Editor’s Note: Josh Herzenberg spent three years as an area scout covering North Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas for the Dodgers. He also spent two years coaching, one with the Ogden Raptors and one with the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes, predominantly working with pitchers and helping to integrate analytics into preparation for minor leaguers. He pitched at Oneonta State and has a Master’s Degree from Georgetown. He currently lives in New York City, where he works in finance, and will be contributing here at FanGraphs.

As someone born and raised in the northeast, the beginning of the professional baseball season has always been a marker, of sorts, of springtime finally arriving. That didn’t change in 2019, as Sunday afternoon’s Low-A matinee between the Phillies’ Lakewood Blueclaws and the Rangers’ Hickory Crawdads brought pleasant weather, plenty of sunshine, and some intriguing players to New Jersey. What follows are some of my notes from that game, with each player’s Top 100 and organizational ranking per Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel indicated where applicable.

Lakewood

Alec Bohm, 3B, Top 100 Rank: 66, Org Rank: 2
Bohm was the third overall pick out of Wichita State in 2018, lauded as a player with a chance to make an impact as a power hitting third baseman. Physically, he stands out on the field as advertised, with an XL frame and broad, strapping shoulders. There might be some more room to fill out the frame but that also might not be necessary – he’s a large human being already. Bohm smoked a double into right center field in his second plate appearance in what was an otherwise underwhelming day for him. The double – off an elevated sinker out over the plate – was a glimpse of Bohm’s ability to drive the ball, but I’m not convinced he’s going to be able to tap into that power consistently enough for it to make the impact the Phillies were likely hoping it would when they selected him in last year’s draft. He’s very compact and fails to get his hands extended through the zone, resulting in him effectively jamming himself and forcing him to work with a smaller hitting zone because of it.

Defensively, Bohm showed plenty of arm to stay at third base and his footwork was fine. He has long, loping strides and is a slower twitch mover, showing below average range on a play to his left, and running below average times on the basepaths throughout the day. I wouldn’t rule out his ability to stay at the hot corner long term but he will need to work on staying agile as he gets bigger in order to do so. The frame and the power is evident, but the bat path and lack of quick twitch drew some mild concerns in this one game look.

Luis Garcia, SS, Top 100 Rank: NA, Org Rank: 4
Garcia will play the entire 2019 season at age 18 and by the looks of his game on Sunday, he should have no trouble holding his own in the South Atlantic League. An undersized, scrappy middle infielder who made his professional debut last year, Garcia presents himself as more of a jack-of-all-trades player than one with a singular carrying tool. He’s a slick fielder at shortstop with enough arm to stay there and he showed good baseball IQ defensively, especially for a teenager, enough to assume he has the potential to play a super utility role in the future, which would ostensibly bode well given Phillies manager Gabe Kapler’s affinity for versatility. Garcia doesn’t pack a huge punch at the plate but showed a compact, rhythmic approach and good patience. I could foresee an average hit tool at his ceiling with power production that is more doubles- than home run-oriented. Garcia has the ceiling of an everyday player, but also likely has a higher-than-usual utility infielder type floor given his current level of polish.

Francisco Morales, RHP, Top 100 Rank: NA, Org Rank: 9
Morales is another intriguing teenage talent on a roster full of them, and threw well in his South Atlantic League debut on Sunday. A tall, fairly full framed 6-foot-4 right-handed pitcher, Morales fits the bill physically as a workhorse and showed the early makings of a power arm. His fastball ranged from 92-95, touching 96, as he worked into the fifth inning. He showed good plane and was able to generate life through the zone. He leaned fairly heavily on a quality slider in the mid-80s, a short breaker that he seemed to have feel to manipulate to move either horizontally or vertically at will. It showed big league average consistently, with a chance to be better in the future.

Morales’s arm action is just fair, with a long, offline plunging type action and some effort at release. He moves athletically enough to repeat his delivery – especially on his slider – but there is some cause for concern with respect to long term sustainability and lack of a present third pitch to project a starter role long term. I think Morales settles in as a quality right-handed reliever long term with two offerings that are at least 55s, but would give him every chance to start at this point as the body, arm strength, and ability to spin a quality breaking ball stand out.

Victor Santos, RHP, Top 100 Rank: NA, Org Rank: 27
Santos continued Lakewood’s trend of making most evaluators (including this one) feel old, as he won’t be turning 19 until July. An average sized right-handed pitcher who looks relatively generic upon first glance, Santos impressed with his command and his ability to change speeds in Sunday’s extended relief look. After walking less than 2% of the batters he faced in the GCL in 2018, he continued his advanced command in this four inning outing, throwing 38 strikes against just 16 balls. He featured a three pitch mix, with a tailing fastball that worked 88-91, a short, low-80s slider, and a diving low-80s changeup. The changeup was the better of the two off-speed pitches on this day and he seemed comfortable with it in any count.

