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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Athletics. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the sixth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

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There are some positions for which a cleaner, wider gap exists between the top teams and the bottom, where we can more definitively say that some teams are better than others. For instance, the talent that the Dodgers and Astros have at DH separates their projections from the rest of baseball in a meaningful way. Relief pitching is not one of these positions. As you digest the forecasts and player details below, make sure to note how thin the margins tend to be from one team to the next. Also know that relief inning sample sizes are small enough that this is where WAR is the least good at properly calibrating impact and value, a dynamic heightened in the playoffs when the remaining bullpens are all turbocharged by the way the postseason schedule allows for rest, or for an elite starter to work an inning on his bullpen day. Things like coherent managerial usage, roster management, and good or bad health luck tend to play a huge role in the way bullpens perform throughout a season, and those are factors we can’t totally control for here. I felt free to point out the situations in which I think the projection is off base. Read the rest of this entry »

Several times during the last half decade, Major League Baseball has piloted rule changes in the minor leagues, some that have already been implemented at the highest level and others that remain purely experimental. Over the weekend, I learned about a league memo circulating among baseball operations departments regarding various experimental rule changes that will be tested during the upcoming minor league season; I then acquired the document from a club source.

This memo, which has not been previously reported, was sent to general managers, assistant general managers, farm directors, and player development personnel with the request that it be relayed to managers and coaches throughout the organization. I have excerpts from the memo below, as well as some thoughts spawned by its contents. Some of the rule changes being piloted in 2026 are aimed at augmenting the game’s aesthetic, others at further increasing the pace of play. Some of them seem like they’re for player development purposes only and not likely to be a future big league feature. Read the rest of this entry »

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Today is the first day of the 2026 college baseball season, and to celebrate, I’m cutting the ribbon on our 2026 draft rankings and scouting reports. They’re now live on The Board, so head over there for all of these players’ tool grades and blurbs. In this piece, I’ll touch on several individual players who I think are among this year’s best and most interesting prospects for readers to watch and monitor over the next five months as we approach July’s draft in Philadelphia (I can’t wait). I’ll also discuss the class as a whole from a talent standpoint, as well as which teams are in position to have a huge draft.

First, some quick housekeeping on the rankings. I’ve got 51 players on The Board right now. I’ve hard-ranked the players with a 40+ FV and above, while the 40-FV players are clustered by demographic below them. Draft-eligible sophomores are denoted with an asterisks. At this stage in the draft process, players are more in neighborhoods or clusters. It’s too early to have many dozens of players ordinally ranked in a way that won’t change drastically between now and draft day, especially once we get beyond the players who fit within the first two rounds. More players will be added to The Board as the spring progresses.

This is also your reminder that we now have college leaderboards on the site, as well as college player pages, all of which I will be wearing out this spring as the class produces another season of data. Read the rest of this entry »

I have been FanGraphs’ Lead Prospect Analyst since the summer of 2016, and enough time has now passed that many of the players from the early era of my prospecting here have had big league careers unfold (or fail to). Hindsight allows me to have a pretty definitive idea of whether my call on a player was right or wrong in a binary sense, and to gauge any gap that may exist between my evaluation and what the player ultimately became. Looking back allows me to rate my approach to grading and ranking players so that I might begin to establish some baselines of self-assessment and see how I perform compared to my peers at other publications. For the third year — the 2017 review is here, while the 2018 review is here — I have gathered the various Top 100 prospect rankings from seven years ago for the purposes of such a self-assessment, an exercise I call “How’s My Driving?” This is my audit of the 2019 rankings. Read the rest of this entry »