MLB.com has a nice piece on Rice third baseman Anthony Rendon and how the upcoming 2011 MLB Draft is affecting him personally. With the explosion of new sources of information about the draft – such as Twitter and websites like this one – the sheer amount of stuff available on the highest-rated prospects is many times what would have been available a decade ago.
“I really stopped myself from trying to see what people are saying about me. I’ve had old coaches saying not to worry about it, and the best thing is to have your family not even worry about that, because it will stress them out even more. That’s what I’ve tried to tell my parents, because they’ll read something about me [and get upset]. I try to tell them, ’Don’t even read about it, don’t worry about it, don’t take it into consideration.’”
That’s good advice. There’s little Rendon can do to change his draft status at this point (assuming he’s already released his medical records), so he stands to gain little from freaking out about what’s going to happen on Monday. And meanwhile, there’s a ton of information out there, but the signal-to-noise ratio on most of what’s being written about the draft is really low. Take all these mock drafts coming out, for example – nobody knows what the Pirates are going to do with the first overall pick. The Pirates aren’t talking. So there really is very little to be gained from some of the guessing certain people are doing.
Whatever happens, Rendon and other top prospects can expect to continue to deal with the scrutiny. Their minor-league numbers will be combed in the same way their amateur performances currently are. But perhaps the amount of speculation will die down a bit.