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 »

Yesterday, we gave you a little bit of a tease, giving you a glimpse into the making of FanGraphs Top 200 Prospect List. This morning, however, we present the list in its entirety, including scouting grades and reports for every prospect rated as a 50 Future Value player currently in the minor leagues. As discussed in the linked introduction, some notable international players were not included on the list, but their respective statuses were discussed in yesterday’s post. If you haven’t read any of the prior prospect pieces here on the site, I’d highly encourage you to read the introduction, which explains all of the terms and grades used below.

Additionally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point you towards our YouTube channel, which currently holds over 600 prospect videos, including all of the names near the top of this list. Players’ individual videos are linked in the profiles below as well.

And lastly, before we get to the list, one final reminder that a player’s placement in a specific order is less important than his placement within a Future Value tier. Numerical rankings can give a false impression of separation between players who are actually quite similar, and you shouldn’t get too worked up over the precise placement of players within each tier. The ranking provides some additional information, but players in each grouping should be seen as more or less equivalent prospects.

If you have any questions about the list, I’ll be chatting today at noon here on the site (EDIT: here’s the chat transcript), and you can find me on Twitter at @kileymcd.

Alright, that’s enough stalling. Let’s get to this.

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Tomorrow, we’ll be officially revealing our own version of the Top 100 prospects list that has become a staple of the baseball community. However, with more than 100 prospects receiving Future Value grades of 50 or higher, we decided to not arbitrarily cut off the list at 100 names, and ordered every prospect who achieved that FV score: 142 players in all. Because the Top 142 prospects sounds a little strange, however, I also included a secondary tier of unranked-but-still-listed prospects whose FVs fall on the higher side of 45; these are guys who weren’t too far off the list themselves, and in many cases, will be strong candidates for next year’s list.

So, tomorrow, we’ll unveil the FanGraphs Top 200 Prospect list. Today, though, I wanted to give you a little bit of background on how I arrived at these grades and rankings, as well as preemptively answering some questions that may arise about certain types of players.

Team Prospect Lists:
Rangers, Rockies, D’Backs, Twins, Astros
Cubs, Reds, Phillies, Rays, Mets
Padres, Marlins, Nationals, Red Sox, White Sox
Orioles, Yankees, Braves

Scouting Explained: Introduction, Hitting Pt 1 Pt 2 Pt 3 Pt 4 Pt 5 Pt 6

Cuban Coverage: Latest on Yoan Moncada and Latest on Four Notable Cubans

What The Tool Grades Mean

If you’re dropping into my minor league prospects rankings for the first time, thanks for coming, but there’s also a few things I should probably explain so that the list doesn’t look like gibberish to you. I use the 20-80 scouting scale, the same grading scale that pro scouts use to grade players at every level of baseball. It grades a player’s traditional tools — hit, hit for power, speed, fielding, throwing, each of a pitcher’s pitches, and his command — against major league average for each tool. Average is 50, above average is 55, below average is 45, plus is 60, plus-plus is 70 and 80 is just called 80 because it’s so rare and special that it doesn’t need another name; think Giancarlo Stanton‘s power, Billy Hamilton‘s speed, or Randy Johnson’s fastball. A 60 or better off-speed pitch is the standard for being called a “swing and miss” pitch; you need two 60 pitches and at least an average third pitch and command to be a #3 starter, for example.

If you want to go into further depth, then I’d suggest checking out the Scouting Explained links above, where I go into more detail about how scouts do what they do. These tool grades aren’t directly applicable to stats in every case — speed is just speed, not the ability to steal bases — but I go into much more detail on each player and project his potential big league numbers, his ETA to reach that level, a risk grade and more on the team prospect lists, linked to above and in each player’s capsule on the list. Since there are so many players that have tools that are 45 or 50, I use a + to denote 47.5 (fringe-average or fringy) and 52.5 (solid-average), or the half-grades between these most common grades, 45, 50 and 55.

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Evaluating the Prospects: Rangers, Rockies, D’Backs, Twins, Astros, Cubs, Reds, Phillies, Rays, Mets, Padres, Marlins, Nationals, Red Sox, White Sox, Orioles, Yankees, Braves & Athletics

Scouting Explained: Introduction, Hitting Pt 1 Pt 2 Pt 3 Pt 4 Pt 5 Pt 6

Amateur Coverage: 2015 Draft Rankings, November Update, 2015 July 2 Top Prospects & Latest on Yoan Moncada

The Braves’ off-season reload has been well-documented, trading veterans Jason Heyward, Justin Upton and Evan Gattis, along with some smaller deals. 8 of the top 13 prospects on this list have been acquired this off-season, along with their 4th best young big league asset. This targeting of high upside pitching turned a below average system into my 6th ranked system.

It’s a confident bet on the organization’s ability to develop young arms, some with specific issues that the team thinks Roger McDowell can fix along with a bet that the Braves’ pro scouting is better than the competition. Judging from the success the club has had in waiver claims and in the minor league portion of trades, that belief appears to be well-founded. We’ll likely see one or two years of the Braves not being playoff contenders, but the 2017 team is being set up to possible start another long run of success, just as the club’s new stadium is set to open.

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Evaluating the Prospects: Rangers, Rockies, D’Backs, Twins, Astros, Cubs, Reds, Phillies, Rays, Mets, Padres, Marlins, Nationals, Red Sox, White Sox, Orioles, Yankees & Braves

Scouting Explained: Introduction, Hitting Pt 1 Pt 2 Pt 3 Pt 4 Pt 5 Pt 6

Amateur Coverage: 2015 Draft Rankings, 2015 July 2 Top Prospects & Latest on Yoan Moncada

This is the longest list by a couple thousand words and the 58 videos (most with clips from multiple years) of current Yankee prospects on the FanGraphs YouTube page is the most of any team. Some of this is due to my history with the organization and proximity to their Spring Training home, but mostly due to the depth this once-maligned system has developed.

