Previous editions: Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati  / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston.

Yesterday, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the Kansas City Royals. In this companion piece, I look at that same Kansas City farm system through the lens of my recently refined KATOH projection system. The Royals have the 20th-best farm system according to KATOH.

There’s way more to prospect evaluation than just the stats, so if you haven’t already, I highly recommend you read Dan’s piece in addition to this one. KATOH has no idea how hard a pitcher throws, how good a hitter’s bat speed is, or what a player’s makeup is like. So it’s liable to miss big on players whose tools don’t line up with their performances. However, when paired with more scouting-based analyses, KATOH’s objectivity can be useful in identifying talented players who might be overlooked by the industry consensus or highly-touted prospects who might be over-hyped.

Below, I’ve grouped prospects into three groups: those who are forecast for two or more wins through their first six major-league seasons, those who receive a projection between 1.0 and 2.0 WAR though their first six seasons, and then any residual players who received Future Value (FV) grades of 45 or higher from Dan. Note that I generated forecasts only for players who accrued at least 200 plate appearances or batters faced last season. Also note that the projections for players over a relatively small sample are less reliable, especially when those samples came in the low minors.

1. Cheslor Cuthbert, 3B (Profile)

KATOH Projection: 4.1 WAR
Dan’s Grade: 40+ FV

Cuthbert hit .277/.339/.429 as a 22-year-old in Triple-A last year, which earned him a late-season cameo with Kansas City. Cuthbert likely won’t be a star, but he makes a lot of contact, plays a semi-premium defensive position and is young enough that he still has time to improve. Statistically, he looks like a future everyday player, and those don’t grow on trees.

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Previous editions: Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati  / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit.

Earlier this week, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the Houston Astros. In this companion piece, I look at that same Houston farm system through the lens of my recently refined KATOH projection system. The Astros have the second-best farm system according to KATOH, trailing only the Brewers. Their system lacks star power, but is easily the deepest. That’s why this post has way more words than you probably care to read.

There’s way more to prospect evaluation than just the stats, so if you haven’t already, I highly recommend you read Dan’s piece in addition to this one. KATOH has no idea how hard a pitcher throws, how good a hitter’s bat speed is, or what a player’s makeup is like. So it’s liable to miss big on players whose tools don’t line up with their performances. However, when paired with more scouting-based analyses, KATOH’s objectivity can be useful in identifying talented players who might be overlooked by the industry consensus or highly-touted prospects who might be over-hyped.

Below, I’ve grouped prospects into three groups: those who are forecast for two or more wins through their first six major-league seasons, those who receive a projection between 1.0 and 2.0 WAR though their first six seasons, and then any residual players who received Future Value (FV) grades of 45 or higher from Dan. Note that I generated forecasts only for players who accrued at least 200 plate appearances or batters faced last season. Also note that the projections for players over a relatively small sample are less reliable, especially when those samples came in the low minors.

1. AJ Reed, 1B (Profile)

KATOH Projection: 7.1 WAR
Dan’s Grade: 60 FV

Reed might have had the biggest breakout of any minor leaguer in 2015. Minor league pitching was no match for his mammoth power and copious walks, as the 22-year-old hit .340/.432/.612 between High-A and Double-A last year. If you’re looking for something to be concerned about, it’s Reed’s 20% strikeout rate. While that’s not alarmingly high, it’s a tick above average, and hints that he might have a tough time making contact against big league pitching. But otherwise, all systems are a go. It isn’t often that KATOH gets excited about a first base prospect, but it’s all in on Reed and his gaudy power numbers.

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Full-season team projections cause some heated arguments. If a team finishes the year with fewer wins than expected, fans want to know why their club underperformed projections. If a team overperforms its projections, meanwhile, those same fans will insist that forecasts in subsequent years lack the ability to detect their club’s particular strengths and are thus useless.

Here at FanGraphs, we have only been doing full-season projections for a couple years, but just about every week I see a mention of the 2015 World Champion Kansas City Royals’ projected record of 79-83. If I search Google for “79-83 Royals FanGraphs,” I get over 11,000 article links. Unsurprisingly, it’s a popular topic. Rarely does a club, following a pair of World Series appearances, then proceed to fail to break even. But that’s what the numbers suggest for 2016.

