Below are snippets of our notes from our in-person looks over the last few weeks, including thoughts on Rangers prospect Jack Leiter as well as six amateur prospects eligible for the 2022 draft. If a player’s ranking on The Board has been impacted by these looks, we’ve indicated that within the player’s writeup.

Jack Leiter, RHP, Texas Rangers

Leiter needs no introduction — he’s one of the top pitching prospects in baseball. He pitched two innings in relief of Cody Bradford (whose velo is up, by the way) last Friday against an upper-level Royals minor league contingent. Leiter had scattershot command of a 95-98 mph fastball that featured his trademark carry through the zone. His two breaking balls – a mid-80s slider and mid-70s curveball – had somewhat more distinct shape Friday than they did throughout most of his career at Vanderbilt, and he used his slider pretty frequently during this outing. The most striking aspect of Leiter’s look on this day was his changeup quality and velocity. Leiter’s cambio was in the 84-86 mph range during his draft spring at Vanderbilt but was 88-90 mph on Friday and had power tailing action. He ran a couple of them off the front hip of left-handed hitters and back into the zone for a looking strike. If he can do this consistently, it might become his best secondary weapon over time, though his curveball has that distinction for now, in part because of how well its shape pairs with his fastball. — EL Read the rest of this entry »

Today, the Oakland Athletics traded star first baseman Matt Olson to the defending champion Atlanta Braves (analysis of the Braves’ side of the deal, courtesy of Dan Szymborski, can be found here) for a sizable package of prospects, including two from baseball’s Top 100. Coming back to Oakland is catcher Shea Langeliers, center fielder Cristian Pache, power-armed relief prospect Ryan Cusick, and polished teenage righty Joey Estes. All four new A’s prospects have been added to the team’s prospect list, both in the article and over on The Board.

In our opinion, the best of that group is 24-year-old Shea Langeliers. Ranking 70th overall and eighth among the catching prospects on our recently published Top 100, Langeliers combines plus or better defense with a power-over-hit game when he’s at the plate as opposed to behind it. His raw power blossomed into game power during the 2021 season, and while Langeliers isn’t an especially instinctual hitter (he projects as a sub-50 bat with contact issues), he has the potential to deliver 20-plus home runs per year. He has Gold Glove potential, with great hands and mobility to go with a strong, accurate arm that shuts down the running game. He also earns raves for his catching intangibles in terms of managing the game and working with pitchers. Theoretically, he’s lined up to start the year at Triple-A, be added to the 40-man after the season, and debut in 2023. His future in Oakland is tied closely and directly to that of incumbent star Sean Murphy, who reaches his first year of arbitration in 2023. We think Langeliers’ presence makes it more likely that Murphy is traded in the next 18 months.

Read the rest of this entry »

Brandon Walter hasn’t come out of nowhere, but he has come a long way. A 26th-round pick in 2019 out of the University of Delaware, the 25-year-old southpaw went into last season a veritable unknown, and he left it as the fastest riser in the Red Sox system. Displaying elite movement from a low arm slot, Walter fanned 132 batters and allowed just 67 hits in 89.1 innings, between Low-A Salem and High-A Greenville. He’ll enter the 2022 campaign ranked No. 10 on our newly-released Red Sox Top Prospects list.

Walter discussed his repertoire, and his unexpected emergence in a steadily-improving system, last month.

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David Laurila: Your Baseball America writeup said, among other things, “His stuff and pitch data suggest reason to believe in a big ceiling.” What does that mean to you, particularly the reference to data?

Brandon Walter: “I’ve learned a lot over the last couple of years, especially since Chaim Bloom came into our organization. They’re big on analytics and pitch data [and] they’re preaching it to us. To me, it mostly means that my stuff is plus, so I can simplify and just throw it in the zone. I can make hitters deal with what I’m throwing instead of trying to hit corners and risk falling behind in the count. Basically, I can just try to get ahead with with my three pitches and compete that way. Getting that information and knowing that my stuff is above average allows me to just attack hitters.”

