On a recent Baseball Prospectus podcast, the guys were talking about what talent-stacked rosters there were at this year's Futures Game. Among others, they enthused about a kid named Bundy. Maybe you've heard of him. Then as they were wrapping up, Jason Parks said something along the lines that it would be cool to come back in 5 years and see how many of this year's prospects were now All-Stars.

I thought "Hey, that's a pretty good idea." Then, having a paucity of good ideas of my own, I quickly advanced to that thought's adjunct: "Hey, I could steal that idea." Much as committing to do something 5 years from now appeals to my inherent laziness, I decided it was more practical to take this notion and look back. What return have the Orioles seen from their Futures Game reps in recent years?

So I looked at the Orioles reps from 2002 - 2010. Since the result is a mix of pitchers and position players, I use some measures that apply to both. I show the number of ASG appearances just to keep in the spirit of Parks' original idea. Since popularity is not necessarily value, I use career to date WAR and RAR for that. Suspecting the value might not be very high for the sample, I thought I'd check for basic utility too. In a sorry organization, the number of pro games also doesn't necessarily mean you were even useful, but as the number gets higher the chances you were do too. For cases where the games accrued to another team, I tossed in the trade return.

The result (from B-R as of 8/4/2012, I meant to post this last week):

Surprise! No All-Stars. More importantly, hardly any value either. 13 players over 9 years have produced 21 wins, with the 3/4ths of that being Erik Bedard. They have made a difference of 309 runs, with 2/3rds of that being Erik Bedard. In terms of games played they don't average out to one MLB season between them.

It's a familiar flavor of depressing that 11 of the 13 of them are pitchers and only Chris Tillman is contributing to the major league club today. One of them we flipped for another club's Futures Game disappointment (the adorable Felix, Cubs 2003 & 2004) and we know how that turned out. Five of the lot show negative WAR. Of course, the book isn't closed on the Cavalry, nor on Nolan, so this table could look different in a couple years.

This is just another way to display what we've all been through with the Orioles over the last decade. It leads right back to the old question, how much of this futility is the result of luck vs. bad player development? I'm not a big believer in streaks of luck running for nine years, so it looks more like development. To test that, I compared the results of the same exercise for two of our AL competitors.

Yankees:

Devil Rays/Rays:

Fewer players in the totals (Yanks, 11, Rays, 12), but their Futures delivered them 3 to 4 times the total WAR, RAR or playing time. One negative WAR player in the bunch for each team. I could have done this just with the names and it may have spoken on its own. No Cabrera or Cano, no Longoria or Crawford for the O's.

Has our development process changed? In a decade, will a similar exercise using the class now started with Machado, Schoop and Bundy look any different? The miniscule pro sample we got this week from Machado is as encouraging as it is statistically meaningless. Absent a window into the inner workings of the farm system, the best we can do is hope.