David Price 2009

Most people consider David Price the top pitching prospect in baseball. His late season performance with Tampa Bay has people believing that he's going to be a superstar in 2009. I doubt that. I do think he'll be a solid major league starter right away, and he could be a star eventually, but his strikeout rates weren't quite high enough at any level of the minor leagues to convince me that he's ready to dominate in the majors in 2009. As he moved up from A to AA to AAA to the AL, he maintained a strikeout rate around one per inning. That's excellent, and his ability to keep it up as the competition got tougher is certainly a good sign. At the same time, his inability to achieve a higher rate in the lower minor leagues suggests to me that at this point, his 'true ability' is probably something like 7.0 K/9 in the majors, and I'd expect about a 3.0 or 3.5 BB/9...very solid, but not yet a star.