Laurila: Has the data reinforced things you kind of already knew, or has any of it actually come as a surprise? Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Boston Red Sox. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the second year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the numbered prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Wallner has taken a circuitous route in his quest to play close to home. Geographically speaking, it might be better-described as an oblong route. The 24-year-old Minnesota Twins outfield prospect grew up thirty minutes northeast of Target Field, then circumstances sent him to Hattiesburg, 17 hours south. Since being drafted 39th overall in 2019 out of the University of Southern Mississippi, Wallner has played in Elizabethton, Tennessee and Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the latter of which sits four-and-a-half hours southeast of where he started.

Exposure-wise, the shape of Wallner’s boomerang journey changed when his intended destination out of high school dropped baseball. The left-handed-hitting slugger — No. 10 on our newly-released Twins Top Prospects list — had planned to continue his studies in Grand Forks, North Dakota, four-and-a-half hours northwest of the Twin Cities.

“[The University of] North Dakota cut baseball in April of my senior year,” explained Wallner, who battled back from a hamate injury this year to log a 131 wRC+ and wallop 15 home runs in 294 plate appearances at High-A Cedar Rapids. “I had some connections to Southern Miss through the North Dakota coach, so I went for a visit and fell in love with it. Playing college baseball when it is warmer than 30 degrees was enticing.”

Belying the fact that he considers his freshman fall at the Conference USA school “the biggest jump I’ve ever had to experience,” Wallner went on swing a hot bat in his first taste of high-profile collegiate competition, compiling numbers that included 19 dingers and a 1.118 OPS. He went on to set Southern Mississippi’s career home run record, going deep 58 times in three seasons. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Minnesota Twins. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the second year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the numbered prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here.

Editor’s Note: Ronny Henriquez was added to this list following his acquisition from the Texas Rangers as part of the Mitch Garver/Isiah Kiner-Falefa trade.

Francis Peguero was added to this list following his acquisition from the Cincinnati Reds as part of the Sonny Gray trade; Chase Petty, previously ranked 14th here, was the return.

Read the rest of this entry »

Every week, we will recap amateur baseball happenings in a post like this, with a focus on how the action impacts the next three draft classes, especially this year’s. You’ll find a primer on our approach, as well as our observations from Week 1, here. Now on to this past weekend’s notes.

Ben Joyce, RHP, Tennessee Volunteers: 0.2 IP, 1 H, 1 BB, 1 K (Current Rank: College Pitcher of Note, 35+ FV)

That line next to Joyce’s name actually represents the composite of his Saturday and Sunday showings, as he faced just four batters combined. Joyce has become a Twitter darling by frequently getting into the triple-digits with a fastball that has touched an eye-popping 103 mph, but after missing the 2021 season due to Tommy John surgery, and with just three innings in the books so far this year, scouts are still very much in the to-be-determined phase of figuring out where to line him up on draft boards. While we haven’t seen this kind of velocity since early-career Aroldis Chapman, teams are still trying to determine what else Joyce can do. So far, he’s been hovering around 90% fastball usage while generally finding the zone with the pitch; maybe we’d all lean that heavily on our heater if we could throw it as hard as Joyce does. Still, while his low-to-mid-80s slider flashes solid sweeping action, of the four he had thrown on the season entering Sunday’s game, none were in the zone, and to be honest, they weren’t particularly close. Even at 100-plus mph, you can’t live on fastballs alone, and many will be watching Joyce for the remainder of the spring in an attempt to figure out exactly what the entire package looks like. –KG Read the rest of this entry »

Two weeks ago was Prospect Week here at FanGraphs. I didn’t contribute any analysis to it, because a) it was packed with really good analysis already and b) I wasn’t done compiling the thing I wanted to contribute. With some time to finish up my work — and not much else going on in our lockout-plagued sport — I’m ready to provide a bit of bonus analysis.

Last year, I used a variety of statistical techniques to come up with a list of players I thought stood a strong chance of putting together a meaningful major league career. This year, I’m … well, I’m using a variety of statistical techniques to come up with a list of players I think stand a strong chance of putting together a meaningful major league career. But this time, I’ve spent a bit more time refining my methods.

