The Cincinnati Reds have witnessed one of the hottest prospect debuts in recent memory. Center fielder Jay Bruce made his major league debut on May 27, going 3-for-3 and driving in two runs. He kept raking from there, hitting in five of six games and blasting a walk-off home run in extra innings on Saturday for his initial round-tripper in the show. He followed up with another long ball on Sunday. Overall, Bruce went 13-for-22 (.591), driving in six runs and scoring 10. Bruce isn’t Superman, so he’s not going to keep up his torrid pace for long, but his start does help explain why he was the consensus pick for baseball’s best prospect coming into the season. With baseball’s amateur draft taking place on Thursday, the Yankees and Mets will be looking to select and sign their own version of Bruce — the readier the better, since their aging rosters need all the help they can get.

Yet, even if they manage to draft a Bruce, there is some doubt as to whether he would develop under their auspices. For both clubs, it has been some time since their own phenoms did any comparable phenomenating. In fact, the opposite seems to happen with more consistency. The failing young pitchers Phil Hughes and Ian Kennedy were the main force in propelling the Yankees toward the bottom of the standings, while the Mets have been forced to rely on former first-round pick Mike Pelfrey to fill out is rotation, with very mixed results. As for position players, it has been almost five years since Jose Reyes made his major league debut with the Mets, and nearly four since David Wright (a 2001 draft-day steal in the supplemental part of the first round) made his. The Yankees’ last homegrown star hitter? The answer might be Robinson Cano. Then again, given his abjectly miserable performance this year, it might not be — we generally expect true stars to shine for longer than three seasons.

To criticize the local clubs for not showering their fans with Jay Bruces is not completely fair — there aren’t many young players of Bruce’s quality to go around, and in order to get them, it helps to pick at the top of the draft. As the Mets and Yankees have mostly posted strong records in recent years, they typically have picked in the lower half of the order, with the exception of some compensation picks for lost free agents. On the rare occasions when they have broken into the top of the first round, they’ve done better. The Mets were in the top half from 2002 to 2005 and picked up one star, Scott Kazmir, and three players who have shown major league ability: Lastings Milledge, Philip Humber, and Pelfrey.

The Yankees haven’t drafted in the top half of the first round since the early 1990s. As with the Mets, access to better talent meant better returns. In four consecutive years of having such picks, they selected a probable Hall of Famer in Derek Jeter; a two-time All-Star in Carl Everett; the pitcher Matt Drews, ultimately a bust but enough of a prospect at one point to get them Cecil Fielder for the 1996 stretch run, and one genius left-hander, who got into a bar fight, in Brien Taylor.

But low draft position only goes so far in explaining the lack of abundant prospects with the Yankees and Mets. Though high first-round picks are immensely valuable, teams with better drafting acumen have been mining gold from later picks for years. In their spectacular draft of 2005, the Red Sox selected Jacoby Ellsbury and Craig Hansen in the first round, then added Clay Buchholz, Jed Lowrie, and pitcher Michael Bowden with first-round supplemental picks. All except Bowden have reached the majors, and even he is a highly regarded prospect who could arrive late this season. Recent second-round picks of the Red Sox — all fair game for the Yankees and Mets when they picked — have included Jon Lester, Dustin Pedroia, Manny Delcarmen, and Justin Masterson. In other words, many Red Sox second-round picks have been better than either New York team’s first-round picks.

In recent seasons the Yankees have shaken off some of their drafting doldrums, securing Kennedy, Joba Chamberlain, and Hughes with first-round or first-round supplemental picks, while outfielder Austin Jackson was a first-round talent the Yankees got in the eighth round when other teams were scared off by his basketball scholarship. Those players aside, the list of top Yankees picks since Jeter is largely a wasteland. The Mets have been perhaps slightly better overall thanks to Wright, Kazmir, and a few others, but due to aggressive trading they have even less to show for it.

The chicken-and-egg question is, are the two teams bad at drafting or bad at development? That is, did Eric Duncan fail the Yankees, or did the Yankees fail him? Would Billy Traber have been an ace starter if he signed with a team other than the Mets? There is no sure answer, but “both” is a disconcerting possibility.

Mr. Goldman writes the Pinstriped Bible for yesnetwork. com and is the author of “Forging Genius,” a biography of Casey Stengel.