Since 2014, I’ve cranked out the career numbers for every significant prospect, regardless of whether they’ve reached the level of the minors that would normally justify an official projection. After a one-year hiatus, those projections, more commonly known as the ZiPS Top 100 Prospects list, return for their FanGraphs debut. If you’re unaware of what ZiPS projections are and the purpose they serve, please consult this article and this article while I reconsider my public relations strategy.

These projections are not a replacement for scouting. Projection systems are very clever, and a smart analyst can figure out a lot of ways to approach some of the thornier data questions that emerge over 15 years of prognostication (as for me, I’ve muddled by). But they can’t capture everything and the farther down the minor league ladder you go, the worse the data gets and the shorter the players’ histories become. That’s why I usually need a compelling reason to create a yearly projection for a hitter with no High-A experience or a pitcher who has yet to make a Double-A appearance. ZiPS can use college data, but I prefer to avoid it. And ZiPS does not use high school data, as that would be preposterous. Without college stats or a major international league, ZiPS literally has nothing to go on for a player without minor league experience. So if you’re wondering why Jasson Dominguez is missing from the list, it’s not that he’s a lousy prospect, it’s just that ZiPS doesn’t have anything useful to say about him yet.

One of the biggest differences between ZiPS and most other prospect lists is that, given the uncertainty surrounding any prospect’s future performance, ZiPS projections tend to give higher career WAR forecasts to lower-risk, lower-ceiling players in the high minors. So ZiPS has historically given higher grades to prospects like Steven Matz, Kolten Wong, and Marcus Semien, though it turned out his ceiling was quite high, than any other prospect lists did. Some of the successes — players who ranked higher on the ZiPS list than any other I found — include Ozzie Albies (No. 49, pre-2015), Mookie Betts (No. 26, pre-2014), Trea Turner (No. 11, pre-2016), and Joc Pederson (No. 2, pre-2015). Naturally, there have been some dismal busts too, just like any prospect list, the worst possibly being the year ZiPS had Arismendy Alcantara ranked 13th. Whoops. Read the rest of this entry »

The swing is noisy and needs refining, but Lewis has the physical ability for superstardom.

That line, written by Eric Longenhagen, led Royce Lewis’s writeup in our 2020 Top 100 Prospects rankings, which were published earlier this week. Both halves of the sentence are intriguing. While the first is potentially a red flag, the second is indicative of a blue-chip up-and-comer with a sky-high ceiling. Selected first overall by the Minnesota Twins in the 2017 draft out of a San Juan Capistrano high school, Lewis holds down the No. 13 slot on Longenhagen’s list.

Alex Hassan isn’t all that concerned with the 20-year-old shortstop’s swing. According to the Minnesota farm director, the underlying characteristics are what really matter. Lewis possesses plus bat speed, a good bat path, and “when he makes contact, he does a lot of damage.”

While nothing is actually broken, Lewis isn’t exactly quiet in the box.

“There are some characteristics that are unique to Royce,” said Hassan. “What’s interesting is that leg-kick piece. Last year, I went back and looked at some of his GCL video from right after he signed, and there are plenty of pitches where his leg kick goes right up to his belt, and he executes his swing from there. It’s something he’s tinkered with. It can be a big leg kick, somewhat of a medium leg kick, and at times he’ll try to get his foot down a little earlier. But the kick has been there since he came into the system. It’s simply a feature of Royce, as opposed to some kind of bug that’s popped up.”

Hassen espouses an if-it-ain’t-broke-fix-it approach, but at the same time he recognizes that excessive movement can be deleterious to a hitter’s ability to consistently square up baseballs. He’s seen Lewis make strides toward. Moreover, he’s seen them made cautiously, and without undue urging. Read the rest of this entry »

The Astros cheated. That’s not in dispute. The search for just how much the banging scheme helped the team, however, is ongoing. Rob Arthur got the party started. Tony Adams chronicled the bangs. Here at FanGraphs, Jake Mailhot examined how much the Astros benefited, which players were helped most, and even how the banging scheme performed in clutch situations. In a recent press conference, owner Jim Crane downplayed the benefit, saying “It’s hard to determine how it impacted the game, if it impacted the game, and that’s where we’re going to leave it.” It’s a rich literature, and not just because it’s fun to write “banging scheme” — but I didn’t want to leave it there.

