Joey Gallo is one of baseball’s most promising prospects, but he’s also one of its most polarizing. On the plus side, he’s got major power. He sported an isolated power of .344 between High-A and Double-A last year, which was the highest mark of any minor leaguer with at least 300 plate appearances. But he’s also hindered by chronic contact problems. He strikes out more than almost any prospect we’ve seen before — or at least anyone who’s gone on to be a successful big-leaguer. According to Minor League Central, Gallo’s 64% Zone-Contact% was the lowest of any minor-league hitter with data available from last year.

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Eddie Butler of the Colorado Rockies is one of baseball’s most highly-regarded pitching prospects. In addition to wielding lights-out stuff, the 24-year-old righty has pitched admirably in the upper levels of the minor leagues. Butler put up a respectable 3.58 ERA in Double-A Tulsa last year, which earned him a three start cameo with the big club.  If he’s not big league ready right now, he’s very close. Given this combination of stuff and performance, it’s no surprise that Kiley McDaniel is a big fan of Butler’s. He ranked him 42nd overall in his top 200 list and gives him a FV of 55 — equivalent to a #3 or #4 starter or a closer.

Despite his redeeming qualities, KATOH hates Butler. It hates him lot. It pegs him for a putrid 0.7 WAR through age-28, which puts him very, very far outside of KATOH’s top 200 list. His KATOH projection was far worse than most similarly-ranked prospects on Kiley’s list.

KATOH’s down on Butler for a couple of reasons. For one, he was a little old for his level last year. If you’re a 23-year-old in Double-A, KATOH’s not going to like you unless you’re dominant, and Butler was much closer to mediocre than dominant. Read the rest of this entry »

Robert Stephenson has tremendous stuff. The former first round pick wields a fastball that can touch triple digits at times, and compliments it with a plus curveball and a usable changeup. His outstanding arsenal of pitches has earned him universal praise in the prospect world. Kiley McDaniel deemed him the top prospect in the Reds organization, as did Baseball America and Baseball Prospectus. John Sickels and Keith Law ranked him #2 in the organization behind Jesse Winker.

Everyone agrees that Stephenson’s one of the most promising pitching prospects in the game. But for all his virtues, Stephenson wasn’t very good last year. His 4.72 ERA and 4.58 FIP were not only worse than the Southern League average, but were much worse — Both marks ranked in the bottom three among qualified Southern League pitchers. That’s not the pitching line of a top prospect, or even a fringy one. A 4.58 FIP is the stuff of a non-descript minor leaguer. Given this performance, its not hard to see why KATOH spat out a meager 2.2 WAR projection for Stephenson through age-28.

Things weren’t all bad for Stephenson, though. On the bright side, he did manage to strike out an impressive 23% of opposing batters, but that good work was washed away by his 12% walk rate and 3% HR% (1.2 HR/9). Clearly, Stephenson’s performance lagged far behind his stuff last year. Kiley McDaniel offered up the following explanation for this disconnect in his write-up on Stephenson. Read the rest of this entry »

Lead prospect analyst Kiley McDaniel turned some heads when he ranked Ozhaino Albies — a 5-foot-9, 17-year-old shortstop — as the top prospect in the Atlanta Braves minor league system. Albies was on the prospect radar prior to Kiley’s ranking, but slotted much lower on most organizational prospect lists this winter. Keith Law, John Sickels, Baseball America, and Baseball Prospectus ranked him 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th respectively. Here’s what Kiley had to say about Albies and his ranking.

Some scouts are already throwing 60’s on Albies hit tool after a huge pro debut, where he hit .364/.446/.444 in 239 plate appearances over two Rookie ball levels with 22 stolen bases and more walks than strikeouts. He continued his assault by impressing the more heavily-scouted instructional league and every scout that has seen him told me they can’t argue with this ranking.

Power isn’t a big part of game and likely will never be, but he does everything else so well at such a young age, that no one seems to care. He has excellent feel for the stike zone and the bat head, plenty of bat speed, knowledge of when to use his gap power and when to keep the ball on the ground, along with easy plus speed and plus everything on the defensive side, enough to comfortably project to stay at the position.  There has to be universal praise for me to go this high on a guy this young and this small that I’ve never seen before, but I think I’ll have him first on this list next year, so I feel fine getting ahead of the crowd now.

Kiley’s definitely the high guy on Albies right now, but KATOH — my prospect projection system — might be even higher. Setting the minimum to 200 plate appearances, the KATOH leaderboard for hitters based on the 2014 season reads thusly. Read the rest of this entry »

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Following the departures of free agents Melky Cabrera and Colby Rasmus, the Toronto Blue Jays were down two-thirds of last year’s opening day outfield. They filled one of these holes when they traded for Michael Saunders, but have opted to go the internal route in filling the other, turning to the inexperienced duo of Dalton Pompey and Kevin Pillar to handle center field duties.

Pompey easily has the brighter future of the two. Kiley McDaniel ranked the 22-year-old 80^th in our top 200 list, giving him a Future Value of 50, which equates to an average everyday player. Pillar, on the other hand, hasn’t done much of anything in parts of two seasons with the Blue Jays, and at 26, he’s unlikely to get much better than he currently is. Non-roster veterans Chris Dickerson, Ezequiel Carrera and Caleb Gindl are also theoretically in the center field mix, but are likely in camp to provide depth more than anything. Given his competition, the starting center field job is Pompey’s to lose this spring.

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Earlier this week, lead prospect analyst Kiley McDaniel published our top 200 prospect list. Later that day, I made my FanGraphs debut looking at how the players on that list graded out according to KATOH — my prospect projection system. Now I’m back with more stats-based prospect analysis only this time, I’ve compiled a list of the top 200 minor leaguers ranked by their KATOH projections.

Just to be clear, this list isn’t intended to compete with or undermine Kiley’s rankings in any way. KATOH isn’t meant to be the the final word on prospect evaluation, but should instead be used as a tool to complement the work done by Kiley and other prospect experts. What follows is simply the output of a (flawed) statistical model that’s been sorted from largest to smallest without any sort of adjustment. But while it may be an imperfect exercise, ranking players exclusively by their KATOH projections makes it easy to spot instances where the stats disagree with the general scouting consensus. Even if, as they likely are in many cases, the scouts turn out to be correct, it’s still worth highlighting the players for which there is a significant difference. Some of the guys below are going to prove scouts wrong; figuring out which is the tricky part.

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This morning, Kiley McDaniel rolled out his much-anticipated FanGraphs Top 200 prospect List. If you haven’t had a chance to look through it yet, I strongly recommend that you do so. As a complement to Kiley’s rankings, I’ll be taking a quick look at how the players he ranked grade out according to KATOH — my methodology for projecting prospects’ career trajectories using solely minor league statistics.

I’ll start with a bit of a primer on the system. In sum, KATOH uses a series of statistical regressions that look at a prospect’s age and league-adjusted minor league stats. After taking all of this data into account, it spits out probabilities that a prospect will reach certain WAR thresholds through age 28. If you’re interested in a more nitty-gritty, technical explanation of how KATOH works, feel free to check out my pieces on KATOH for hitters and pitchers over at The Hardball Times. Read the rest of this entry »