Santos is off to a fast start in his career and while only his changeup showed as a major league average offering on Sunday, he could have the ability to move quickly through the lower levels of the minor leagues due to his command and feel to change speeds. He’ll be worth monitoring moving forward to see how the stuff plays against better competition, and if it improves as he matures.

Hickory

Chris Seise, SS, Top 100 Rank: NA, Org Rank: 12
Seise was somewhat of a late riser in the 2017 high school draft class, enough that the Rangers decided to take him with the 29th overall pick out of West Orange High School in Central Florida. Seise flashed some power in his first pro season after signing but missed all of 2018 due to right rotator cuff surgery and is now back on the field and healthy in meaningful games for the first time in about 19 months. At 20 years old, Seise certainly looks the part of a big leaguer, filling out his uniform well with a high waist and very broad shoulders.

He has fluid, athletic actions defensively and moves both ways at shortstop with no problem. His first step quickness is probably about average at this point, which brings up some questions about his ability to stay at shortstop long term as he continues to get bigger. He showed no throwing issues during warmups and made just a few throws in game play, all of which were below average but didn’t necessitate more. I’ll reserve judgment on the arm strength until another look but for now, I’d say there’s enough risk that he doesn’t stay at shortstop due to the first step risk that assessing utility options – whether it be third base or center field (Seise is a plus runner underway presently) – could happen as early as 2019 Instructional League.

Offensively, Seise has something of an all-or-nothing approach, with plus bat speed and strength in his swing. There is some inherent swing-and-miss risk, but he has the ability to impact the baseball. Seise has everyday upside but carries a lot of risk due to questions about where he ends up defensively and if he’ll make enough contact to actualize his impressive athleticism and strength in the box.

Dylan Bice, RHP, Top 100 Rank: NA, Org Rank: NA
Bice was drafted in the 23rd round of the 2016 draft out of a Georgia high school and spent three years in the AZL, including a 2018 season that saw him throw just three innings. Now 21, Bice was impressive in his full season debut on Sunday, throwing 21 of 29 pitches for strikes in two innings of relief. He is a big bodied right-handed pitcher, standing at 6-foot-4 and listed at 220 pounds, although he looks a bit more than that.

He has a long arm stroke and a violent, effort-filled release that generally leads to both reliever projection and command questions long term. I do think Bice is a reliever, but he showed no command issues on this day. His fastball was 94-97 and averaged 96, with steep downhill plane and life through the zone. He throws from a high slot and could probably bode well working up in the zone with his fastball. His breaking ball, sort of a tweener, is currently an 82-85 mph slider that should probably be a curveball to play off a north-south profile long term. Bice showed some feel to spin the pitch and while it is fringy now, it could get to average with better shape. A big bodied reliever without a plus off-speed pitch isn’t someone who generally turns into anything more than a player with marginal impact at baseball’s highest level, but Bice is worth monitoring moving forward due to the big frame and arm strength.

12:23

Kiley McDaniel: here’s some high speed via twitter, two more pitches on the @fangraphs instagram:   FanGraphs Prospects @FG_Prospects   Last night @kileymcd saw our 15th-ranked 2019 draft prospect, FL prep righty Matt Allan, sit 94-96 and hit 97 until a rain delay. He also broke off a couple 65-grade breaking balls, here’s one of them fangraphs.com/prospects/the-… 10 Apr 2019

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These are notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Seuly Matias, RF, Kansas City Royals
Level: Hi-A   Age: 20   Org Rank: 1   FV: 45+
Line: 3-for-4, 2B, 3B
Notes
Matias’ 34% career strikeout rate is a sizable red flag that ultimately is what kept him off our overall prospect rankings. With a few exceptions, even the most whiff-prone big leaguers struck out less than that when they were in the minors. But so gifted and physically dominant is Matias that we think he’ll be effective, even if it’s in a streaky, inconsistent way like Domingo Santana or Carlos Gomez. As a teen, he was already posting exit velocities on par with burly, Quad-A type hitters. We hope he learns to take a walk, but “Randal Grichuk with more raw power” is a good player, so we’re cautiously optimistic that the Royals at least have a good big leaguer here, and a potential superstar if there’s contact/approach refinement, which is admittedly easier said than done.

