I was hired as FanGraphs’ Lead Prospect Analyst just after the 2016 draft and took my first run at evaluating the entirety of the minor leagues on my own the following winter. Enough time has now passed that many of the players from that era of prospecting have had big league careers unfold (or not). 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 gauge any gap that may exist between my evaluation and what the player ultimately became. Looking back allows me to assess 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. Last offseason, I began compiling the various Top 100 prospect rankings from seven years ago for the purposes of such a self-assessment, an exercise that culminated in the “How’s My Driving?” piece that ran during Prospect Week 2024. This winter, I turned my attention to the 2018 Top 100, which I co-authored with Kiley McDaniel. Below are the results of that audit and my thoughts on them.

Before we get to a couple of big, fun tables and my notes, I want to quickly go over why I’ve taken the approach I have here and discuss its flaws. There are absolutely deeper avenues of retrospective analysis that can be done with prospect lists than what I have attempted below, approaches that could educate us about prospects themselves, and probably also about prospect writers. (Last year, in the first edition of this piece, I proposed a few such potential methods of evaluation and included my thoughts on their limitations. For the sake of brevity, I’ve cut that discussion from this year’s edition, but if you’re curious about that stuff specifically, you’ll want to go back and read the paragraph that begins, “Eventually, someone could pool the lists…”) Read the rest of this entry »

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the New York Yankees. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the fifth 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 »

Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Philadelphia Phillies. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the fifth 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 »

Major League Baseball had its “Kevin Durant is a Warrior” moment on Friday, when 23-year-old Japanese phenom Roki Sasaki agreed to sign with the defending World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers for $6.5 million. Sasaki himself announced his decision via his Instagram, while his bonus was reported on X by The Athletic’s Fabian Ardaya and Alden González of ESPN.

If he can stay healthy, Sasaki is a likely front-of-the-rotation arm who has the talent to win Cy Young Awards. When he’s been fully operational, his fastball has averaged nearly 99 mph, he has an elite splitter, and his slider became a useable weapon in 2022. He joins a loaded Dodgers roster that has five or six other players who either have won a Cy Young or MVP (Freddie Freeman, Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Blake Snell), or could conceivably do so in their best season (Tyler Glasnow and maybe Yoshinobu Yamamoto). One and a half of those players weren’t even on last year’s Dodgers title team. As I’m writing this, the Dodgers have not yet announced the signing. Though Sasaki’s contract is technically a minor league deal, and he isn’t yet on the 40-man roster, he is overwhelmingly likely to break camp with the Dodgers’ big league club and be part of their squad that opens the season against the Cubs in Japan on March 18-19. Read the rest of this entry »

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the San Francisco Giants. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the fifth 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 »

Wednesday is the first day of the new international signing period, so it’s time for me to share expanded and updated evaluations of the players from the class. An overview of the rules that govern signing international amateurs can be found in MLB’s glossary here, while more thorough and detailed documentation can be found starting on page 316 of the CBA and page 38 of the Official Professional Baseball Rules Book. Players have until December 15 to sign before this signing period closes.

Scouting reports, tool grades, and projected signing teams for about 50 players from the 2025 class can now be viewed over on The Board. Because the International Players tab has an apples and oranges mix of older pros from Asian leagues and soon-to-be first-year players, there is no explicit ranking for this amateur class on The Board. That said, I’ve stacked the class with a ranking in the table below, and as usual, that ranking will live on the International Players dropdown of The Board after most of these guys have finished signing in the coming weeks.

Below I’ll run down how I compiled this list, talk about the class as a whole, and then discuss how Roki Sasaki’s presence is impacting the proceedings. Read the rest of this entry »

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