An Announcement Regarding Our Prospect Coverage

On Monday, Kiley McDaniel announced that he was leaving his position as FanGraphs Lead Prospect Analyst, having been offered a job as Assistant Director of Baseball Operations by the Atlanta Braves. When Kiley called me a few weeks ago to give me the news, I wasn’t surprised; this isn’t the first time a team had shown interest in him, and we knew it was inevitable that he was going to get offered a job he couldn’t pass up. The quality and quantity of work he did was simply too strong of a resume to ignore, and it was clear that this point would eventually come.

Kiley leaves a big void in our staff, and we’re certainly aware of the fact that it’s unreasonable to expect anyone to step in and simply pick up where he left off. Between his time working for three previous organizations and almost every media outlet that covers prospects, Kiley was about as connected to people in and around the game as anyone I’ve ever been around. He traveled extensively, seeing as many players in person as he could, and ended up doing things like having lunch with Yoan Moncada.

But beyond just traveling to see players, shooting video, writing up reports, and gathering valuable information from people in the game, he also helped push the creation of some back-end tools that led to things like the scouting grades that now appear on the player pages, as well as sortable pages with four years’ worth of information on the draft and the international players of interest who signed in July. He didn’t just produce content; he overhauled what prospect coverage at FanGraphs looked like.

Through his efforts, Kiley took our prospect coverage and made it a strength of the site. With that foundation in place, it would be foolish to go backwards, and so over the last few weeks, David Appelman and I have had numerous conversations about how to replace him, and who we want to take what he started and continue to build from where it is now. During those conversations, we talked about what we think makes a good prospect analyst, and what we want to emphasize to give you guys something you won’t find somewhere else.

The thing we kept coming back to was that we wanted someone who not only could offer their own perspective and evaluations, but someone with the ability to substantively explain the process that got them to that conclusion. FanGraphs is a process-driven site in many ways, and explaining the why and how is often as important as the result, so we wanted someone who was as interested in the process as in the conclusions. Especially with the tremendous amount of uncertainty that goes along with forecasting players in their teens and early twenties, we thought it was important that our prospect coverage not just be focused on the current crop of prospects — though those players are clearly the vehicle that the discussions will ride upon — but about the various theories that go into projecting future growth.

Of all the things Kiley did really well, I think his willingness to openly explore his process and explain the ideas behind his opinions is what really set him apart. To keep this ship going in what we feel is a strong direction, we wanted to make sure that we looked for someone who shared that same desire, and we felt we were very fortunate to already know someone who fits that mold, and was extremely interested in pursuing this opportunity. So, without further ado, I’m pleased to announce that Dan Farnsworth begins work today as the new Lead Prospect Analyst here at FanGraphs.

Our background with Dan is a pretty fun story. Back in January of 2013, he published a post on the Community Blog entitled “Is Rebuilding Worth It?” It remains, in my opinion, one of the most interesting pieces we’ve ever published over there, and was clearly the product of a significant amount of research. I really liked the piece, and we exchanged a few emails, where I encouraged him to keep submitting pieces, as I interested to see what else he could do.

It took him four months — he was working full time as a hitting instructor, so he didn’t have time to get his nose out of the game and into a spreadsheet — before he sent me a note saying he’d uploaded a second piece, but this one was nothing like his first article.

This piece, entitled “Breaking Down The Swing: Best Hitters of 2012” used video analysis to discuss some of the concepts that are often bandied about when teaching hitters how to put their swings together, and looking at what Major League players actually do in order to see how many of them are doing the kinds of things kids are often taught in lower levels. It was a complete departure from what he did in his first piece, but it was also really interesting and showed that he’d put a lot of work and thought into the analysis, and so we invited him to join the writing team here.

He wrote a couple of follow-up posts in the “Breaking Down the Swing” series, and then later that winter, he decided he wanted to do some deep dives on some specific players. The first one was high profile international free agent Jose Abreu, who he profiled not long after he signed with the White Sox. After providing his analysis based on available videos, he concluded with the following:

I understand the caveats that come with being a foreign player whose value is completely tied to his bat. However, there are just too many good things going on in his swing for him to be a bust, things that only the best hitters in the game do. I do not feel comfortable forecasting a stat line for Abreu’s upcoming season, since I don’t know enough first-hand information about his makeup and current state of mind and body with the defection. However, assuming he is able to make adjustments in a reasonable manner next year, I feel confident in him being a top-25 hitter in the Major Leagues.

I’d say, at this point, Dan’s optimism seems to have been reasonably well founded, but perhaps as importantly, his willingness to walk through the process of his explanation really stood out. He had a strong opinion about Abreu’s likelihood of success, but the piece read almost as a primer on what he liked about swings in general, rather than simply focusing on breaking down Abreu specifically. It was the kind of piece I really enjoyed reading, and wished there was more of in prospect analysis.