Nolan Gorman, 3B, St. Louis Cardinals
Level: Low-A   Age: 18   Org Rank: 3   FV: 50
Line: 2-for-5, 2 HR
Notes
The Cardinals gave Gorman some reps with the big league team during spring training, and a scout told me they thought it would make Low-A, where Gorman struck out 37% of the time for a month of 2018, appear slower and easier by comparison. He has reached base in each of his 2019 games, and six of his 10 hits have gone for extra bases. We considered Gorman one of the more advanced high school bats in last year’s class (he and Jarred Kelenic were the only two in that top tier) and thought he might move quickly if the strikeout issues that popped up during his senior spring could be remedied. It looks like Gorman is just going to strike out a little more than is ideal, but he also appears poised for a quick move to the upper levels of the minors. When is the right time for promotion? I’d give opposing pitchers the chance to make adjustments to Gorman, and vice versa, which means waiting until mid-May when he sees Beloit, Quad Cities, Wisconsin, and Cedar Rapids for the second time. If he hits until then, and those clubs can’t find a way to get him out the second time they see him, perhaps we see Gorman in Hi-A just after he turns 19.

Joey Bart, C, San Francisco Giants
Level: Hi-A   Age: 22   Org Rank: 1   FV: 55
Line: 2-for-5, HR, 2B, BB
Notes
Nothing to see here as Bart should be expected to hit for power in the Cal League both because of its offensive environment and because last year he teed off on ACC competition, which is second only to the SEC, in my opinion. It’s ironic that the top two picks in last year’s drafts seem likely to be ready for the majors well before their parent club is likely to be competitive, but perhaps it will behoove the Giants to move Bart to Double-A semi-early this summer if for no other reason than to get him working with that pitching staff, which I think has more future big league teammates on it than the group in San Jose does.

Josh Naylor, DH, San Diego Padres
Level: Triple-A   Age: 21   Org Rank: 11   FV: 50
Line: 3-for-6, 2 2B
Notes
Naylor should be monitored closely because he’s the type of hitter who could explode if he makes a relevant approach change. He has both huge raw power and excellent bat control, but his willingness to offer at pitches he can’t drive had limited his power output until 2018, when he homered 17 times at Double-A. If he learns to attack the right pitches, he’ll hit so much that it won’t matter that he doesn’t really have a defensive home. As Naylor is just 21, we’re cautiously optimistic that he will. It’s too early to draw conclusions from his stats but his pull% is currently much higher than is usual.

Trying New Things
I noticed two odd things while combing box scores last night. First, Astros prospect Myles Straw (17th on the Astros list) has been playing shortstop. A quick perusal of the interwebs unearthed this article in the Houston Chronicle, which reports that the Astros will give this a try for a few weeks and see if Straw can actually play there. Their upper levels have been so crowded with outfielders that many of those players have been traded, and seeing as Straw’s best tool (his defense) is made redundant by Jake Marisnick, it makes sense to explore his defensive versatility.

Similarly, the Rangers are trying 1B/LF/3B Andretty Cordero at second base. Unlikely to do enough damage to profile at first (where he’s seen the most time), Cordero’s bat was still notable enough to include him in the Others of Note section of the Rangers list. Should he prove passable at second base, he’ll be much more relevant.

Former shortstop Javy Guerra of the Padres has moved to the mound, and I’ve been told he’s sitting in the upper-90s with natural cut. He’s on the San Diego 40-man.

Once again, we’ve done a refresh of all of our draft rankings. They get tweaked multiple times per week in subtle ways, but every few weeks they need a larger overhaul when there are over a dozen guys who have moved around in the key spots. That’s what happened this weekend. We reset the trend arrows a few days ago to clean things up a bit visually. Here are some notes on where we stand now:

