(March 2008)
The Perfect Game Major League Player of the Day was started last year (2007). There are a large number of Major League players who attended Perfect Game events while they were in High School. Each day we will identify one Major League player with Perfect Game ties. Every team in MLB has former PG players, so we will be tracking the stats daily to find one player to honor each and every day of the season in this column.
It has been estimated that by year 2009, over half of all those playing in the Major Leagues will be players who had previously attended Perfect Game events. This will account for over 80% of the Major Leaguers who were born in the United States. With hundreds of top prospects throughout the minor leagues to go with the large number of those who have already made it to the Big Leagues, this should be a very interesting column for many years to come.
Keep in mind that there are only a very few players presently on Major League rosters who appeared in PG events before the year 2000. So most all of the players who will be mentioned in this column are still very young. Many of these young players will have great careers, with all star appearances, winning awards and hopefully some future Hall of Famers. Some of these players have already been in MLB All Star games including Carl Crawford, Prince Fielder, David Wright, Scott Kazmir, Brian McCann, etc.
No one does a better job of tracking minor league players than Baseball America. In last year’s BA list of top 10 prospects from each organization there are some interesting facts revealed. We can’t give the names of the players due to copyright rules, but here are the results.
Players who had attended PG events accounted for the #1 ranked prospect in 22 of the 30 organizations.
Here are more interesting facts gathered from the BA list…
Team – Number of players in the 2007 top 10 who have attended a PG event
Orioles – 7 of the top 10
Red Sox – 8 of the top 10
Yankees – 6 of the top 10
Devil Rays – 7 of the top 10
Blue Jays – 4 out of 10
White Sox – 8 out of 10
Indians - 8 out of 10
Tigers – 5 out of 10
Royals – 8 out of 10
Twins – 8 out of 10
Angels – 8 out of 10
Athletics – 6 out of 10
Mariners – 7 out of 10
Rangers – 8 out of 10
Braves – 8 out of 10
Marlins – 9 out of 10
Mets – 4 out of 10
Phillies – 7 out of 10
Nationals – 8 out of 10
Cubs – 8 out of 10
Reds – 8 out of 10
Astros – 6 out of 10
Brewers – 7 out of 10
Pirates – 7 out of 10
Cardinals – 9 out of 10
Diamondbacks – 6 out of 10
Rockies – 6 out of 10
Dodgers – 8 out of 10
Padres – 7 out of 10
Giants – 6 out of 10
The above figures show that out of the top 300 prospects in 2007 (top 10 in each organization) 214 had attended Perfect Game events. Of the 86 top prospects who did not attend PG events, the vast majority were from Latin America or other foreign countries.
Well over 4,000 draft picks in the past 6 years have attended Perfect Game events, this includes over 150 first round selections. Around 73% of all draft picks in the 2007 draft were players who had attended a Perfect Game event.
We plan to have some fun tracking the careers of these outstanding players who had attended PG events….
