I love the Raben pick, personally. It´s about time the organization drafted someone like him.

Friedrich would’ve been a decent pick more in the mold of the ‘close to contributing’ side of the equation, though I’m not going to argue he’s ‘high-end impact talent.’

It’s a shame, in watching Jay Bruce, Evan Longoria, Max Scherzer, etc. come up and contribute to their respective teams, to know that we had such a guy in our system in Adam Jones and that we traded him away, though that’s done and not much we can do now.

That said, I’m hard pressed to figure out who the Mariners could have taken with their initial pick that would have added high-end impact talent. I think, ultimately, there is little at best that the Mariners could have done short of adding more high-risk high-reward talent. They definitely could have picked better in the initial rounds, though… far better.

Beyond that, Halman´s still one of the rawest players in baseball, Triunfel´s far more tools than skills, Aumont only has one major league pitch at present, and Ramirez´ pitchability grades very low. As a group of organizational top prospects, that really doesn´t compare well with other teams, even though they´re people I´m very glad to see in the system.

Good organizations have multiple players with star potential AND good prospects within a year or two of contributing. The Mariners have high-risk star potential, but nothing close to a future core until we see how those tools play out in the next few years. Given a system profile like that, it would really have been nice to add more impact talent in the draft to give the organization as many options as possible in the future.

Gomez responds with:
¨If you sincerely believe the Mariners have one of the worst systems in baseball…¨

You really need to work on understanding what people are saying before you respond to things they never said.

This question is more of an aside. What is your opinion of Baseball America’s content (and the content of the similar sites) concerning scouting reports. Are they generally trustworthy or should they generally be taken with a grain of salt?