• There is now a level of comfort amongst scouts with the hierarchy of college pitching in this year’s draft. TCU LHP Nick Lodolo is the consensus number one, West Virginia RHP Alek Manoah is the consensus number two, and Elon RHP George Kirby is most scouts’ third choice. Some scouts have Kentucky LHP Zack Thompson third, but he’s had durability issues dating back to high school, so when his medicals come out, he could go anywhere from 10th to 40th.
• As for high school pitching, it’s a big more muddled. I’m heading out tonight to see the guy who most feel is the best prep pitcher in the draft, Florida prep RHP Matthew Allan. Behind him, most scouts have another Florida prep RHP (whom I’ll see Friday), Brennan Malone. Illinois prep RHP Quinn Priester’s area kicks off a bit later than the Sunshine State but some scouts had him up to 97 mph in his last start, so he may jump into that top tier with Allan and Malone after another couple starts. New Jersey prep RHP (and son of Al) Jack Leiter was good in front of lots of heat last week at NHSI, and he’s probably next in the pecking order, with months of speculation that it’ll take $3 million or more to keep him from going to Vanderbilt. This, along with the varied rankings of prep pitching from team to team, likely makes him a target for an overslot bonus later in the first round by a club with multiple picks (similar to how the Cardinals landed Jack Flaherty).
• Some preferences in the early picks are becoming clearer. It still seems like Adley Rutschman at one (Orioles) and Andrew Vaughn at two (Royals) are the two easier ones to project with what we know at this point (the full draft order and slots can be found here). Rutschman’s lead at the top spot is still significant, so it would take a major injury or an uglier-than-expected medical to make Vaughn a real option at the first pick for Baltimore. The buzz is that the White Sox are leaning heavily to college prospects for the third pick, with Nick Lodolo in the mix along with the next tier of college hitters, which can be ranked any way at this point (UNLV SS Bryson Stott, North Carolina 1B Michael Busch, Vanderbilt RF J.J. Bleday, Arizona State LF Hunter Bishop, Missouri RF Kameron Misner is the way we have them lined up right now). There’s similar buzz that Miami is also looking hard at college options and that Lodolo is in their mix. Things get a bit hazier beyond that and also depend on the picks at three and four. The general feeling is that this top 10 isn’t strong enough to make every club just take the best player available, so there’s some chatter that clubs picking outside the top five may take a money saver with the first pick and move that money to float a prep prospect to their second pick. That strategy may be more fraught than normal this year with Arizona in possession of a $16 million bonus pool and set to pick 16th, 26th, 33rd, and 34th.
• We’re up to 271 total players in the 2019 list now and we’re adding to the 2020 and 2021 lists weekly. We also have a handful of 2022 prep names ready for when the unsigned 2019 prep players join that class as college players. I’m starting a Florida swing this week and should see all of the potential first rounders in the state along with a couple Florida State League games. Last weekend, I saw Nasim Nunez, Louisville/Clemson, UNC/Georgia Tech, UNC Wilmington/Kennesaw State, Georgia/Vanderbilt, and a Triple-A game between the Braves and Orioles affiliates. Eric is running around the Pacific Northwest and he’s always bouncing around the backfields and local amateur games back in Arizona. We’ve got new Sony high speed cameras, so stay tuned to the FanGraphs Youtube page (Mackenzie Gore or Ryan Jensen) and Instagram account (Austin Riley or Michael Busch) to see what we’ve been seeing on the pro and amateur end of things, likely at 960 frames per second.
• Georgia has seemed like it was on the verge of being a top tier program for decades, with all kinds of built-in advantages, and now it appears to be coming together. The 2020 group is strong, headlined by the top two pitchers in the class (RHP Emerson Hancock and Cole Wilcox) along with the Saturday starter (LHP C.J. Smith), and the 2019 class also has a potential first day headliner (3B Aaron Schunk) along with solid day two depth pieces (RHPs Tony Locey and Tim Elliott, SS Cam Shepherd). The top tier SEC programs (LSU, Vanderbilt, Florida have been the top tier recently) often have more than a half dozen top 5-7 round prospects for the next two drafts, a strong freshman class, and a strong high school senior crop. Georgia is joining a number of other strong programs (Arkansas, Mississippi State, Texas A&M, Ole Miss, Auburn) in challenging for an extended stay in the top tier, and some would argue a few of those already have.
• Along those lines, Miami hasn’t broken through yet, but has a very strong 2020 class with five players (SS Freddy Zamora, 3B Raymond Gil, 1B Alex Toral, RHPs Slade Cecconi and Chris McMahon) on THE BOARD, while only being slated to lose one player who’s on the 2019 list (RHP Evan McKendry).

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Cleveland Indians. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from our own (both Eric Longenhagen’s and Kiley McDaniel’s) observations. For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of our prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this.

All of the numbered prospects here also appear on The Board, a new feature at the site that offers sortable scouting information for every organization. That can be found here.

Other Prospects of Note

Grouped by type and listed in order of preference within each category.

Some More Really Young Guys
Raynel Delgado, SS
Marcos Gonzalez, SS
Korey Holland, OF

Delgado just turned 19. He’s a patient, switch-hitting infielder with some low-ball ability from the left side, though his swing can get long. Marcos Gonzalez will be 19 all year and was assigned to full-season ball. He’s a polished defender with a small but well-proportioned frame, and average bat speed, but limited bat control. Holland will also be 19 all year. He’s a plus runner with some feel to hit but came to pro ball with a poor swing foundation, so he’s a bit of a project.

Catching
Eric Haase, C
Sicnarf Loopstok, C
Logan Ice, C

Haase has power, he strikes out, and he’s not a great defender. It’s an Evan Gattis-ish profile. Eli Ben-Porat identified Loopstok as an elite receiver, something corroborated to me by an office source. He’s also performed on paper the last two years. He might factor into the 40-man catching picture soon. Ice’s numbers were bad last year but he’s still a fine defender and hits the ball in the air a ton.

Power Relief Arms
Juan Mota, RHP
James Karinchak, RHP

Mota’s fastball doesn’t have great angle, but it’s hard and moves. His slider is just average but when he locates it, it gets swings and misses. Karinchek throws in the mid-90s and has a unique, over-the-top delivery.

