By Darryl Houston Smith

League 10

One of baseball’s annual rites of winter includes going down to your local newsstand to pick up a few of the many fine magazines devoted to the upcoming fantasy baseball season. We all do it, but then we get home and start reading them only to find out that many of those publications were written months ago. In the end, they are already past their sell date and tell us little.

So here is some fresh intelligence for you to help in your upcoming Mafia drafts and, even more importantly, this is information that will help guide you when you have to make those crucial decisions during the season with respect to which key prospect pickups can save your season or turn you into a champion.

Last year’s Mafia drafts saw too many top prospects taken far too soon. Did you waste a valuable pick on Homer Bailey or Alex Gordon? Or did you wait and pick up Ryan Braun or Troy Tulowitzki as free agent pickups? If you drafted anybody named Homer, then this list is for you.

In putting together these rankings, I have tried to create a highly personalized –and thus deeper subjective — blending of available axioms, profiles, and projections. My GVA “good value approach” to ranking prospects is based on my belief that good risk avoidance is crucially reliant on being able to recognize good values. Ron Shandler is fond of saying, “This is not a game of projections. It is a game of market value versus real value”. I could not agree more. I have practiced GVA successfully in real world situations and find that it adapts surprising well to fantasy baseball.

As you look over this list, you may not see everyone that you expected to see. For instance, twenty-year-old, Justin Upton, was dropped from my 2008 prospects list since he has reached 140 MLB at-bats. This is because I use the same cut-offs for prospects as does the Baseball America Prospects Handbook (130 at-bats or 50 big league innings). It keeps things clearer.

Here is the first installment of my Top 100 prospects for the year 2008. In the following days and weeks, each of these rising stars will be briefly profiled and will have a Major League ETA assigned to them. During the season, look for more detailed discussions on prospects. Unlike those forgotten magazines from January, this information will remain fresh and vital throughout the year. Now, let’s mine for some “gold”!