The top rated Dominican is Eskarlin Vasquez, OF and the Giants are pursuing him: "As it sits right now, Vasquez appears to be the top all-around position player in the class. A right fielder with a strong arm, Vasquez has shown some good power at the dish and could get a bonus north of $2 million. The San Francisco Giants are considered among the favorites at this stage to land him, but several clubs will be involved."
Sounds pretty good and is a good sign that the Giants will continue pursuing top talent in the region. While the failure rate for the top picks have been high (for every one that made it on Baseball America's Top signing bonus list, it seems like two or three fails big time), basically you have to play the game if you hope to find someone in this market who can make a difference.
Another article on top Dominican players: http://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2010/05/dominican-republic-top-10-july-2-prospects.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+MlbTradeRumors+(MLB+Trade+Rumors)
ReplyDeleteEskarlin Vazquez is not rated as high in this list.
But that's OK. Given the vagarities of scouting evaluationsa and what they value, that is not a surprise. It is good to get a number of different views in order to get a good grasp overall of who is really good and why.
And, in any case, this is a nice description of what really happens in Latin America to find these players.
If tryouts are suspect because that prospect happens to have a bad day, I wonder how hard/expensive it would be to create an army of scouts to attend every game and cover most players, particularly with video taping so cheap today, you could just hire guys on the cheap to go and tape games for your real scouts to analyze, I would think.