While FanGraphs has produced team win projections for only a couple seasons, Replacement Level Yankee Weblog (RLYW) has been publishing win projections for years. Since 2007, to be precise. Given this larger sample, I thought that it might be worthwhile to compare the projected win values produced by RLYW to the actual final win values produced by teams. So, with the permission of RLYW editor SG, that’s what I’ve done here.

I hate to disappoint anyone, but there are actually aren’t any great findings in the plethora of graphs to follow. I did find a couple interesting artifacts of the data, but no game changers. Instead, I see the following mainly as an additional data point in many past, present, and future discussions.

To start with, here is how projected and actual values have correlated.

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Yesterday, I utilized my KATOH projection system to rank the 30 farm systems. By my math, the Milwaukee Brewers are the top dog. And it isn’t particularly close. Here’s a graphical representation of each team’s cumulative projected WAR according to KATOH.

The Brewers farm system outpaces everyone else’s by a fairly wide margin by this metric. That’s interesting in and of itself. But the path David Stearns and company have taken to put their farm system in this position is perhaps even more interesting.

For one, they’ve acquired a large chunk of their minor league talent in the very recent past. Orlando Arcia, their consensus top prospect, has been around for a few years; but many of the others are very new additions. In fact, KATOH’s #2 through #8 prospects all joined the organization within the past seven months. That’s Ramon Flores, Jacob Nottingham, Brett Phillips, Josh Hader, Isan Diaz, Zach Davies and Javier Betancourt. Domingo Santana would fall in that group as well were he still prospect eligible. They’ve also added Rymer Liriano, Keon Broxton, Garin Cecchini, Jonathan Villar, Adrian Houser, Bubby Derby (who I’m still not convinced is a real person) over that same period. Not to mention lower-tier prospects Freddy Peralta, Trey Supak, Colin Walsh, Zack Jones, Carlos Herrera, Daniel Missaki and Manny Pina.

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‘Tis the season for prospect rankings. With little else going on in the baseball world, prospect writers typically spend the month of February releasing and discussing ordered lists of prospects and farm systems. Even within the past hour at this very site, our own Jeff Zimmerman published a farm-system ranking derived from the scouting grades produced by Baseball America.

This year, I showed up to the party a little early by putting out KATOH’s top 100 list last month. I still have more to give, however. And here I present you with KATOH’s organizational rankings.

My methodology for compiling this ranking was pretty straightforward: I simply aggregated all of the KATOH forecasts by team. Still, there a few caveats worth mentioning.

• To be considered in this exercise, a player must have recorded at least 200 plate appearances or batters faced in 2015. KATOH derives its forecasts from minor league stats, so it can’t really formulate an opinion on players who didn’t play much in 2015. As a result, many of the players who were drafted in 2015 are omitted.

• This exercise only considers players projected for at least 1.0 WAR over their first six years in the big leagues. Ideally, I’d consider all prospects, but that would involve verifying the teams for thousands of mostly nondescript minor leaguers. That obviously taken some time. This one-win threshold cuts pretty deep into a team’s farm system. The average team has 18 players above this cutoff, while none have fewer than 10. That feels like more than enough for these purposes.

• KATOH tends to favor hitters over pitchers, especially on the high end. So this analysis likely favors organizations with farm systems that are hitter-heavy over those that rely more on pitchers. This is likely because a pitcher’s stats capture a smaller portion of his future potential relative to hitters. Factors like velocity also very important when it comes to projecting pitchers.

• And as always, stats don’t tell the full story. This is the output from a flawed statistical model that fails to take into account many of the factors that go into evaluating a prospect. If an organization has a lot of raw, toolsy prospects, it’s likely to be underrated here.

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Previous editions: Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati  / Cleveland / Colorado.

