Ouch

While perusing Oliver Perez's PECOTA card at Baseball Prospectus, I found this comment on him from the 2003 annual:

"I had seen notes that showed Perez’s fastball at 90 mph, but it sure looked better than that to me. He supports it with a tremendous changeup and tight curveball, giving him three quality pitches to work with. Perez is mature beyond his years in terms of working hitters with speed changes; somewhere, his changeup against Reggie Sanders just hit the glove. San Diego might be the only club with better and younger front-line starting pitching than Oakland. These guys are that good."

Ouch. At least Peavy's good...

Some of these young arms that were better and younger than Barry Zito, Mark Mulder, Tim Hudson, Aaron Harang, and Rich Harden:

Jake Peavy - Hey, a success. Let's just stop here.
Oliver Perez
Brian Lawrence
Dennis Tankersley
Adam Eaton
Mark Phillips
Ben Howard
Eric Cyr
Mike Bynum

Glance at this article and think about what might have been.

So what does this tell us? Never count your minor league pitching prospects until they are hatched as fully formed big league starters. Actually, if you think about this list, Peavy is one of the best pitchers in baseball, Perez was traded for a great player (coming of a 177 OPS+ year), and Eaton was used to acquire Chris Young and Adrian Gonzalez. I guess that's about as good as you can hope for when dealing with minor league arms and potential. I think I would have preferred a rotation of Hudson, Zito, Mulder, Harden, Harang in their primes, though.