Upper-Level Outfielders
Oscar Gonzalez, OF
Andrew Calica, OF
Alex Call, OF
Mitch Longo, OF

Gonzalez, 21, is an old school, gloveless free-swinger who takes big hacks at everything. Calica had a great sophomore year at UCSB, then fell off as a junior. He’s fast and makes contact, and could be a fourth outfielder. Call has more power, but it’s doubles thump, and he doesn’t run quite as well as Calica. Longo seemed to be a 2018 swing changer and does a little of both.

Changeup Artists
Chih-Wei Hu, RHP
Raymond Burgos, LHP
Zach Plesac, RHP
Eli Lingos, LHP
Ben Krauth, LHP

Hu has been developed as a kitchen sink starter and is probably rotation depth for now, but ultimately, he’ll likely stick in someone’s bullpen with a more limited repertoire. Burgos has a low three-quarters slot, and sits 91-94, with the cambio. Plesac is coming off of Tommy John. He has the hardest fastball among the non-Hus in this category, but also has the worst command. Krauth throws harder than Lingos, but Lingos is a few years younger and doesn’t need to be on the 40-man for a while.

Can Spin It
Jerson Ramirez, RHP
Kyle Nelson, LHP
Kirk McCarty, LHP

Ramirez is only 20 but throws in the low-90s and averaged 2700 rpm on his curveball last year. Nelson can really pitch and carved up Low-A in 2018. He sits 88-91 but beats hitters with it anyway, and his good slider has bat-missing vertical action. McCarty’s release point clearly makes lefties uncomfortable and he has a good two-plane breaker.

System Overview

Cleveland seems to be one of the game’s more rational actors. Well aware of their competitive window, the team moved several young players in exchange for players who, while perhaps possessing less upside, are more likely to help them soon. Tahnaj Thomas for Jordan Luplow. Jhon Torres for Oscar Mercado. Gionti Turner for Chih-Wei Hu. Ignacio Feliz for Walker Lockett. These are moves designed to create depth behind the talented and competitive big league roster as other teams need to shed 40-man weight. Nash Equilibrium and all that. It’s team building on a budget, a front office making do with what ownership seems willing to spend.

We’ve talked about this here before, but Cleveland executes their draft strategy so well that it’s easy to see what it is. They almost always end up with some of the youngest high school players in the draft, and they often seem to end up with players who had strong sophomore college seasons, but down junior years, or high school players who were great during the previous summer but fell during their senior spring. It suggests they more evenly weigh multiple years of performance, perhaps consciously avoiding recency bias in places where other teams and individuals see progress.

These are notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Luis Robert, CF, Chicago White Sox
Level: Hi-A   Age: 21   Org Rank: 4   FV: 55
Line: 2-for-4, HR, 2 HBP

Notes
Off to hot start, Robert has multi-hit efforts in each of his first four games and has already stolen three bases and homered three times. After watching LouBob a lot last year (first while he rehabbed multiple injuries, then in the Fall League), I grew concerned about how his bat path might limit the quality of his contact (he sometimes struggled to pull pitches he should have) or his rate of contact, which we don’t have a large-enough sample to properly assess because of his injuries. So far, the pull-side stuff hasn’t been founded, as all but two of Robert’s balls in play so far this year have been to the right side of the field, and those were both pop-ups to the second baseman. He’s one of the more physically-gifted players in pro baseball.

Darwinzon Hernandez, LHP, Boston Red Sox
Level: Double-A   Age: 22   Org Rank: 2   FV: 45
Line: 5 IP, 2 H, 4 BB, 0 R, 10 K

Notes
We do not think Hernandez is a long-term starter and instead think he’ll be an elite bullpen arm. His fastball often sits in the upper-90s when he’s starting so it should at least stay there if he’s moved to relief and, though his feel for it comes and goes, his curveball can be untouchable at times. Maybe the strong early-season performances of Matt Barnes, Brandon Workman, and Ryan Brasier has stifled some of the disquiet about the Red Sox bullpen, but in the event that they need an impact arm, I think it’s more likely to be Hernandez than a piece outside the org. Some of this is due to the quality of the farm system, but Hernandez might also just be better than a lot of the options that will eventually be on the trade market. Read the rest of this entry »

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In November, I published the results of my research attempting to put a value on minor league prospects. It seems only natural that a similar study on draft picks should follow.

As with prospect valuations, considerable work has preceded mine in the area of valuing draft picks. Sky Andrechuk, Victor Wang, Matthew Murphy, Jeff Zimmerman, and Anthony Rescan and Martin Alonso have all done similar studies.

