Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.

Summary
Formerly an all-or-nothing power hitter, the early returns on Gallo’s 2014 show him to be combining his once-in-a-generation power with an increasingly sound approach at the plate.

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Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.

Summary
The former fifth-overall pick continues to struggle with his swing, leading to increasingly poor output as he climbs the ladder.

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Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.

Summary
After a romp through the Pioneer League last year, McMahon is continuing to crush the ball, and he projects well going forward.

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Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.

Mike Montgomery, LHP, Tampa Bay Rays (Profile)
Level: Triple-A   Age: 24   Top 15: N/A   Top 100: N/A
Line: 0.90 ERA, 10 IP, 10.80 K/9, 3.60 BB/9, 1.00 WHIP

Summary
No longer an elite prospect, the left-handed Montgomery appears to have adapted well enough to reduced velocity to provide some future value at the major-league level.

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Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.

Alex Balog, RHP, Colorado Rockies (Profile)
Level: Low-A   Age: 21   Top-15: N/A   Top-100: N/A
Line: 11 IP, 9 H, 5 R, 1 HR, 9/5 K/BB, 4.09 ERA, 4.38 FIP

Summary
The 70th overall pick in last year’s draft struggled mightily upon his introduction to pro ball in 2013, but has regained the stuff that got him drafted so high.

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Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.

Rafael Montero, RHP, New York Mets (Profile)
Level: Triple-A   Age: 23   Top-15: 5th   Top-100: 94th
Line: 11.0 IP, 11.45 K/9, 0.82 BB/9, 0.0 HR/9, 0.93 FIP

Summary
The Mets’ diminutive right-hander has torched the Pacific Coast League (PCL) thus far, but the organization may need to get creative if its to best utilize his services.

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Intermittently, over the past month or so, the present author — leaning heavily on historical data from Baseball America — has examined the ways in which prospects distinguished for possessing certain tools as minor-leaguers have ultimately fared at the major-league level. The goal: ideally, to develop a better sense of what does and doesn’t correlate to future success, with a view towards better assessing contemporary prospects.

The first of these posts considered the 2005 “class,” as it were, of best-tool prospects and their respective major-league futures; the second post, that collection of prospects from 2005 to -09 who had been recognized both for their hit tool and plate discipline simultaneously; and the third, that subset of the best-hitting, most-disciplined prospects who had also been recognized for their defensive acumen.

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Recently, in these electronic pages, the author made a study of those hitting prospects who had been recognized by Baseball America for possessing the best of this or that tool (i.e. ability to hit for average, ability to hit for power, etc.) within their respective organizations. The study, specifically, was designed to identify how certain tools, on average, had translated to the majors. The results? While not exhaustive, the exercise in question seemed to indicate that those prospects who had been recognized either for their ability to hit for average or their plate discipline had produced markedly better numbers at the major leagues than those prospects who were recognized for their power, speed, or athleticism.

A sequel of sorts to that first piece focused specifically on those prospects who, during at least one of the years between 2005 and -09, had been recognized by Baseball America for possessing both the best hit tool and the best plate discipline within their respective organization. While, as noted in that second post, one doesn’t expect talent to have been distributed evenly among every minor-league system — and, accordingly, can’t expect the best hitter in a talent-poor system to match the skills of the best hitter in a talent-rich one — the value of the Best Tool designations is that they function as a reasonable proxy for more sophisticated data that isn’t available publicly.

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Note: because he (a) assembled the following list by hand and also (b) is a careless idiot, the author neglected some names from the first version of this post. Do not hesitate to raise concerns about the absence of a notable prospect.

What follows is an attempt to identify, using a nearly sound methodology, the rookie-eligible players* who are most ready to produce wins at the major-league level in 2014 (regardless of whether they actually receive the opportunity to do so). What it is not is an attempt to replace the work done by prospect analysts who assemble similar lists by means of “knowledge” and “skill.” Unlike their lists, no attempt has been made here to account for future value.

*In this case, defined as any player who’s recorded fewer than 130 at-bats or 50 innings — which is to say, there’s been no attempt to identify each player’s time spent on the active roster, on account of that’s a super tedious endeavor.

To assemble the list, what I’ve done first is to calculate prorated WAR figures for all players for whom either the Steamer or ZiPS projection systems have produced a forecast. Hitters’ numbers are normalized to 550 plate appearances; starting pitchers’, to 150 innings — i.e. the playing-time thresholds at which a league-average player would produce approximately a 2.0 WAR. Catcher projections are prorated to 415 plate appearances to account for their reduced playing time.

All figures published below are averaged 2014 projections produced by Steamer and ZiPS, except in those cases (represented by an asterisk*) where only Steamer has produced a projection. Players eligible for the list either (a) enter their age-26 season or lower in 2014 or, alternatively, (b) were signed as international free agents this offseason.

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As has been the case each of the past two years, the present author has recently transported his dumb body to Jupiter, FL, America — spring home of the Miami Marlins, the St. Louis Cardinals, and the author’s (now) 93-year-old grandfather.

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