 OPS+, 19 HRs in 516 at-bats) were nothing special.

4) Is Andy Marte worthy of his #1 prospect status? Only one Blue Jay, Guillermo Quiroz (#41), cracked the top 50 (Russ Adams was an "honourable mention"). Who did they leave out? And why?

5) Commenting on Ed Yarnall, they eat some crow about their prediction of stardom for him (BP wasn't alone in getting it wrong with Yarnall), but then go on to say, essentially, "You never know when a pitcher 'gets it'." On the same nexus as the Bad Attitude Threshold, at what point do you simply say, "Enough"? (In the future this will be the Bruce Chen Threshold, after Chen has worked his way through all 30 ML teams. For hitters, this could be the BP Mark Johnson Line Of Stiffication.)

I'll have more later, but for now I yield the floor to the Bauxite community. Feel free to use this thread as a replacement for the other catch-all threads. Feel free to link any material you'd like. As ever, baseball should be the theme. Yes, I realize that I didn't mention the word "baseball" until the 117th word of this entry, but I'm allowed. At least, Mick told me I could do it. Blame him.