I've been wondering if the depth of the pitching on the farm system is truly reflective of a strength on the part of the Orioles, since it appears from everything one reads or intuits, that there are more teams with pitching depth, no so much because of a surfeit of pitchers, but rather a paucity of hitting prospects. We already know that the Orioles pitching mostly in "pitcher's parks" should give us reason to a bit more pessimistic about our pitching depth, and optimistic about the hitting, but what sort of shape are other teams really in?

I decided to provide myself with a simple overview. The following come from the Baseball America Prospects 2004 book. I took each organization, and broke down their hitting and pitching prospects by top 30, and top 10 lists.

2004 Pre-Season Rankings

You can see that there are 108 more pitchers overall in the Top 30 lists, meaning an average of about 3 per team more than hitters, giving an average team a split of around 16-14, or 17-13. This would place the Orioles a little higher on the scale than average, but then the quality of the players has not been addressed. From the Orioles' own system, one can wonder how readily one can draw conclusions when such non-prospects as Jose Morban, Eli Whiteside, and Ed Rogers are in the top 30. When looking at the top 10 prospects in each organization, a vastly different ratio existed. There were actually 2 more position players on the overall list. It appears that more pitchers show up lower on the list, possibly because teams draft more pitchers, pitchers fall off the list as the move through the minors, or perhaps more pitchers have made the list in the last couple of seasons, as they rest at lower positions in the minor league assessments.

The top ten systems were a plus 40 in pitchers over hitters, meaning their splits were more along the line of 17-13 pitcher/hitter, reflecting a bias towards pitching in more of the top systems, especially in Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee and Toronto.

What conclusions can be drawn from this admittedly simple exercise? Nothing, really, though it does give some small credence to the creeping thoughts I'd had concerning the overall lack of position players coming up across the board, thus elevating the status of pitching prospects. The problem here is, while the Orioles do seem to have a good number of pitching prospects, other teams do, too, and most everyone has more of them than they do position players. This may make excess pitching not quite as valuable as we might think, if more teams are loaded up on pitching than hitting. And such teams as the Indians and Blue Jays seem to be poised to have more pitching to offer to bolster their positional prospects than will the Orioles, especially since most of the remaining O's prospects are treading water or struggling.

It's always been said that "you can't have enough pitching," and there's a lot of truth to that. It doesn't seem to mean, however, that if you have a lot of pitching prospects, that you are really setting yourself apart from the rest of the major league pack. Or that you're going to be able to "trade pitching for the hitting that you need", if everyone else is hurting for hitting, too.