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K.C. Hobson can almost qualify as a veteran in this bunch. And even at age 20, he has been around professional baseball longer than most of the other kids gathered on a practice field on a sunny, windy afternoon in Dunedin, Fla.

This is the Toronto Blue Jays’ second annual minor-league minicamp, where Hobson and 34 other prospects have been assembled for an eight-day head start on the rest of the farmhands.

They represent the cream of the Jays’ prospect pool, including 12 players drafted in the first three rounds in recent years and six teenagers signed out of Venezuela and the Dominican Republic.

Some of the most highly touted players in this crowd have not appeared in a professional game. That list includes Adonys Cardona, a right-hander who just turned 17 and signed last summer for US$2.8-million, the highest bonus ever given to a Venezuelan pitcher.

So in this company, Hobson qualifies as someone who has been around. The muscular first baseman played his first 58 pro games last year after the Jays made him a sixth-round draft pick in 2009. But he began his baseball education much earlier as the son of former big-league infielder Butch Hobson, who managed the Boston Red Sox from 1992 to 1994.

K.C. was born in 1990, just in time to enjoy a personal major-league moment. He calls it his earliest baseball memory.

“Hitting the ball and running the bases backward in Fenway Park,” he said. “We have a video of it.”

Hobson is a big boy now, having hit .271 in the low minors last year and earning an invitation to his second spring minicamp. It is an honour, he says, because it means the Jays consider him one of their top prospects.

Like many high draft picks, Hobson waited until the August deadline to sign with the Jays in 2009. That trend is troubling for big-league clubs, who used to sign their top picks quickly and get them onto the field within days or weeks after the draft. These days, many top draftees do not play in the minors at all in their draft year.

For that reason, the Jays doubled the length of their fall instructional league last year and plan to make the spring minicamp a permanent fixture. The kids need to catch up, says Tony LaCava, the assistant general manager in charge of the farm system.