I like the word 'pragmatic', Derek...lol.
Being pragmatic is to look at an overall situation and apply some analysis to it without wishing and hoping and rose colored glasses, but also without total pessimism.
The window for us to get enough production out of a prospect to make a significant difference is his six years of control. You can decide for yourself what significant production is, but studies suggest using 1.5 fWAR/year the lowest production to be determined a success.
Many consider Amed to have been a bust in NY, both their fans and ours. His average falls very close to that 1.5 fWAR. If we bring Miller up and he does exactly what Amed did over the next four seasons, our fans will turn on him, too.
But the thing is that 70% of all top 100 prospects...pick any rating service you like...will never average 1.5 fWAR.
Make your own top ten Indians prospect list. Several of them will not make a top 100 list, but lets say they all did for the sake of conversation. The odds are very good that only three of them will be of any significant value to us over their years of control. If even four do, that would be a large deviation from the mean.
The odds that any one of them would be a difference maker immediately on arrival are even longer. We can dream of the next Lindor showing up and being the shot of adrenalin this team needs right now, but in the past fifteen years only three position prospects have made a significant difference upon arrival....Lindor, Kipnis, and Santana. You can throw in Naquins freak 385 plate appearances, if you want.
But thru selective memory (lol) we tend to forget Max Moroff, Jason Donald, Lou Marson, Zimmer, Frazier, Mejia, Chang, and a whole cast of long forgottens who were highly thought of prospects.
None of this means that I'm not excited about our present list of position prospects, but with all due respect to fellow posters like Bimbo and MT88, most of them will be forgotten in five years.
The likelihood that a known and very good veteran, like Cesar Hernandez, can be replaced by Miller is near zero.
Given the over value being put upon prospects today, we could get more in short and long term production by trading our entire top ten for veteran MLBers. Obviously, that will not happen, nor should it. But it is representative of the state of baseball valuations today.
The good thing, and its a very good thing, is that the Indians have IMO found and taken advantage of a market inequity. We have gathered a bushel basket full of other teams former high end prospects who have already been indoctrinated into MLB, have already been thru their first taste of frustrations, but are still somewhat likely to become productive players while under control.
IMO we should be more excited about kids like Naylor, Amed, Gimenez, and Harold than about our prospects. They are already farther advanced in their growing pains than the kids who have yet to get here
