The Lexington Legends had been the Low-A affiliate for the Houston Astros for quite some time. Walking around Whitaker Bank Park, you would see images of Hunter Pence and that one time Roger Clemens pitched there. Those images aren’t there anymore after the Astros bolted and the Royals came in. This is a little sad because this would have been the year to see the Low-A Astros team as opposed to the years of yuck before that, but the Royals are a nice consolation prize. Here are some prospects of note from my four days in Lexington last week.
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On Wednesday, we took a look at the top farm systems in baseball. Today, we’ll take a look at how the top prospects stack up against each other. We’re essentially looking at the same principles that we were looking at in the farm systems. How do the prospects rank after the lists are averaged together? Where are the true gaps/tiers in prospects? And how good is the prospect class overall? Let’s take a look.

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We’ve spent the past few weeks taking a look at combined rankings for each organization, going division-by-division. I wasn’t really sure what I was going to find, but my goal was to take a look at the two main overall aspects of a prospect – his talent/reasonable ceiling and his risk of getting there – and see how farm systems graded out. The traditional 1, 2, 3 ranking system is fine because we’re ultimately looking at an educated subjective process, but a simple list doesn’t show the audience where the real gaps lie and where there’s negligible difference. My hope was to begin to approach a way to see these differences, and while there is certainly room for improvement, I believe it has led to some interesting results.
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Prospect lists are one of the best parts of the off-season. Marc Hulet published his top 100 yesterday as the culmination of several months of work, and Baseball America, Baseball Prospectus, Keith Law, John Sickels and a plethora of websites have published others. Each group puts myriad hours into analyzing, calling, writing, editing, re-analyzing and finally publishing their work. But even after all that, they usually come to several different conclusions. I decided — instead of focusing on a specific list — to generate a list that combined each of these lists into one.

The idea of community or consensus lists isn’t new. Sites have done it before, but I’ve added some wrinkles:

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Prospect lists are one of the best parts of the off-season. Marc Hulet published his top 100 yesterday as the culmination of several months of work, and Baseball America, Baseball Prospectus, Keith Law, John Sickels and a plethora of websites have published others. Each group puts myriad hours into analyzing, calling, writing, editing, re-analyzing and finally publishing their work. But even after all that, they usually come to several different conclusions. I decided — instead of focusing on a specific list — to generate a list that combined each of these lists into one.

The idea of community or consensus lists isn’t new. Sites have done it before, but I’ve added some wrinkles:

Read the rest of this entry »

Prospect lists are one of the best parts of the off-season. Marc Hulet published his top 100 yesterday as the culmination of several months of work, and Baseball America, Baseball Prospectus, Keith Law, John Sickels and a plethora of websites have published others. Each group puts myriad hours into analyzing, calling, writing, editing, re-analyzing and finally publishing their work. But even after all that, they usually come to several different conclusions. I decided — instead of focusing on a specific list — to generate a list that combined each of these lists into one.

The idea of community or consensus lists isn’t new. Sites have done it before, but I’ve added some wrinkles:

Read the rest of this entry »

Prospect lists are one of the best parts of the off-season. Marc Hulet published his top 100 yesterday as the culmination of several months of work, and Baseball America, Baseball Prospectus, Keith Law, John Sickels and a plethora of websites have published others. Each group puts myriad hours into analyzing, calling, writing, editing, re-analyzing and finally publishing their work. But even after all that, they usually come to several different conclusions. I decided — instead of focusing on a specific list — to generate a list that combined each of these lists into one.

The idea of community or consensus lists isn’t new. Sites have done it before, but I’ve added some wrinkles:

Read the rest of this entry »

Prospect lists are one of the best parts of the off-season. Marc Hulet published his top 100 yesterday as the culmination of several months of work, and Baseball America, Baseball Prospectus, Keith Law, John Sickels and a plethora of websites have published others. Each group puts myriad hours into analyzing, calling, writing, editing, re-analyzing and finally publishing their work. But even after all that, they usually come to several different conclusions. I decided — instead of focusing on a specific list — to generate a list that combined each of these lists into one.

The idea of community or consensus lists isn’t new. Sites have done it before, but I’ve added some wrinkles:

Read the rest of this entry »

Prospect lists are one of the best parts of the off-season. Marc Hulet published his top 100 yesterday as the culmination of several months of work, and Baseball America, Baseball Prospectus, Keith Law, John Sickels and a plethora of websites have published others. Each group puts myriad hours into analyzing, calling, writing, editing, re-analyzing and finally publishing their work. But even after all that, they usually come to several different conclusions. I decided — instead of focusing on a specific list — to generate a list that combined each of these lists into one.

The idea of community or consensus lists isn’t new. Sites have done it before, but I’ve added some wrinkles:

Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks ago, I took a look at how the profile of corner outfielders has changed over the past decade, and it led to a little discussion between Wendy Thurm and I. She shared some research she had done on catchers, and she wondered whether or not catchers were changing as well. Catchers such as Buster Posey, Brian McCann, Matt Wieters, Carlos Santana, Miguel Montero, and even Yadier Molina of late have been producing offensively, eschewing the traditional idea of a catcher as an offensive pipsqueak. But are these players exceptions or the beginning of a new rule?

The first thing we’ll do is take a look at MLB catchers’ overall performance using wOBA and wRC+. Read the rest of this entry »