I don’t hate prospects; I really don’t. (Jeff’s kidding when he calls me a jerk, btw. At least I hope he is.) In fact I am en route to Binghamton to talk to prospects as we speak.

It is undoubtedly important for teams to develop deep farm systems and build from within. It’s the best way to build a sustainable winner in baseball.

What annoys me is the impatience with which fans seem to track prospects and the authority with which they purport to scout them. Even for baseball teams armed with legions of professional scouts, predicting which young players will turn out good and which will suck is a game of educated guesswork.

It seems sometimes fans lose sight of how difficult the road to the Majors can be, how unlikely young players are to ever become superstars, and how much more valuable a Major League contributor is to his team than some teenager that shows promise for three years down the road. I do it myself all the time.

I wrote more about this back in May.

Fun fact: On a windy day in July, my wife and I drove out to the Hamptons, where my sister was staying for the weekend. I brought a kite my parents had given me for some occasion a few years ago. I hoped it would be a fun thing to do with my three-year-old nephew.

I put the kite together and took it out to the beach, then proceeded to run around like a goon for the next hour trying to get it airborne. There was plenty of wind, too.

Then to make matters worse, some smug bastard in a linen shirt came out onto the beach with a kite of his own and got it flying without any effort whatsoever, then paraded past me with his kite in the air, pretending he was just nonchalantly flying a kite even though he was clearly showing off.

Long story short, if kite flying becomes a professional sport around here don’t look for me on the leaderboards anytime soon. I maintain that the kite was defective.

Anyway, in terms of popular Thai sports, I much prefer sepak takraw: