Can you give us any insight into how optimistic we should get about the Mets’ minor league pitching prospects? Familia, Holt, Carson, Mejia, Cohoon, and Harvey are looking anywhere between decent and drool-worthy (Harvey), but I don’t want to get my hopes up unnecessarily.

Also, is it a good idea to move Harvey up from St. Lucie to AA at this point? Conventional wisdom seems divided between not wanting to rush the guy through the system and trying to make sure he’s competing at the level he deserves.

– NeverSeenThemWinOne, via email.

There’s a saying, “There’s no such thing as a pitching prospect.” In a 2003 column for Baseball Prospectus, Joe Sheehan explains:

The principles behind TNSTAAPP are pretty simple. Pitchers are unpredictable. They’re asked to perform an unnatural act–throw baseballs overhand–under great stress, thousands of times a year. They get hurt with stunning frequency, sometimes enough to cost them a career, more often just enough to hinder their effectiveness. (Modern medicine has dramatically changed what a pitcher can do to his arm and still have a career.) Even the better ones–Andy Pettitte, for instance–have wide year-to-year variations in their performance. It’s only the very top 0.1% of pitchers who are consistently good year-in and year-out over substantial careers.

That’s major-league pitchers, who have proven themselves to be the best in the world at what they do, and are physically mature. Minor-league pitchers have all of the inconsistencies of the class, and are still developing in significant ways: physically, mentally and emotionally. If you can’t predict where most major-league pitchers will be two years out, it’s quite a conceit to think you can predict where any minor-league pitcher will be even one year out.

That.

It’s understandable to be pretty excited about the results coming out of the Mets’ crop of young pitchers this season — and you can throw Jeurys Familia into the group of guys NeverSeenThemWinOne listed. But pitchers being pitchers, Mets fans should be satisfied if the entire group produces two solid rotation pieces and a couple of good bullpen arms.

Of course, aces have to come from somewhere and it’s certainly better to develop one from within than to look for one in free agency, when he’s likely to be extremely expensive and on the cusp of decline. Mejia, Harvey and Familia seem to garner the most hype for their upsides, so it’s fun for fans to cross our fingers, follow closely and hope everything falls into place for one of them.

But it’s best to be reasonable. Mejia has yet to throw 100 innings in a season, in part because of the silly bullpen experiment from last season. Familia walked 5.5 batters per nine last year. Harvey is still only four starts deep in his professional career.

As for that, a bit of perspective: Mike Pelfrey, another first-round pick, was nearly as dominant as Harvey in his first four starts in High-A ball at 22. Big Pelf struck out 26 batters while walking only two in his first 22 innings, posting a 1.64 ERA.

Harvey supposedly throws a good breaking pitch, so the Pelfrey comparison is hardly a great one. But let it serve as an example of what top-flight college pitchers with mid-90s fastballs can do to A-ball hitters. And to be fair, it wouldn’t be a bad thing if Harvey winds up a league-average innings-eater like Pelfrey is. Sure, he wouldn’t be matching our massive expectations for first-round picks, but he’d be a valuable Major League commodity, something many, many top picks — especially pitchers — never become.

As for a promotion, this is far from my area of expertise but I’d guess the weather plays a role. Obviously pitchers have to learn to deal with crappy weather eventually, but since it does seem like the cold and rain increase the likelihood of injuries and since the Mets’ upper-level farm teams both play in upstate New York, there’s probably no sense pushing Harvey to a higher level until it warms up a bit around these parts. If he keeps pitching anything like this, I’d guess it’ll happen by June. I mean, he has a 0 ERA.

One other thing: Cohoon rarely gets any love on top prospects lists because he doesn’t have overpowering stuff, but he is a smart guy who throws strikes and has gotten results at every level. I’d love to see a study of how those guys end up compared to the Matt Anderson types (ie the exact opposite), but then I guess there’d be no scientific way of doing that since at some point you’d need to rely on subjective judgments.