The work below is less a replacement of the work already done and is more of a continuation of, and addition to, the study of the subject matter. As to why we might want to know this information, creating an expected value for a draft pick helps us to understand and manage our expectations of draftees’ performance. More practically, teams regularly give up draft picks to sign free agents, receive extra draft picks when they lose free agents or reside in a smaller media market, and drop slots when they exceed the highest competitive balance tax payroll threshold, not to mention that some picks can be traded. Determining a value for these picks helps us better understand the decisions teams make regarding those picks.

In some ways, determining draft pick value is a little more complicated than figuring out prospect value. When determining prospect value, players are placed within the constraints of the current CBA, which provides for a minimum salary for roughly three seasons and suppressed arbitration salaries for another three years after that before a player reaches free agency. Draft picks are confined to the same system, but there is also a signing bonus to consider, not to mention slotting rules that are often manipulated in order to move money around to different picks.

Due to signing bonuses and bonus slots, to arrive at an appropriate value for a draft pick, it isn’t enough to determine the present value of players’ WAR in the majors without getting to a dollar figure. We also have to account for the present value in dollars and then subtract the expected bonus.

Before explaining the methodology for draft picks, we can look at the very similar framework used to get to the present value of minor league prospects. From my “Update to Prospect Valuation”:

To determine surplus value for players, I used WAR produced over the first nine seasons of a career, including the season in which a prospect was ranked. Why nine years? In today’s game, most players don’t hit free agency until after their seventh major-league season. By examining nine seasons, it’s possible to account for prospects who were still a couple years away from the majors when they appeared on a top-100 list — as well as late-bloomers who might have bounced up and down between the majors and minors for a full season.

Of course, not all prospects continue to develop in the minor leagues after appearing on a top-100 list. Some debut in the majors right away. Due to the methodology outlined above, such players might be in a position to receive greater credit for their first nine seasons simply because they were closer to the majors when they were ranked. To accommodate this issue, I’ve spread out a player’s WAR over the final seven seasons of the period in question, distributing 10% of it to years three and four before slightly gradually increasing that figure up to 20% by year nine. To calculate surplus value, I’ve discounted WAR by 3% in years No. 3 through 5 (to approximate the impact of the league-minimum salary) and then 15% in year six, 32% in year seven, 48% in year eight, and 72% in year nine. Spreading out the WAR in this way not only mimics a sort of generic “development curve” but also ensures that arbitration discounts aren’t too heavy.

After that, I applied an 8% discount rate for present value. For players immediately ready to play, the extra value they get from the eighth and ninth year is minimized by removing value they actually provided from the first two years and spreading into later seasons. This similarly ensures that the controllable years of players who take longer to develop or reach the majors aren’t treated the same way as those produced by players who contribute right away. A two-win season in 2019 is more valuable than a two-win season in 2021; and this method helps to strike that balance.

Draft picks aren’t as close to the majors as most minor league prospects are. To combat this problem, I used 10 years for college draftees and 11 years for those drafted out of high school, but kept the rest the same as above.

The other difficult issue for draft picks is one of sample size. When I looked at 15 years of prospect lists, it meant we were looking at hundreds of prospects at nearly every single prospect grade. If we did the same for draft picks over 15 years, we only have 15 players at every pick, which isn’t much of a sample. To compensate for this issue, I took a large percentage of the pick in question, and then a smaller percentage on a sliding scale of the next 12 picks. After all, having the third pick in the draft isn’t just an opportunity to take the third-best player; it is the opportunity to choose between a whole host of players. The Astros taking Mark Appel ahead of Kris Bryant doesn’t make the second pick in the draft better than the first. The Astros could have had Kris Bryant, and factoring in the picks that follow helps represent that challenge.

Smoothing things out a bit helps make sure a small sample doesn’t create a bias around a pick. For example, in the years I studied (1993-2007), the third overall pick often performed poorly, but Eric Hosmer, Manny Machado, and Trevor Bauer were taken with the third pick in the three of the four drafts that followed. It wasn’t bad to have the third pick from 1993-2007. It just happened that those picks didn’t work out well.

First round picks were then adjusted upwards slightly so that the actual WAR of the picks and the adjusted value using the method above matched. The values were then smoothed out to ensure the value of the picks moved downward. The smoothing stopped mattering after the second round. After finding the present-value WAR for each pick (I used $9M/WAR), I then subtracted the slot amount for each pick to come up with a current value.

This is what the first 70 picks look like:

The values at the very top of the draft are going to be context heavy. Sometimes, the top pick is a solid 55, like Casey Mize was a season ago. Other years, it might be Bryce Harper. For context, here is how the first round played out last season in terms of bonuses and slots for the pick.

The draft reveals just how important it is for teams to receive a compensation pick the following season when they fail to sign a pick in the current year. While there is certainly lost developmental time and opportunity in losing a pick for one year, losing that pick permanently would be a major loss, and provide considerably more leverage to the players when negotiating contracts.