I thought I’d take a different tack. All of these studies are based on reality, and reality has one huge problem: it’s so maddeningly imprecise. You can’t know if we captured all the right bangs. You can’t know if the system changed, or if it had details or mechanisms we didn’t quite understand or know about. And even when everything is captured right, those sample sizes, those damn sample sizes, are never quite what you need to feel confident in their results.

If we simply ignore what actually happened and create our own world, we can skip all that grubby, confusing reality. Imagine, if you will, a player who makes perfectly average swing decisions and achieves perfectly average results on those decisions.

Let’s further stipulate, while we’re far off into imaginary land, that pitchers attack our perfectly average batter in a perfectly average way. For each count, they’ll throw a league average number of fastballs, and those fastballs will be in the strike zone at — you guessed it — a league average rate. The same is true for all other pitches — with cut fastballs included in “all other pitches” in this analysis. Read the rest of this entry »

When publishing prospect lists — in particular, the top 100 — I am frequently asked who, among the players excluded from this year’s version, might have the best chance of appearing on next year’s version. Whose stock am I buying? This post represents my best attempt to answer all of those questions at once.

This is the third year of this exercise, and last year Kiley and I instituted some rules. First, none of the players you see below will have ever been a 50 FV or better in any of our write-ups or rankings. So while I think Corbin Martin will return from Tommy John and become a 50 FV again later next year, I’m not allowed to include him here (although I just sorta did). The second rule is that I am forbidden from using players who have ever been on this list before, which means no Gilberto Celestino (on the list two years ago) or Lenny Torres (who was on last year’s) even though they might soon be 50s. McDaniel and I were right about 18 of the 63 players we picked the first year, about a 29% hit rate, and we were right about 16 of the 55 players on last year’s list, which is also 29%. Two years still isn’t long enough to know whether that’s good or not, but it does appear as though a baseline is being established.

At the end of the piece, I have a list of potential high-leverage relievers who might debut this year, because readers seem to dig that category. These are not part of the 50+ FV forecasting; it’s just a way to point an arrow at guys I like who might have real big league impact in a smaller role very soon.

I’ve separated the players into groups or “types” to make the list a little more digestible and to give you some idea of the demographics I think pop-up guys come from, which could help you identify some of your own with The Board (with The Board, through The Board, in The Board). For players whose orgs I’ve already covered this offseason, there is a link to the applicable team list where you can find a full scouting report on that player. I touch briefly on the rest of the names in this post. If you want to peek at the previous lists, here is Year 1, and here is Year 2. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is my list of the top 100 prospects in baseball. The scouting summaries were compiled with information provided by available data, industry sources, as well as from my own observations.

Note that prospects are ranked by number but also lie within tiers demarcated by their Future Value grades. The FV grade is more important than the ordinal ranking. For example, the gap between prospect No. 3 on this list, MacKenzie Gore, and prospect No. 33, Jazz Chisholm, is 30 spots, and there’s a substantial difference in talent there. The gap between Evan White (No. 64) and Matthew Liberatore (No. 94), meanwhile, is also 30 numerical places, but the difference in talent is relatively small. You may have noticed that there are more than 100 prospects in the table below, and more than 100 scouting summaries. That’s because we have also included 50 FV prospects who didn’t make the 100; their reports appear below, under the “Other 50 FV Prospects” header. The same comparative principle applies to them.

