Please welcome Patrick Clark to the BtB fraternity (not that I'm opposed to making this a co-ed house down the road.)  My first exposure to Patrick's work came through his fascinating look at Dominican youth baseball.  He'll be taking a look at the international game at BtB, both by dissecting angles most fans aren't familiar with and, eventually, from the objective, data-driven side.  Give him a warm BtB welcome.  - Sky

"There’s no question in my mind, in 2011, certainly a [hard] slotting system and a worldwide draft are things we will be very aggressive about," said Selig.

This from MLB’s spendthrift commissioner on August 19, as the signing period for the Rule 4 draft closed and Stephen Strasburg laid waste to Mark Prior’s record for an amateur bonus. It’s no surprise then that Selig’s comments on the amateur draft have received the bulk of the attention, even if it’s also worth noting that we only seem to hone in on the international talent market when someone has been defrauded.

Still, a worldwide draft represents a more radical departure from prevailing procedure than hard slotting does, and the ramifications are greater.

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More photos » by Jeff Chiu - AP

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As we near the trade deadline, teams out of contention will look to trade away their players who don't have long until free agency.  The goal is to shed money and receive back aprospects who will provide value in future seasons that bring more hope of making the playoffs.  But on the flip side, you have to consider holding on to an upcoming free agent in order to collect draft pick compensation when they sign with another team.

Which is a better strategy, trading a soon-to-be free agent for prospects or letting him walk and collecting the draft picks?  Let's take a look.

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Simply put, Travis Snider is easily one of the best hitting prospects in the game. At just 20 years of age he flew through three levels of the minors last year and ended his wild ride in Toronto as a September call up.  He should be a fixture in the Jays' lineup right out of spring training and is a valid Rookie of the Year candidate. Let's take a look at some of his numbers to get a better idea of what his strengths and weaknesses are.

Total Zone stats are found at Minor League Splits. All other numbers came from First Inning.

First the good -- He has some serious power. You can see for that for yourself by watching this video of him winning the Eastern League HR Derby.

I think 30+ HR annually isn't out of the question, although that probably won't happen until a little later on down the road. His walk rate went up and down as he moved up the ladder, but scouts praise his ability to work the count. That  particular aspect of his game should stabilize; just as a general rule of thumb as players age, they swing less. He hits to all fields and despite his lofty strikeout totals, scouts believe that he has the sort of swing that allow him hit for a high average.

Now for the wrinkles -- His defense is crummy. A right elbow injury limited him to 96 games in the outfield last season, but his one full season in RF was a disaster. He already weighs 245 and there are concerns about his conditioning, therefore a move to first base or even playing as a DH could be in his future. While he's a career .300 hitter in the minors, he put up some gaudy strikeout numbers along the way.  It's not as if he will be legging out a lot of infield hits, so I'm not sure how much he really will hit for average no matter how sweet his swing is. He also struggled to hit left-handed pitching last year, putting up a .246/.300/.351 line against southpaws.

The flaws seem to yell "old-player skills!", but there is no reason that Snider won't be a valuable player for years to come. The question is how valuable. The scouting community sees a regular all-star, even someone who could contend for MVP's at some point. I'm not ruling that out, but I see a more conservative future, at least under his cost-controlled years. Power hitters tend to peak during their age 27-30 years, after he will have hit the free agent market. He also looks like a DH in the making, limiting his ultimate upside.

Just for fun, I used one of Baseball Reference's fun PI tools to find a comparable player Snider. For the criteria I used 20-29 year old OF/DH's that weighed at least 225, hit 35 homers or less, walked 75 times or less and struck out 120+ times during a single season. I know it's not perfect, again it was more or less just for fun. Those standards fit into his seven year PECOTA forecast. You can see the results here.

Throw out Bo Jackson and Jose Canseco, Snider isn't going start swiping bags any time soon, but  Pat Burrell, Pete Incaviglia, Greg Luzinski and Richie Sexson represent some decent enough comparisons to Snider in my opinion. The Luzinski and Burrell comparisons I like best because they are slow-footed, bad fielding, three true outcome types. Snider, Burrell and Luzinski were also first round picks. Note also the presence of a young Adam Dunn.  Incaviglia represents Snider's downside; I don't believe Snider will struggle to get his OBP above .315 every year.

For 2009, his projections* vary rather wildly --

That probably is not quite good enough for the AL ROY, not unless Matt Wieters and David Price remain banished in AAA for the duration of the season. If he was on an NL team, he would probably be the favorite. 

I hope I didn't come across too negative, Snider is a great prospect no matter how you slice it. He does however have some shortcomings and I'm interested to see how much of an effect they have on his total value. My main questions are, "can he become at least adequate in the outfield?" and, "can he somehow find a way hit for average despite high strikeout totals?" How Snider answers those questions will tell us whether he will be a star or just plain good.