After that piece, Dan followed up with an article on Jacoby Ellsbury’s power, and then, right before the winter meetings, he wrote a little-read (at the time) breakdown on a potential Rule 5 pick that he thought had some upside: an outfielder named J.D. Martinez. The conclusion of that piece:

However, the work he has done with his swing may be what pushes him back on track to being a respectable middle of the order threat for a competitive team. The power is not in question, and if his hit tool is really starting to blossom he becomes an exciting player very quickly. The investment is minimal to add him to the mix for a roster spot and see what happens in Spring Training. Even if his injury woes continue for any part of this year, what team would not want to stockpile Rule 5 talent on the DL as added depth to draw on throughout the long season? I think that whoever takes a chance on this guy will be more than happy with the results, and with some continued refinement to his swing we could be looking at a Rule 5 steal for a legitimate Major League power hitter.

It was a sample size of one (or two, including Abreu at that point), but he was the only person I know who saw J.D. Martinez coming. After Martinez got called up to Detroit and instantly became one of the best hitters in baseball, we began to look back at that piece and realize that maybe Dan was onto something. Over the course of the 2014 season, he published some in-depth pieces at The Hardball Times, and then he did a breakdown of Rusney Castillo for us here, offering some skepticism that Castillo would hit for enough power to turn into more than a solid average player.

Then, in February, we published another one of his breakdowns of the newest international free agent signing: Pittsburgh’s infielder Jung-ho Kang. While Kang had hit for power in South Korea, there was a lot of skepticism about how well it would translate in MLB, with Kang signing for just $11 million over four years with the Pirates after a tepid bidding war for his services. Like with Abreu, Dan was bullish, writing the following after explaining why he liked the swing so much:

While Kang did play in a league where video game scores are the norm, you can only discount a player’s production so much because of competition level. With an upper echelon swing and league-leading production in his home country, I will gladly bet on Kang having a spectacular start to his big league career. Throw in the evidence that he has made some recent improvements to his swing that led to a career year, and he may only be getting better as he transitions to Major League Baseball.

…Taking the detestable jump into the predictive, with how hard he hits the ball and assuming only average contact and strikeout rates, I could easily see him hitting .280 with 25 homers, and that might be conservative.

Jung-Ho Kang, as a rookie, hit .287 with 15 homers in 467 plate appearances, on pace for just over 20 homers in a full season’s worth of playing time, and the Pirates decision to bet on his upside now looks like the best signing any team made last winter. Again, Dan’s optimism looks to have been justified.

Of course, he isn’t always going to look like a genius. In the most recent piece he published for us, he walked through some of the reservations he had about Carlos Correa’s power development. Correa has emphatically put most of those concerns to bed, but I appreciated that Dan was willing to not only update his analysis as Correa developed, but also to not be afraid to publicly write what he’d only spoken in private.

Had he never published that article, most people would have never known that Dan wasn’t as high as the industry consensus on Correa heading into this year, and as writers, it’s always tempting to not bother reminding our readers when we miss the mark. But he was willing to do so even when his previous comments about Correa weren’t in the public sphere, and used it as an opportunity to discuss the difficulties and uncertainty in projecting future power. That showed me that he was interested in learning, and possessed the humility to know that he doesn’t have everything figured out.

It’s that kind of piece — plus the time I’ve spent with him on our staff trips over the last few years, in addition to the continuing suspicion that Abreu, Martinez, and Kang are evidence that he really might know what he’s talking about — that gives me confidence that Dan is going to do an excellent job as our primary prospect guy, even though this will be his first time attempting to tackle this outsized task. I’m legitimately excited to see what Dan can do with this role, both from providing his own personal evaluations as well as helping to explain why he reaches the conclusions he does.

We’re going to give Dan the same resources we gave Kiley. He’s joining the staff as a full-time employee, and he’ll begin traveling regularly around the country to see players in person and upload video for the FanGraphs YouTube channel, so you guys can see the players he sees as well. He’s also going to begin writing up the organizational rankings, and we’ll be rolling out our prospect rankings this winter just as we did last winter.

Dan will also be providing scouting grades that will get fed onto the player pages and the sortable boards that Kiley set up, so these features will continue on, and hopefully only get better. And yes, he’ll be chatting and podcasting as well, though given the amount of work that the organizational lists take, we will likely give him a bit of a head start on those before we let you guys start assailing him with questions about random players in rookie ball that you’ve got stashed in your 40 team dynasty league.

We’re well aware of the fact that Kiley left some very big shoes to fill, but we’re really excited to see what Dan brings to the table as well. We’re thrilled you guys enjoyed the increased focus the site put on prospects over the last year, and we think Dan is the right choice to help us continue to provide the kind of insights you came to expect from FanGraphs over the last 12 months. Please welcome Dan to the staff, feel free to ask him questions in his upcoming introductory post, and hit him up on Twitter at @dwfarnsworth. I know he’s looking forward to having some great discussions with you guys, and we’re excited about what the future of prospect coverage looks like here at FanGraphs.