Prospecting isn't about stats. Nobody thinks anymore that you can look at a minor-leaguer's numbers and project him accurately using only that line. They're tiny young babies with literal physical growth as well as skills growth remaining, so it would be foolish not to take account of what scouting experts think.

With that caveat out of the way, it's still fair and important to look at actual performance. Everyone has blind spots, and at some point a player's unsexiness has to recede in the face of consistently good hitting, or vice versa -- sometimes the explosion never comes. Which is why it's interesting that Chris Mitchell, now writing at FanGraphs, has developed KATOH, a minors-only projection system. We'll see, of course, how it winds up faring against other systems that project everybody, like ZiPS or PECOTA, but the theory, if you read Mitchell's series of introductory posts at Beyond the Box Score, is intriguing.

In what may not come as a shock to you, the A's have a number of players who show up better in KATOH than in scout-based or blended prospect rankings available elsewhere. If you click the link and scroll down, you'll see Matt Olson higher than almost anyone else has him, you'll see Rangel Ravelo in the top 200, you'll see Renato Nunez look better than others seem to think. There's perhaps a love of corner bats here, and maybe the system will turn out not to fully appreciate the defensive/positional limitations of such players, but Franklin Barreto also shows up on the list in the same range that other lists have him.

Check it out and keep an eye on Mitchell's work going forward, though one suspects if he does it well enough he's not going to be working in public for long.