*Projections found at Fangraphs

Chris Vinyard is a big 21 year old Orioles first baseman who might be one of the last serious prospects to come out of the draft and follow process, which will be eliminated starting in a few weeks. For a relative bargain price of $90k, the Birds got themselves a prospect with a nice power ceiling. They also got him with the 1143rd pick in the 2005 draft. Not a bad value.

Those 26 doubles were an Ironbirds record. He led the New York-Penn League in both doubles and homers. I'm a bit conflicted on what I see him developing into. His stats say that he's a potential three true outcomes slugger, but all of the scouting reports I've ever read say that he has a short, quick stroke. They make him sound more like a Mark Teahen at the plate rather than the Richie Sexson analog he's showing. His strikeout rate and isolated power are significant. I have no problem with three true outcome behemoths, so this isn't an issue for me. One thing that COULD be an issue is if the dip in his walk rate is real rather than a small sample size fluke. Three true outcome approaches only work well if you have walks to go with the whiffs and bombs.

Another thing that is a potential issue is Vinyard's defense. He's even less nimble than you'd expect a 6'4", 230 lb first baseman to be. He may grow up to be a butcher in the field, pushing him to prematurely DH. There are only so many of those jobs to go around. He's also not particularly quick on the basepaths, but you're smart enough to figure that one out all on your own.

Vinyard isn't an elite prospect at this point, but there are plenty of good indicators going on here so he's more than worth the effort of checking back in with him every so often. The Orioles need some thunder in their lineup at the 1B and DH spots and there isn't a whole lot in the system that's going to hold him back. If he keeps on hitting, he'll advance quickly. I'd feel a lot better about him if he made more consistent contact and developed some measure of skill with the glove.

Heath Michael Phillips is a 25 year old lefty who qualifies as a bit of a cliché. "Crafty lefty" may be one of the original baseball archetypes and he fits the bill. Since being drafted by the White Sox out of a Florida JuCo in the 10th round back in 2001, he's slowly climbed the ladder, culminating in a spectacular season in Charlotte last season. He doesn't have great stuff, working mostly with a mid/high 80's fastball with movement and command and a better than average changeup.

Last year was dominating and showed promise for a Major League career. If you would have asked me before the season, I would have told you that he's surely capable of being a lefty specialist in the big leagues. But his struggles this season have me wondering if his 2006 campaign was a career year rather than a breakthrough. His strikeout rate is mediocre and his walk rate is spiking. He's allowing more home runs. He's overall not showing the kind of ability to keep hitters off balance as he showed in 2006.

This is the problem with guys who have subpar stuff. They're always working to keep hitters off balance, get them to roll the hands over and weakly ground out to the second baseman. When their command is off a little bit or the changeup has a little less movement than usual, they don't have another trick up their sleeve to go to. Even the guy Phillips hopes to grow up to be, Sox lefty Mark Buehrle had a terrible stretch at the end of last season where he completely lost his ability to get hitters out.

Phillips is pretty neutral when it comes to ground outs/flyouts, which if he gets to the Cell might be a problem. The International League has a lot of parks that are difficult to hit the ball out of. The south side of Chicago does not have that advantage for him to exploit.

There's still hope here in the future if he develops his curve into an out pitch or if he becomes a real command specialist in the Bob Tewksbury mold. If he doesn't do one of these two things, he'll be a competent AAA pitcher for the foreseeable future, maybe getting a cup of coffee when the big club needs a spot starter or an extra lefty in the pen. If he does make one or both of those improvements, then I think he might be able to pass as a fifth starter or a long reliever.

You know, I'm surprised that Tim Hulett Jr. doesn't get more attention from scouts. He's got a decent glove, makes consistent contact, and has one of the best batting eyes in the minors. All of that combined with ML bloodlines usually at least gets a guy a token mention here and there in prospect lists. But scouts tend to greet him with nothing more than a yawn. I don't get it.

Okay, okay, I'll admit that he doesn't have much of a ceiling. He isn't going to hit for much power. And he isn't going to bat .315, which makes him a .290/.340/.350 kind of ML hitter. He even has a nominal amount of speed to offer, so that means he may be able to slide into a super utility role by learning how to play center field while backing up all of the infield spots, pinch hitting, and pinch running. There's not much risk involved, which at least makes him a prospect, even if there's no star power to be found. And look at it this way, Baseball America had Jose Vallejo ranked 29th, ahead of Hulett. I don't have a problem with ranking him outside of the top 10. But saying that he's not as good a prospect as a 21 year old second baseman who posted a .573 OPS in the Midwest League last season is insanity.

