The late, great Cleveland sports talk host Pete Franklin used to say something similar to this about minor league baseball players–until proven otherwise, prospects should be considered suspects.

The meaning being no matter how good a player performs in the minors, the big leagues are different.

Former Rockies’ and Pirates’ manager Clint Hurdle was on the cover of Sports Illustrated as baseball’s newest phenom after hitting .328 with 16 homers (978 OPS) at AAA in 1977. He wound up playing just 515 games in the majors, hitting .259 with 32 dingers (745 OPS).

Gregg Jefferies was another phenom after hitting .367 in AA with 20 homers in the Mets’ organization (1021 OPS). He wound up playing parts of 14 years in the majors, and made two All Star teams, but he never became the superstar he was projected to be.

More recently, the top prospect in baseball in 2013 was Texas’ Jurickson Profar after he hit .281 (820 OPS) at age 19 in AA as a shortstop. Profar is still in the big leagues, but has a career .237 batting average (709 OPS) and is currently a LF for the Padres.

No doubt the ranking of minor league prospects has become more sophisticated in recent years. Among the current players who were named the sports’ best are Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Adley Rutchman, Wander Franco, and Bobby Witt Jr.

However, here are two players who were considered top five prospects in all of baseball who are struggling. They may get everything to click at some point, but right now, they haven’t fulfilled what others thought they could accomplish.

Detroit took Spencer Torkelson with the first pick in the 2020 draft, and to date, in 264 at bats, he’s hit five homers and batted .197. He’s back in AAA with a .228 batting average and coincidentally, five long balls.

The Angels’ Jo Adell was a consensus top five prospect after hitting .289 with 23 home runs in AAA at age 22. To date, the majors have been a much bigger challenge, with a .215 batting average and 13 dingers in almost 500 plate appearances.

Why do we bring this up? Because he see various comments from Guardians’ fans pining for the youngest team in the sport to bring up even more rookies.

Complicating the matter is the Guards being in contention for the playoffs. If they were on pace to lose 90+ games, it would be a no-brainer to bring guys up and play them. So when Nolan Jones goes two weeks doing nothing at the plate, Terry Francona can’t afford to be patient.

And nothing causes a manager to lose the trust of his players than putting someone out on the field who doesn’t deserve to be there.

Also, just because someone is highly touted as a prospect doesn’t mean they will be better players at the big league level than the person currently at that spot.

For example, we think Brayan Rocchio is going to be a very good big league shortstop. However, to say he is better than Amed Rosario right now is crazy. He might be, but no one should be stating that as a fact.

We are sure Tigers’ and Angels’ supporters were saying the same thing about Torkelson and Adell not so long ago.