Moving down, this is what the picks in the third round and below are worth. For the 11th round and below, the median value is used instead of the average given the potential for a few really good picks out of thousands to distort the value beyond what would be a reasonable expectation for that pick.

In practical terms, that means that for the picks in round 20 or later, you might come up with one average player every three years. For picks in rounds 11-20, a team can expect an average player every two or three seasons. The same is true for rounds three and four combined. It’s hard to find good players in the draft after the first round. There’s as much value in the first 100 picks as in the entire rest of the draft. Teams might opt to pay a third round pick a $3,000 bonus to save money and use it elsewhere. That doesn’t mean that we should expect the same performance from that pick as we would a typical third rounder, but we should expect that the slot money the team uses elsewhere will have a value somewhere close to $4 million.

When considering how teams sometimes shift money around from the second or third round to the sixth and seventh round (and vice versa) or use money to sign players above $125,000 after the 10th round, it helps to know how to properly value every dollar spent. For the first 100 picks, where the bonuses are the highest, every dollar spent generally yields five dollars in value. In rounds 4-5, every dollar should yield about six dollars in value, and in rounds 6-10, every dollar spent should yield 10 dollars in value due to the talent available and the small signing bonuses. Given this information, it appears teams might be better off paying slightly less money in the first few rounds while still getting good talent, and shifting some of that money elsewhere in the first 10 rounds. If teams are shifting money from the first 10 rounds to the back of the draft, they need to feel pretty confident in that player’s ability.

In terms of comp picks in this year’s draft, the Arizona Diamondbacks will receive a pick at the end of the first round for losing Patrick Corbin to the Nationals. That pick is worth something close to $10 million. The six small-market teams will receive picks between rounds one and two that are worth $8 million to $9 million each. The other eight small-market picks after the second round are worth around $4 million each, and the same is true for the free agent compensation picks like the one the Dodgers will receive for losing Yasmani Grandal.

Teams signing free agents who have received a qualifying offer generally lose their second pick, and that pick is worth somewhere between $4 million and $10 million depending on where in the draft the team is picking. The Red Sox’s top pick drops down 10 spots this year because they were more than $40 million over the competitive balance tax. That penalty is only worth around $2 million.

There’s further analysis to be done based on whether a player is coming out of high school or college, as well as whether he is a position player or pitcher, but that work will be left to a later date. For now, I hope this is a useful starting point for further study, and for gaining a greater understanding of draftees’ expected production and teams’ decision making.

FanGraphs has obtained bonus figures for over 90% of all the international signings in baseball history. We have all of the most significant bonuses, every big leaguer, notable current prospects, and everything in the mid-six figure range and above, along with many years for which we have every single signing.

This provides us with a pretty complete picture of the distribution and trends of these bonuses, also allowing us to estimate how many players we’re missing. Those players are overwhelmingly names you wouldn’t recognize, guys who played for a couple of years before being released, signing as filler for a five-figure bonus.

We’ve taken out all of the major league deals (think older, high profile Japanese and Cuban players), and we have incomplete data for all of the Mexican players, as MLB notes all of them as receiving a $0 bonus (it’s an easy workaround for a convoluted system that’s mostly cleaned up now). We’ve filled in correct bonuses for players where we have it, mostly among the high profile Mexican signings, like Luis Urias and Julio Urias (no relation).

We could do a lot of things with this data — and we will, including listing it on the player pages and THE BOARD — but the thing that interests me today is combining this bonus data with our asset value research, and the dollars-per-WAR framework to get a better idea of what a dollar invested in an international amateur player returns. We’ll start with some of the meta data:

2017 was the first season of hard-capped bonus pools, which explains why bonuses declined and also why they spiked the year prior. These figures don’t include the pool overage payments made to MLB from 2013 to 2016. We estimate those figures to add up to about $250 million over those four years, with about $100 million paid to MLB in 2016 alone. (The CBA says that this money was to be spent on international operations and initiatives.)

Since the international market changes and matures so rapidly, it makes sense to start with the early 2000s signing classes as a baseline for a similar era to today. Most of the players who signed 15 years ago are now in their early 30s and have either played out their entire careers or are into their seventh year of major league service time. We can grab the dollar-per-WAR figures from the years that spanned their controlled years and turn that historical WAR into a dollar amount of value created. I used seven seasons since we don’t have comprehensive service time data, which, from some spot-checking, appears to do the trick. We have the FV of the most recent signings that are current prospect on THE BOARD, which maps to an asset value.

The most interesting players to analyze signed in the last 5-10 years, are in the big leagues, and are in the middle of their control years, so I had to do some work to peg their value. I quantified what they’ve already produced the same way I did with the older players, then estimated or figured out by hand their current service time situation. I then used our various projections to fill in what those players are expected to produce in the rest of their controlled years.

