3and2Fastball posted:From the perspective of someone who lives in Wisconsin, I can say that top players from here absolutely utilize Perfect Game's help in ways that no other organization or scouting service would provide. For Gavin Lux (1st Round pick - Dodgers), Ben Rortvedt (2nd Round pick - Twins), and Jerred Kelenic (projected Top 10 overall pick in the 2018 draft), they wouldn't have been been positioned to go as high in the draft w/o the Perfect Game National or the All-American Game at Petco. Living in Wisconsin they just don't get the exposure of playing enough top-flight competition (even if they do play in a few WWBA Tournaments with their travel teams) to get properly slotted in the draft without those elite events.
But they have benefited from that exposure already. The need to televise them and parade them in front of a crowd of scouts at Petco is immaterial at a certain point in my opinion and is a marketing exercise for the event organizer. Look at where these players went in your example, 1st rd to Dodgers, 2nd rd to Twins and a 2018 top 10 pick potentially. I will give PG some credit, but also credit those kid's parents and/or advisors/coaches who told them to get exposure at these events. With that level of talent, it was probably apparent at their first PG event they were prospects. PG definitely provides a platform to compare apples to apples in these top events, but many of the Showcase events also allow oranges, pomegranates and a few lemons in as well.
I know that different regions of the country get different attention from scouts/colleges when it comes to baseball, the hotbeds being California, Florida, Georgia, Texas - and now apparently Wisconsin, but really - if I lived in Wisconsin and my son demonstrated skills that either I or a coach recognized as being very good, I would have driven my butt to the closest PG showcase. Cars are mobile, and if necessary can be slept in (done that a night or two myself).
Properly slotted for the draft is really something that nobody knows. Kids can get drafted high and not pan out. It happens. PG All Americans are great HS baseball players who project to the next level (and beyond), but they haven't gotten there yet. There is a ton of hard work to do on that journey and if that kid has cruised to this point due to being a stud at the HS level, the wakeup call is coming in all likelihood once they step on the field against professionals who are all striving for the same goal and that chasm in talent closes. It's really easy, even for the untrained eye, to say "this kid is special" when they are throwing 95mph, running a 6.4 sixty, launching bombs or throwing 92mph across the diamond. I saw Hunter Green play in the PG AAC and could tell he was the best player on the field...and I am by most definitions an idiot.
Any one of us on this board are as qualified as most anyone else in baseball to spot that talent. It's the guys downstream who the ones who are tougher to call. I did a quick count of players PG had ranked as "top 500" in the 2017 class - approximately 32 pages with 50 players per page. Why is that? Because there is not as much difference between #500 and #1,500. They are all good baseball players who PG kind of lumps together. How much meaning is there in that ranking? It seems most of those kids end up committed to good to very good D1 programs. Top 1000 puts about another 1,700 kids in a category - and they for the most part are going small school D1 and below or uncommitted by PG site data. Just reporting what I see.