Promoting a prospect early is a bad choice

Let’s take a quick detour from the political scandals of today and focus on something that will take precedence for decades to come: the Seattle Mariners’ call-up of their top prospect, catcher Mike Zunino.

Zunino, when called up this Tuesday, was hitting a rock solid batting average of .230 in AAA Tacoma. It’s well-known that any baseball player will drop in average when graduating to the next level of play, so most Mariners fans should expect around .210 or closer to .200 from him. Of course, that would mean Zunino would have a better batting average than 90 percent of the other Mariners bat...