In short, it’s not perfect, but as with filling in the holes in the bonus data, it’s fairly accurate and any mistakes appear to cancel each other out in the aggregate. There’s some noise in the data year-to-year, but it appears that right around 2004, the market improved its output and has held mostly steady to today. Here’s the production (a combination of produced WAR, projected WAR, and minor league asset values) over this period:

I included up to the 2017 class, but it would appear that we need three full seasons in the system — with players having signed on July 2, 2015, and played in 2016, 2017, 2018 — before the class as a whole has developed enough to reveal how much value it could create. As such, a dozen years (2004-2015) appears to be our usable sample.

We could use the above figures to create a simple return on investment calculation, but a true ROI would compute what a team is making on the average dollar spent, so we also have to consider the expense to operate the department that signs the players. Building or renting an academy, feeding and housing the players, running a DSL team, paying coaches, trainers, scouts, and administration and travel expenses are all facets of an international operation that are essential to signing and developing these players, so they have to be considered alongside the bonus expenditures. After consulting with some international directors, I’ve estimated those costs for all 30 teams combined and added that to the bonuses, before arriving at an ROI figure that represents something close to what MLB clubs can expect a bonus pool dollar to return. I used a rolling figure to smooth out any noise in the yearly results.

This gives us an idea of what a club’s accounting department would say their ROI was running an international operation in these years. There are a couple of other ways to look at this data. Going forward, we know that overages won’t exist. We also know the maximum that can be spent with hard caps in place. If we were to take the historic spending of 2016 and keep those signing rules, while also imagining that the talent of 2018 demanded the same outlay in bonuses and overages as the group in 2016, we could compare the two realities owners were considering in the most recent completed CBA negotiations:

You can see that there’s still a solid positive return even with historic spending levels, but owners negotiated to add a hard bonus cap to the international market, essentially doubling their ROI. The 2016 class was unique in that clubs were motivated to spend wildly in anticipation of the caps and because of that, a great class of Cuban players that couldn’t be duplicated today (four of our top 132 prospects are Cuban players from this class) drove much of that spending. That roughly $315 million expenditure may be the closest figure we’ll get to what clubs think the true value of a historically-talented class is in an open market with multiple motivated bidders. The market is now capped at half that figure.

We can also answer the question of what an international pool dollar is worth going forward. If we assume that the overhead of running a department is fixed, how should clubs think about the value of each additional dollar added to their bonus pool? We could take the table just above this one and use the projected actual 2018 row to figure out the ROI from $150 million in bonuses and the estimated $1.125 billion in value that will be created by the signees. The result is a staggering 650%. It appears that it takes about three years for the an investment in the international market to mostly mature in terms of trade value, though there’s a way to read this data where there’s further value gained in a 5-7 year horizon for full maturity.

This sort of analysis can get too close to quantifying the worth of humans in purely dollar terms, although going through the exercise in this way also helps to define what a fair market price is for someone’s service. 650% is a pretty abstract number to consider, so let’s compare it to an standard investment for wealthy individuals such as baseball club owners: investing in the stock market. An owner can invest roughly $5 million into international market each year and expect a median return of 650% after three years, while a strong 10% yearly compounded return in the stock market over that period would return a 35% return. That sort of return makes clear both the appeal for ownership of signing international players, and capping their bonuses. It also points to how wide a gap exists between the value these players generate for their clubs and their compensation relative to that value.

In the next part of this series, I’ll take a look at some of the best and worst signing classes, if we were to grade out every club’s international signing class over the last 30 years using the framework rolled out today.

We got a hold of the bonus slot values and, it follows, each team’s total pool amount for the upcoming 2019 MLB Draft. The PDF we acquired from an industry source was missing Washington’s comp pick for Bryce Harper at 138 overall, so we added that and manually recalculated each team’s pool total (which were incorrect on the PDF because of this missing pick).

(Update: After receiving additional clarification, it appears that Washington will not receive a comp pick for Harper; the pick that would have received as Harper compensation became the pick they gave up to sign Patrick Corbin.)

What follows is, first, the total draft bonus pool amounts for all thirty teams, followed by the individual slot values for each pick in the first ten rounds of the draft. Picks labeled “COMP” are compensatory selections for players lost via free agency or from last year’s unsigned draft picks. Picks labeled “CBA” or “CBB” are competitive balance picks (rounds A and B) allocated to teams in the spirit of parity. These can be traded, and several have been. In both the compensatory and traded competitive balance picks, we note the players for which the picks were received. The tables here will be updated if competitive balance picks change hands or if teams receive comp for a yet-to-sign free agent who received a qualifying offer, like Dallas Keuchel or Craig Kimbrel.