As a quick explanation, variance means the range of possible outcomes in the big leagues, in terms of peak season. If we feel a prospect could reasonably have a best big league season of anywhere from 1 to 5 WAR, that would be “high” variance, whereas someone like Sean Murphy, whose range is something like 2 to 3 WAR, would be “low” variance. High variance can be read as a good thing, since it allows for lots of ceiling, or a bad thing, since it also allows for a lower floor. Your risk tolerance could lead you to sort by variance within a given FV tier if you feel strongly about it. Here is a primer explaining the connection between FV and WAR. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, please read this. (If you would like to read a book-length treatment on the subject, you can pre-order my forthcoming book, Future Value, co-written with erstwhile FanGraphs analyst Kiley McDaniel.)

You’ll also notice that there is a FV outcome distribution graph for each prospect on the list. This is our attempt to graphically represent how likely each FV outcome is for each prospect. Using the work of Craig Edwards, I found the base rates for each FV tier of prospect (separately for hitters and pitchers), and the likelihood of each FV of outcome. For example, based on Craig’s research, the average 60 FV hitter on a list becomes a perennial 5+ WAR player over his six controlled years 26% of the time, and has a 27% chance of accumulating, at most, a couple WAR during his six controlled years. I started with these base rates for every player, then manually tweaked them for the first few FV tiers to reflect how I think the player differs from the average player in that FV tier, since a player in rookie ball and a player in Triple-A with the same FV grade obviously don’t have exactly the same odds of success. As such, these graphs are based on empirical findings, but come with the subjectivity of my opinions included to more specifically reflect what I think the odds are of various outcomes.

Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: Sources have indicated to FanGraphs that Fernando Romero has been awarded an additional option year. This post originally stated that Romero was out of options, and has been updated.

The need to define a scope, to create a boundary of coverage, creates a hole in prospect writing. Most public-facing prospect publications, FanGraphs included, analyze and rank players who are still rookie-eligible because, contrary to what you might think after seeing the length of my lists, you just have to stop somewhere, if only for the sake of your own sanity. Because of this, every year there are players who fall through the cracks between the boundaries of prospect coverage and big league analysis. These are often players who came up, played enough to exhaust their rookie eligibility, and then got hurt and had a long-term rehab in the minors. Some are victims of the clogged major league rosters ahead of them; others are weird corner cases like Adalberto Mondesi.

Regardless, prospect writers are arguably in the best position to comment on these players because they fall under the minor league umbrella, but simply adding them to prospect lists would open a can of worms — what do you do with other young big leaguers? So every year, I examine a subset of the players caught in this limbo to give curious readers an update on where once-heralded prospects stand now. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to Prospect Week 2020, FanGraphs’ annual pre-season spotlight on our sport’s future, and my annual opportunity to experience a dissociative fugue state.

The uninitiated will first want to read this primer on how I assign an overall grade to each prospect, and if you want to familiarize yourself with my process more thoroughly, you should pre-order Future Value, the book I co-wrote with baby-faced turncoat Kiley McDaniel, now of ESPN. In the span of a long weekend Kiley got engaged, joined ESPN, saw our book go to the printer, and did a SportsCenter hit wearing someone else’s tie. Congratulations to my friend, who worked until the clock struck midnight on his FanGraphs tenure, and to me, as I now get to do what I want without having to convince Kiley that it’s a good idea.

While the NCAA baseball season starts this weekend, 2020 draft looks have already been going on for nearly a month. The Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend always features several important high school showcases, and junior college baseball begins shortly after that. Meanwhile, Division-I schools have been scrimmaging in front of scouts in preparation for Friday’s openers. Dope siphoned from these events is included in my 2020, 2021 and 2022 draft rankings, all of which have been updated for today and will be updated continuously between now and the draft. And in a brand new feature courtesy of Sean Dolinar, you can now see all three draft classes mushed together here. Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: This piece has been updated to reflect Jair Camargo’s trade to the Twins from the Dodgers as part of those teams’ Kenta Maeda/Brusdar Graterol swap.

