Over the past several years, we’ve typically had about 1,500 players on The Board at any given time once all the org lists are done, spread across the tool’s pro, draft, and international sections. Heuristics play an important role in enabling us get a grip on such a large pool of players, especially when we are considering individuals for the first time, or trying to assess disparate players on the same FV scale.

For example, we felt comfortable absolutely stuffing Rockies right-handed pitcher Jordy Vargas near the top of their organizational prospect list in large part because of a key heuristic. I have not seen Vargas in person. He spent all of 2021 in the DSL, and didn’t come stateside for instructional league. Because the Rockies have struggled at the big league level and are therefore unlikely to be motivated to trade prospects, other teams have had little reason to thoroughly scout their DSL club, which makes sourcing detailed scout opinions about a player like Vargas difficult. Sometimes, a scout will come across a player like this at random and provide an in-person opinion that makes up the lion’s share of what we impart to readers, but in Vargas’ case, all we had was pitch data (which was how he got on our radar in the first place) and video we sought out from the 2021 DSL.

It can be challenging to drop Vargas right into the Rockies list for initial consideration, since he and someone like Ryan Vilade are apples-and-oranges in the extreme. It’s much cleaner to step back and compare Vargas, apples-to-apples, with same-aged pitching prospects across the global baseball landscape to get a sense of where he fits among that sub-group, assign him a FV grade in that context, and then move him onto the Rockies list. In Vargas’ case, his skill set is very similar to that of high school pitchers taken in the mid-to-late first round of a given draft (projectable 6-foot-3, gorgeous delivery, already throwing in the mid-90s, an excellent curveball), so we can use our heuristic FV for that type of player (in this case a 45) to get an initial sense of where he should be on the Rockies list even though I haven’t seen him, and then try to polish his grade from there. The foundations of most players’ evaluations on our site are built on heuristics like this and then augmented by other, more granular details. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Prospects Week! It’s like Shark Week except with fewer severed limbs, better editing, and a mandatory mention of Hunter Harvey. It’s been a while since we’ve done a thorough-going procedural refresher before getting into the meat of the week, a rundown of what it is we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and how we came to do it this way. For those of you who have been following prospect coverage at FanGraphs for a while, you’ve likely read and/or listened to versions of this before. There have been no significant changes to our process, so for you, the word pile below should mostly serve as a review. For those new to this process, however, welcome! I’m glad you’re here and sorry this is so meticulous.

Let’s start by talking about distributions, the 20-80 scale, and Future Value. Obviously the point of prospect evaluation is to gauge whether a player has the potential to play major league baseball. If the answer to that query is, “yes,” then it’s important to specify how good of a big leaguer we’re talking about. While it comes with its own margin for error, Wins Above Replacement is the best public-facing metric we have for evaluating big leaguers over a meaningful sample. As such, it’s useful for us to try to map our prospect predictions to that metric since it gives us a pretty granular way of distinguishing players from one another. We all know that both Mike Trout and Bryce Harper are very good, but WAR helps us to more precisely understand just how good, and shows us the daylight that exists between players all over the talent and performance spectrum. Read the rest of this entry »

The following is our video tutorial for how to use (and get the most out of) The Board, which houses much of our work on amateur and pro prospects, including Future Value, org rankings, reports, tool grades, and video. The tutorial was initially recorded as part of Prospects Week 2021. A transcript, which has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity, is included below.

0:00 Introduction
0:45 How To Access The Board
1:20 Three Ways To View The Board

We have a great many data and research tools on FanGraphs. Some people are well-suited to clicking around the site, exploring on their own, and learning how to navigate FanGraphs that way, but others might benefit from a written, audio, or video tutorial. It is my aim to provide a version of that in this post. This first tutorial covers The Board, and gives an overview of some of the prospect evaluation methodology that has been used at the site. The transcript you’re reading now has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. Due to the size of the text, this tutorial is best viewed in YouTube’s “Theater Mode,” or in full screen. In the header of each section below, you’ll find a link to the relevant section of the tutorial so that you can easily click around to specific topics.

You can find a link to The Board on the site’s Prospects menu header, or from the Prospects home page. There are three main ways to view The Board. There is a “Scouting Only” section, a “Stats Only” section, and a chocolate/vanilla swirl version (“Scouting + Stats!”) that features a mix of both old school scouting tool grades and a collection of telling statistics (K%, BB%, OBP, SLG, etc.). Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the second 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.

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

All of the numbered prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details 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 »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Colorado Rockies. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the second 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.

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

All of the numbered prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details 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 »

Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Milwaukee Brewers. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the second 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.

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

All of the numbered prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details 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 »

The International Players tab on The Board has once again enjoyed a sweeping update, the second such update since the pandemic shifted the international signing calendar back about six months. Rankings and reports for the current class of amateur players set to sign in January 2022 (though that date could be delayed due to the lockout) have been expanded on The Board with help from Kevin Goldstein, while updates and additions to the notable pro players in other markets have been completed with help from Tess Taruskin and Brendan Gawlowski.

CBA/COVID Complications

There are a few factors that could potentially complicate the upcoming signing period. Remember that fallout from the pandemic has already pushed this signing period back six months. When most of the international amateur players on The Board agreed to their deals with teams, they assumed that they’d have put pen to paper by now and perhaps have spent the fall in Florida or Arizona for instructional league. Instead, they haven’t yet signed, and now a lockout may further delay or complicate their coronation. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday, we published an update to our 2022 Draft rankings. Today, I pushed 2023 and 2024 to The Board, with the small 2024 group consisting almost entirely of our highly-ranked, unsigned 2021 high schoolers.

The most significant takeaway from the 2023 class is its projected strength at the top. There’s currently only one 50 FV prospect in the 2022 class, but already three atop the 2023 group: Ole Miss shortstop Jacob Gonzalez, Wake Forest third baseman Brock Wilken, and LSU outfielder Dylan Crews. That’s more than has been typical for a class that’s still a year and a half away from draft day. Gonzalez has special bat-to-ball skills and can play a premium position, Wilken already has 70-grade raw power and rare athleticism for a corner defender, and Crews performed in the SEC and reinforced confidence in the huge tools that made him famous as a high schooler.

This group may eventually be joined by more prospects. Most of the college players who will be eligible in 2023 are still teenagers right now, and some of them have not even had the opportunity to play consistently as they are coming off freshman seasons at big, talent-rich programs. With a couple of obviously excellent prospects already in place at the top of the class, and so much of the rest of it still in a magmatic stage of development, the 2023 draft has a shot to be pretty special up top. Read the rest of this entry »