In terms of diagnostics, he's developing into a groundball/liner hitter, though that's not a bad idea as his 5'10" frame doesn't really work as a flyball hitter. There are worse things than being a slap hitter as long as you're good at it. It also bears mentioning that he's consistently been more effective against RHP than against southpaws.

So let's review, he's a good defensive second baseman who has enough smarts and footspeed that he might turn into a decent supersub kind of like an Esteban German/Chone Figgins. He doesn't have much of any kind of power. He knows the difference between balls and strikes. So how you look at him depends a lot on whether you think that the phrase "A poor man's Dustin Pedroia" is a compliment or not. The ceiling is David Eckstein at second base. The downside is that he doesn't get a chance at all and ends up cruising Durham, Tucson, Portland, and Louisville in a long AAA career.

Pay attention to this one, class because you're going to be hearing a lot about this guy in the near future. Manship has been well known in the scouting community ever since he was a high schooler in San Antonio. The right hander was a member of Team USA's junior national team and he was dominant. But he broke off a couple too many curveballs and ended up needing Tommy John surgery. The result of that was a medical redshirt at Notre Dame. When he came back, he was pretty effective in his 2 years playing for the Fighting Irish. Teams backed off of him as a draft eligible sophomore last year thinking that it would take a bunch of money to sign him. The Twins absolutely stole him with a 14th round pick and handed him a $300,000 bonus, or approximately third round money.

Manship works in the low 90's with outstanding control. His best weapon is a fall-off-the-table curve. He also has a change and a slider, but as of last fall, they were still under development rather than fully functional pitches on par with his fastball/curve combo.

The kid clearly is not being challenged at the low class A level. I haven't seen any reports of increased velocity or dramatic improvement in his changeup so I'm treating this as a refinement of his approach and a conservative assignment to start his first full season. The Twins have made a cottage industry out of drafting solid college pitchers and quickly turning them into command machines who run up through the minors like they have a plane to catch. Matt Garza, Kevin Slowey, Glen Perkins are all precedents for this.

The biggest complaint people have with Manship is that he isn't a big guy. He's only 6 feet tall and 195 pounds. When you couple that with his past elbow problem, you might get concerned about durability. There might be something to that, but it's not something you can see being a factor immediately. One thing that isn't affected by his size is his ability to induce ground balls. The guy has been a worm burner machine in his brief time as a pro. For Beloit, he almost has a 4/1 GB/FB ratio. In last summer's rather paltry 14 innings after signing, he had a ratio over 3.

I like Manship. He has a good track record going back through high school and college. He would have been drafted much higher had teams thought he was signable. He's in an ideal organization as the Twins know what they're doing when it comes to young pitchers. His ceiling is higher than that of Kevin Slowey because of the velocity and the flashy breaking ball, but he's a higher risk due to his being farther away from the Majors and his injury history. Expect him to climb the ladder fairly quickly this season, though expecting him to make it to AAA like Garza and Slowey may be asking a bit much given the rarity of such a feat and the fact that Kyle Waldrop is progressing quickly too and the upper levels of the Twins system is getting a bit crowded.

Rabelo is a switch hitting catcher who made his first appearance of the season on Thursday night, giving Pudge Rodriguez a much-deserved day off. He went 0-4, grounding out 3 times and being victimized by a pop fly once. Rabelo is up with the Tigers while Vance Wilson nurses a fairly serious sounding elbow injury. Rabelo was drafted out of the University of Tampa in the fourth round of the 2001 draft and he looks like a fairly standard backup catcher.

Rabelo started hitting for a bit more power last season, but no Big League pitcher is going to be particularly scared of him. Here's the thing, he's not clueless at the plate, but he's limited in the damage he can do. Coupled with a good glove, that spells a solid backup who is ready now. He his bat slows a bit or if he starts having injury problems, he could fall off the map and never be heard from again or he could have a 10 year career as one of those immortal catchers like Henry Blanco or Mike Difelice. Don't expect a Josh Bard or Dave Ross kind of breakout.

The future for Rabelo involves plenty more time in AAA. The Tigers have Wilson signed to a multi-year contract. Wilson is a little better offensively and he doesn't have options while Rabelo still has plenty of option years remaining. So he'll probably stay on the 40 man roster, but once Wilson gets healthy, he's going back to Toledo. Don't weep for him though, I've pointed it out in the past, but life as a AAA regular isn't that bad. I'd go as far as to say it's a nice gig. He can still expect a high 5 figure/low 6 figure annual paycheck, he gets called up whenever the team wants a 3rd catcher or when somebody gets hurt. And AAA has had a building boom on par with that of the Major Leagues. Teams like Buffalo, Indianapolis, Louisville, Memphis, Fresno, and Toledo have magnificent new parks and get nice crowds. I'd take it.