Earlier this week, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the Detroit Tigers. In this companion piece, I look at that same Detroit farm system through the lens of my recently refined KATOH projection system. There’s way more to prospect evaluation than just the stats, so if you haven’t already, I highly recommend you read Dan’s piece in addition to this one. KATOH has no idea how hard a pitcher throws, how good a hitter’s bat speed is, or what a player’s makeup is like. So it’s liable to miss big on players whose tools don’t line up with their performances. However, when paired with more scouting-based analyses, KATOH’s objectivity can be useful in identifying talented players who might be overlooked by the industry consensus or highly-touted prospects who might be over-hyped.

Below, I’ve grouped prospects into three groups: those who are forecast for two or more wins through their first six major-league seasons, those who receive a projection between 1.0 and 2.0 WAR though their first six seasons, and then any residual players who received Future Value (FV) grades of 45 or higher from Dan. Note that I generated forecasts only for players who accrued at least 200 plate appearances or batters faced last season. Also note that the projections for players over a relatively small sample are less reliable, especially when those samples came in the low minors.

1. Michael Fulmer, RHP (Profile)

KATOH Projection: 3.8 WAR
Dan’s Grade: 50 FV

Fulmer enjoyed a breakout season with the Mets last year and kept it going after he came to the Tigers in the Yoenis Cespedes deal. Both his strikeout rate and walk rate improved as he made the jump from High-A to Double-A in 2015, giving him the lowest ERA — and second lowest FIP — in Double-A last year.

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Previous editions: Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati  / Cleveland.

Earlier this week, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the Colorado Rockies. In this companion piece, I look at that same Colorado farm system through the lens of my recently refined KATOH projection system. There’s way more to prospect evaluation than just the stats, so if you haven’t already, I highly recommend you read Dan’s piece in addition to this one. KATOH has no idea how hard a pitcher throws, how good a hitter’s bat speed is, or what a player’s makeup is like. So it’s liable to miss big on players whose tools don’t line up with their performances. However, when paired with more scouting-based analyses, KATOH’s objectivity can be useful in identifying talented players who might be overlooked by the industry consensus or highly-touted prospects who might be over-hyped.

Below, I’ve grouped prospects into three groups: those who are forecast for two or more wins through their first six major-league seasons, those who receive a projection between 1.0 and 2.0 WAR though their first six seasons, and then any residual players who received Future Value (FV) grades of 45 or higher from Dan. Note that I generated forecasts only for players who accrued at least 200 plate appearances or batters faced last season. Also note that the projections for players over a relatively small sample are less reliable, especially when those samples came in the low minors.

1. Trevor Story, SS (Profile)

KATOH Projection: 7.2 WAR
Dan’s Grade: 50 FV

Story’s prospect trajectory resembles a bathtub curve — which is to say it’s gone from high to low and back to high again. Drafted 45th overall back in 2011, he got off to a strong start in the low minors, but hit a wall as soon as he reached High-A. Story got back on track in 2015 when he hit .279/.350/.514 between Double-A and Triple-A with 20 homers and 22 steals. Story was one of the top offensive performers in the high minors last year, which is mighty impressive for a shortstop. His 25% strikeout rate is cause for concern, but is largely outweighed by everything else he does well.

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Previous editions: Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati .

Earlier this week, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the Cincinnati Reds. In this companion piece, I look at that same Cincinnati farm system through the lens of my recently refined KATOH projection system. There’s way more to prospect evaluation than just the stats, so if you haven’t already, I highly recommend you read Dan’s piece in addition to this one. KATOH has no idea how hard a pitcher throws, how good a hitter’s bat speed is, or what a player’s makeup is like. So it’s liable to miss big on players whose tools don’t line up with their performances. However, when paired with more scouting-based analyses, KATOH’s objectivity can be useful in identifying talented players who might be overlooked by the industry consensus or highly-touted prospects who might be over-hyped.

Below, I’ve grouped prospects into three groups: those who are forecast for two or more wins through their first six major-league seasons, those who receive a projection between 1.0 and 2.0 WAR though their first six seasons, and then any residual players who received Future Value (FV) grades of 45 or higher from Dan. Note that I generated forecasts only for players who accrued at least 200 plate appearances or batters faced last season. Also note that the projections for players over a relatively small sample are less reliable, especially when those samples came in the low minors. Read the rest of this entry »

Previous editions: Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL.