Here’s a quick overview of those methods. I used a variety of simple models based on historical minor and major league data. In each of them, I looked at a variety of key indicators in minor league hitters: statistics, age, position, level — anything I could download, essentially. I linked those minor league seasons to that player’s eventual major league career (or lack thereof).

This methodology carries many limitations, only some of which I have time to detail here. Baseball isn’t the same as it was in the past; while I think I’ve done a decent job of picking performance metrics that are stable over time, player development and the skills that are necessary to stick in the major leagues don’t look the same as they did 10 or 20 years ago.

That particular problem is inherent in everything that uses the past to predict the future, but don’t worry: my methods have way more shortcomings. For one, 2021 was a strange year to look at minor league statistics. With no 2020 season to gauge players’ skill levels, competition seemed far more variable within each league. I’m also basing much of this data on leagues that don’t exist anymore, as minor league realignment changed the makeup of the minor leagues significantly and also messed with my rudimentary park factors. I didn’t use Statcast or Trackman data, both because I don’t have a complete picture of it for 2021 and because it doesn’t exist at all in most of the years I used to train my various models. Finally, I’m using the position that each player played most in 2021 to give them a position, rather than where they’re projected to end up or what our prospect team thinks they’re best suited for.
Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past several years, we’ve typically had about 1,500 players on The Board at any given time once all the org lists are done, spread across the tool’s pro, draft, and international sections. Heuristics play an important role in enabling us get a grip on such a large pool of players, especially when we are considering individuals for the first time, or trying to assess disparate players on the same FV scale.

For example, we felt comfortable absolutely stuffing Rockies right-handed pitcher Jordy Vargas near the top of their organizational prospect list in large part because of a key heuristic. I have not seen Vargas in person. He spent all of 2021 in the DSL, and didn’t come stateside for instructional league. Because the Rockies have struggled at the big league level and are therefore unlikely to be motivated to trade prospects, other teams have had little reason to thoroughly scout their DSL club, which makes sourcing detailed scout opinions about a player like Vargas difficult. Sometimes, a scout will come across a player like this at random and provide an in-person opinion that makes up the lion’s share of what we impart to readers, but in Vargas’ case, all we had was pitch data (which was how he got on our radar in the first place) and video we sought out from the 2021 DSL.

It can be challenging to drop Vargas right into the Rockies list for initial consideration, since he and someone like Ryan Vilade are apples-and-oranges in the extreme. It’s much cleaner to step back and compare Vargas, apples-to-apples, with same-aged pitching prospects across the global baseball landscape to get a sense of where he fits among that sub-group, assign him a FV grade in that context, and then move him onto the Rockies list. In Vargas’ case, his skill set is very similar to that of high school pitchers taken in the mid-to-late first round of a given draft (projectable 6-foot-3, gorgeous delivery, already throwing in the mid-90s, an excellent curveball), so we can use our heuristic FV for that type of player (in this case a 45) to get an initial sense of where he should be on the Rockies list even though I haven’t seen him, and then try to polish his grade from there. The foundations of most players’ evaluations on our site are built on heuristics like this and then augmented by other, more granular details. Read the rest of this entry »

Every offseason, we work diligently to produce prospect rankings for every team in baseball — when all is said and done, our lists typically incorporate well over 1,000 player write-ups. And based on the engagement with last week’s Top 100 Prospects list and our other Prospects Week content, our readers are as excited about prospects as we are. I’m proud of the work we do here at FanGraphs, but there is one area in which we haven’t done as well as we could, and that’s in helping you properly manage expectations.

We see it in the comments, on Twitter, and in pieces at other publications that reference the work done here. People line up a team’s prospect list and assume that is what the team will look like in two, three, or more years. Look up a system’s top five pitching prospects and that’s what the big league rotation will look like down the road. Three good middle infield prospects? That’s too many! What will the club ever do? We’ve tried our best to communicate the exceptionally real (and yet still underrated) failure rate when it comes to projecting prospects, but it’s become clear that we haven’t done a good enough job. Read the rest of this entry »