Once upon a time, in a remote Himalayan theocracy, an old ruler once wise and powerful had spiraled into grave illness. His decisions were proving odder and odder, and the people, mostly poor farmers who scratched out sustenance from the thin air and rocky soil, were perplexed. How could this be? He is, after all, divinely embodied, half-human half-deity, like all our rulers before him, a descendant from the loins of the Great Ox-in-the-Sky that shines at night upon our kingdom in the brief but beneficent summer months. They dared not speak ill of their ruler. They could only look at each other and wait.
One day, the ruler died. Sure, there was plenty of wailing in the muddy streets outside his palace; incense burned night and day, bleating yaks were slaughtered with sharpened glinting swords, and those looking to make a particularly good show tore out fistfuls of hair and ripped their best shirts.
Part of it was true grief — he was generally a kind, smiling, hands-off type of ruler except for the occasional annexation of barley fields for a nephew’s palace or a grand-daughter’s equestrian complex — but underneath the ceremony and piety was genuine dread: The old guy had become rather foolish, people thought, but at least there was someone. Now we have no one.
This thought might have been more subconscious than conscious, and among the few people who knew that even without a wise ruler crops would still grow, rain would still fall, and yak-dung cakes would still fuel winter fires, the thought went more like this: “Now we have no one to keep the rest of the people in their places.”
But those people were few and far between. Most people just felt the void at the top and shuddered. Everyone agreed: they had to move quickly.
After several months of fretting throughout the land and plotting inside the palace walls, a crack team of royal monks in saffron robes found a five-year-old in the village on the other side of the glacier’s tongue, near the stream where the goats shelter for the winter, in a thatch hut with no windows and only a hole in the roof so the yak-dung smoke could escape. Word had come to the monks that the boy, though he had not yet begun to speak in full sentences, was spotted scratching in the dirt floor what looked like the outline of the Ox-in-the-Sky. Voila: the next ruler. To the dirt farmers about to plant the next round of crops, it was quite a relief.
By the way, two prospect geeks just published their top-100 lists. ESPN’s Keith Law is here, and BP’s Kevin Goldstein is here. The Giants have three on Law’s list: Angel Villalona (#20), Tim Alderson (#59) and Henry Sosa (#74). Goldstein only lists two: Villalona (#29) and Sosa (#84). This seems roughly to line up with John Sickels’s summation of the Giant system, in which he ranks Villalona, Sosa, and Alderson the top three.
Law is encouraging about the Giants’ new attention to amateur scouting:
The Giants of the early 2000s were notorious for skimping on amateur signing bonuses, giving away first-round picks and doing little in Latin America. So when they paid over $2 million to sign Villalona just days after his 16th birthday in August of 2006, not only was it a surprise, it was a signal that the organization was committing to acquiring top-flight amateur talent. Signing Villalona was tantamount to getting an extra top-10 pick in the amateur draft -- perhaps better, since he could be in the organization for what would have been his senior year had he been an American-born prospect.
He goes on to say great things about Villalona’s power potential, but the harsh reality is the kid has barely played above rookie ball and will likely have to move to first base sooner than later. In fact, Law lists him as his overall #1 first-base prospect.
Law’s description of Alderson is also very encouraging, but he’s so-so on Sosa, who comes with a blazing fastball and big mechanical question marks. We don’t know what Goldstein thinks, exactly, or where Alderson lands in the grand universal scheme of things, though today’s chat might shed a little light. If not, his list of top-11 Giant farmhands is due later this month.
But the rest is details. We’ve found our child-king. Speak not ill of him lest the barley fields turn forever fallow, and long may he rule when he actually gets around to it.