Last week, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the Cincinnati Reds. In this companion piece, I look at that same Cincinnati farm system through the lens of my recently refined KATOH projection system. There’s way more to prospect evaluation than just the stats, so if you haven’t already, I highly recommend you read Dan’s piece in addition to this one. KATOH has no idea how hard a pitcher throws, how good a hitter’s bat speed is, or what a player’s makeup is like. So it’s liable to miss big on players whose tools don’t line up with their performances. However, when paired with more scouting-based analyses, KATOH’s objectivity can be useful in identifying talented players who might be overlooked by the industry consensus or highly-touted prospects who might be over-hyped.

Below, I’ve grouped prospects into three groups: those who are forecast for two or more wins through their first six major-league seasons, those who receive a projection between 1.0 and 2.0 WAR though their first six seasons, and then any residual players who received Future Value (FV) grades of 45 or higher from Dan. Note that I generated forecasts only for players who accrued at least 200 plate appearances or batters faced last season. Also note that the projections for players over a relatively small sample are less reliable, especially when those samples came in the low minors.

1. Jose Peraza, 2B (Profile)

KATOH Projection: 14.9 WAR
Dan’s Grade: 55 FV

Peraza burst onto the prospect scene in 2014, when he hit .339/.364/.441 between High-A and Double-A. His high BABIP came back to earth a bit in Triple-A last year, but was still roughly a league-average hitter. His .293/.316/. 378 showing wasn’t bad at all for a 21-year-old. Peraza is an interesting prospect due to the outlier-ness of many of his attributes. For example, both of the following sentences are accurate. One: he’s a 70-grade runner who makes tons of contact, is a strong defender up the middle, succeeded in Double-A as a 20-year-old, and held his own as a 21-year-old in Triple-A. And two: he’s a second baseman with minimal power who never walks and has been traded twice in the past seven months. There are clearly pros and cons to Peraza’s profile, but when fed into KATOH, they yield a very favorable projection. I’m always skeptical of the projections for outlier cases like Peraza, so let’s turn to the Mahalanobis comps for more clarity.

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Last week, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the Chicago White Sox. In this companion piece, I look at that same Chicago farm system through the lens of my recently refined KATOH projection system. There’s way more to prospect evaluation than just the stats, so if you haven’t already, I highly recommend you read Dan’s piece in addition to this one. KATOH has no idea how hard a pitcher throws, how good a hitter’s bat speed is, or what a player’s makeup is like. So it’s liable to miss big on players whose tools don’t line up with their performances. However, when paired with more scouting-based analyses, KATOH’s objectivity can be useful in identifying talented players who might be overlooked by the industry consensus or highly-touted prospects who might be over-hyped.

Below, I’ve grouped prospects into three groups: those who are forecast for two or more wins through their first six major-league seasons, those who receive a projection between 1.0 and 2.0 WAR though their first six seasons, and then any residual players who received Future Value (FV) grades of 45 or higher from Dan. Note that I generated forecasts only for players who accrued at least 200 plate appearances or batters faced last season. Also note that the projections for players over a relatively small sample are less reliable, especially when those samples came in the low minors.

1. Tim Anderson, SS (Profile)

KATOH Projection Through First Six Seasons: 6.0 WAR
Dan’s Grade: 55

At the plate, Anderson’s 2015 at Double-A strongly resembled his 2014 at High-A. He struck out in over 20% in his plate appearances, walked in less than 5% and hit for an unremarkable amount of power. While he improved his walk rate to near-respectability — from 2% to 4% — he sacrificed a chunk of power in the process. Last year, however, he complemented his relatively empty .300 average with a boatload of steals, which speaks to the 22-year-old’s athleticism. Anderson’s undeveloped bat still gives KATOH some pause, but shortstops with top-notch speed don’t need to hit much to be productive.

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