On Tuesday, word got out that Mookie Betts would be traded to the Dodgers. Over the course of the week, the trade moved from a seeming certainty to something less so, as the Red Sox reportedly raised concerns about the health of prospect Brusdar Graterol. With spring training just days away, the players were stuck in limbo as the teams tried to renegotiate. Now it appears those negotiations have borne fruit, with a new deal finalized per reports from Jeff Passan, Ken Rosenthal, and Chad Jennings. And in a bit of good news after the indecision of the last four days, Alex Speier is reporting that the player medical evaluations are done, with only league approval of the money heading to Los Angeles holding up the official finalization of the trade.

The original deal was a three-team swap involving the Dodgers, Twins, and Red Sox, with a follow-up trade between the Angels and Dodgers. But Sunday’s moves involve two discrete trades between the Dodgers and Red Sox, and the Dodgers and Twins. And that Dodgers-Angels deal? It is not happening, per Ken Rosenthal.

Let’s look at the finalized version of each trade.

Trade 1: Dodgers/Red Sox

Dodgers Receive:

• OF Mookie Betts
• LHP David Price
• $48 million to pay David Price’s $96 million salary over the next three years.

Red Sox Receive:

• OF Alex Verdugo
• SS Jeter Downs
• C Connor Wong

What’s new: The Red Sox were previously set to receive Minnesota pitching prospect Brusdar Graterol. With the Twins now out of the deal, the Dodgers will send along Jeter Downs and Connor Wong to complete the trade. We also now know the cash considerations for David Price. Read the rest of this entry »

Almost inexplicably, the proposed contraction of 42 minor league teams has largely become second-page news. Baseball’s biggest story just a few short months ago, a potentially cataclysmic alteration of the game’s landscape has found itself overshadowed by cheating scandals, managerial mayhem, and the controversial trade of a superstar by a deep-pocketed team. In arguably one of the most-tumultuous off-seasons ever, a hugely-important issue lies almost dormant within the news cycle.

Here at FanGraphs, we’re doing our best not to let that happen. My colleague Craig Edwards is taking an in-depth look at the situation — expect those articles in the coming days — and what you’re seeing here serves as a lead-in to his efforts. My own opinions aren’t included. What follows are the thoughts of a handful of high-ranking MLB executives, the bulk of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity.

In the opinion of one GM, lawsuits are likely, if not inevitable. Speaking on the record would thus be an invitation to trouble. Another pointed out that the ongoing discussions are at the league level, and independent of individual teams. For that reason, offering a public opinion wouldn’t be in his best interest.

With no exception, each executive expressed that his organization’s bottom line is to optimize player development, regardless of the structure of the minor leagues. An American League GM put it this way: Read the rest of this entry »

Just when you thought every angle of the Astros sign-stealing scandal had been covered, a new wrinkle emerges. Previous attempts to discern the true impact of the banging scheme were always limited by the lack of granular data. Without going through the effort of scanning all of the available audio and video, we had very little idea how often the Astros banged on their trash can. Were they using their scheme in every plate appearance? Only in high-leverage situations? Without answers to these questions, we were using incomplete data that included a ton of noise.

Enter Tony Adams. He scanned through 58 Astros home games with available video and audio and logged every single instance of a bang using a custom application he built. He ended up logging over 8,200 pitches and over 1,100 bangs. Last Wednesday, he made his data public on his site.

With Adams’ data in hand, we have answers to some of the questions that thwarted earlier attempts at analysis. The data still isn’t comprehensive. The 23 home games with missing video are still shrouded in mist, and we can’t assume the banging scheme was in effect during plate appearances where the batter only saw fastballs. We also don’t have insight into other possible methods of communicating stolen signs, like whistling, buzzers, or the like. Still, the new data provides us with a thorough look at those 58 games, helping us draw some more definitive conclusions. Read the rest of this entry »