Dear Mr. Fred Nelson, Director of player development........Sir, can we please speed things up a bit?

I think players, in terms of development and readiness for promotion, have such a variance in how they need to be treated. Each player needs to be treated as an individual case. Sure, there are some general rules of thumb (a player should never spend 3 years at one level, a player is unlikely to drastically improve past age 27), but the overall strategy should be the people with the most exposure to the player should be the ones making a judgement based on individual performance/analysis. In Bushue’s case, I definitely think he is getting closer to a “sink or swim” moment, but throwing him up to AA not only might be squandering his latent talent by rushing him, it may also deprive another, more ready player of a AA rotation slot.

I agree with Orem that many of the current youngsters have been rushed. Other than Martinez and Jack Shuck, I think every player under 25 should be in the minors in 2012. Castro was rushed and needs to ease back into everyday play. Wallace needs to be in AAA until he finds his confidence and power stroke. Altuve needed time in AAA to work on plate discipline. Paredes needs minor league work to get better defensively at 3B (and to work on striking out less). Lyles’ clock was started too early and to me he hadn’t shown an ability to truly dominate AAA, and at his age, there was still plenty of possible tweaking that couldve been made to raise his ceiling.

Case in point; Hunter Pence was at AA when they moved him to the majors. So, does that mean he wasn’t good enough to be in AAA??? That is beyond explanation.

That’s not necessarily how it works. Most of the very best prospects in baseball never make it to AAA. By the time they have a significant number of games in AA, it can be obvious that the player is ready for major league ball, and moving them to AAA won’t accomplish anything except delaying a good career. AAA is populated with mostly rehabbing veterans, older guys who have had something happen to them that stunted their major league careers, and “organizational soldiers” whose best chance at making the majors is as a short-term bench player when somebody gets hurt.

Many good prospects make it to AAA, but they are often players whose position is blocked in the majors, late bloomers, or guys with less than elite talent who have something specific to work on to improve their game unless that weakness gets exploited in the majors.

In Pence’s case, he had no need for much time in AAA because he had no noticable weakness in his game and there was an open spot for him in Houston.

In Altuve and Paredes’ cases, as clack pointed out, both of those guys have huge holes in their skill set that really could use some work in the high minors, mostly having to do with being more selective about which pitches they swing at. In the majors, the pressure to perform could prevent them from working on that, and as a result they may never be as good as they could have been had they stayed in the minors for another year or so to work on plate discipline.

… some of these international guys (Altuve and Paredes, for example) can be on pretty different timelines that their American counterparts. They went through a different system and can sometimes develop a little faster, I think. Not that any of those guys were ready to skip AAA this past season, but it’s a thought.