The big story with the Yankees farm system is their July 2nd spending spree last summer and the harsh critiques ownership gave the player development and scouting departments the summer before that.  One led to the other and now things look to be in a much better shape. It’s still too early to pass judgment on the July 2nd group, but all of the high bonus guys are listed below either on the list or in the others section.

They’re the only names below that are unlinked, since they haven’t played pro games yet, only instructional league; the videos of these players are from the pre-July 2nd showcases in the Dominican and from fall instructional league in Tampa. July 2nd prospects sign contracts for the following year, so the team gets an extra year of control before having to add them to the 40-man roster, rather than starting their clock a year early for just part of a summer of games.

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Evaluating the Prospects: Rangers, Rockies, D’Backs, Twins, Astros, Cubs, Reds, Phillies, Rays, Mets, Padres, Marlins, Nationals, Red Sox, White Sox, Orioles & Yankees

Scouting Explained: Introduction, Hitting Pt 1 Pt 2 Pt 3 Pt 4 Pt 5 Pt 6

Amateur Coverage: 2015 Draft Rankings, 2015 July 2 Top Prospects & Latest on Yoan Moncada

Something that came up on every call with an Orioles official was their internal prospect list. Most teams I’ve talked to don’t have a consensus list; maybe a list a couple people in the office maintain with agreed-upon tiers of players, but not one that the whole organization refers to. Others in the org maintain their own lists as well. At one point or another, this master list was referenced enough that I saw some trends where the Orioles own list would diverge from my own.

They skewed high for the near big league ready players, with down list players like Dariel Alvarez and Henry Urrutia much higher than I have them and thus some lower level players like Stephen Tarpley lower than I have them. As you would expect, they also have some information a typical scout may not have, regarding injuries and progress in private workouts, so some players with subpar 2014 season are higher than I have them, like Urrutia, Michael Almanzar and Josh Hart. Other than those two main differences, our lists ended up being pretty similar, with only a handful of players we disagreed on that didn’t fall into one of those two groups.

There’s positives and negatives of having such a list. The official-ness of it means it gets referenced internally all the time and is the starting point for trade talks, so it can morph the internal dialogue about a player for better or worse. While it’s less divisive than it was 10 years ago, there is also still a scouts vs. stats divide on subjects like prospect lists in most organizations, since the evaluation method (particularly on high minors players with lots of data) differs a good bit.  There’s also a positive to having the dialogue that leads to a consensus list, so various factions within the organization know where “their” guys stand and thus know when to speak up in-season if they think their guy warrants a better ranking.

The O’s have had solid drafts under the Dan Duquette regime; they haven’t had tons of extra picks or a high draft position to give them the money or opportunity to get the super elite prospect. That said, the early returns are solid considering that and their lower investment in international bonuses, with Jomar Reyes looking like a steal less than a year after signing.   There’s also depth in pitching at the upper levels, with 5 of the top 12 prospects being pitchers that could contribute in the big leagues in 2015.  From my current ranking of the farm systems of all 30 organizations, I have Baltimore 18th, which may still change before I formally publish those rankings.

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We’re right in the thick of prospect ranking season right now, with all of the national prospect writers feverishly emailing scouts their top 100 lists and making adjustments with plans to unveil them in the next couple weeks or so.  I’ll hold the details of what and when we’ll be putting up our list, but it will likely be well over 100 players. I’m nothing if not wordy.

Undermining Team Prospect Lists

An interesting thing I’ve noticed while balancing the individual team list research with the overall big list research is how team lists change after I’ve posted them. The reasons I give FVs to players is to categorize them, guessing where I’ll put them in a top 100, to save some time. It’s inevitable, then, that some player I call a 50 FV on his team list will end up being ranked ahead of a that I call a 55 FV on his team’s list. This is expected and part of the reason I’ll be continually updating the team lists (more on this at a later date), so that discrepancy in the team list will be fixed after the big list goes up.

When I write a team list, I talk to 3-5 people with the club, then more from outside the club. I massage the data into a list and usually feel pretty good about it. When I combine all these team lists into a big list, I feel pretty good about it and then I send it to scouts and execs from every team and when I get replies, I start feeling less good about it.

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Evaluating the Prospects: Rangers, Rockies, D’Backs, Twins, Astros, Cubs, Reds, Phillies, Rays, Mets, Padres, Marlins, Nationals, Red Sox, White Sox & Orioles

Scouting Explained: Introduction, Hitting Pt 1 Pt 2 Pt 3 Pt 4 Pt 5 Pt 6

Amateur Coverage: 2015 Draft Rankings, 2015 July 2 Top Prospects & Latest on Yoan Moncada

I liked the Nationals’ deal to move Steven Souza for Trea Turner and Joe Ross and they’re doing a nice job finding prospects despite lower draft position and international bonus pool. Being aggressive with injured pitchers in the draft (Giolito) has already paid off big and may soon pay off again (Fedde).

Stacking this system up with the other 14 I’ve done so far, I realize the reason I don’t have a ton to say is the Nationals system is very average, which is an accomplishment given that they are perennial contenders focused on their big league team: they haven’t busted their international pool, gone after high profile international free agents or had the extra picks to spend as much as some other big market clubs with better systems.

Washington made the most of their time in the cellar (and were fortunate that it coincided with Bryce Harper‘s and Stephen Strasburg’s draft years), will make a deal for prospects when they like the value, have a couple high end prospects (which some teams with higher draft positions still don’t have), a solid middle class with okay depth, along with some longer shot upside bets to watch. I’d bet they end up in the 13-17 area when I rank the systems at the end of this process, which shows a large net positive contribution from the scouting and player development staffs.

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