How’s My Driving: 2018 Top 100 Audit

I was hired as FanGraphs’ Lead Prospect Analyst just after the 2016 draft and took my first run at evaluating the entirety of the minor leagues on my own the following winter. Enough time has now passed that many of the players from that era of prospecting have had big league careers unfold (or not). Hindsight allows me to have a pretty definitive idea of whether my call on a player was right or wrong in a binary sense, and gauge any gap that may exist between my evaluation and what the player ultimately became. Looking back allows me to assess my approach to grading and ranking players so that I might begin to establish some baselines of self-assessment and see how I perform compared to my peers at other publications. Last offseason, I began compiling the various Top 100 prospect rankings from seven years ago for the purposes of such a self-assessment, an exercise that culminated in the “How’s My Driving?” piece that ran during Prospect Week 2024. This winter, I turned my attention to the 2018 Top 100, which I co-authored with Kiley McDaniel. Below are the results of that audit and my thoughts on them.

Before we get to a couple of big, fun tables and my notes, I want to quickly go over why I’ve taken the approach I have here and discuss its flaws. There are absolutely deeper avenues of retrospective analysis that can be done with prospect lists than what I have attempted below, approaches that could educate us about prospects themselves, and probably also about prospect writers. (Last year, in the first edition of this piece, I proposed a few such potential methods of evaluation and included my thoughts on their limitations. For the sake of brevity, I’ve cut that discussion from this year’s edition, but if you’re curious about that stuff specifically, you’ll want to go back and read the paragraph that begins, “Eventually, someone could pool the lists…”)

Below, I have compiled the 2018 Top 100 prospect rankings from the publications where it was basically at least one person’s full-time job to do this: FanGraphs, Baseball America, Baseball Prospectus, ESPN, and MLB Pipeline. Of course, several 2018 rookies who were not ranked on Top 100 lists have turned into good big leaguers, so I’ve also included players who might be thought of as collective whiffs, guys who produced enough that it turns out they arguably should have been on our Top 100 lists by my measure of production. I’ve also included anyone who Kiley and I graded as a 50 but had ranked just outside the 100-player cutoff.

My goal here was to reflect on my work, not to create metrics that measure these publications against one another, and so I haven’t done that; the Top 100 rankings, which you’ll find next to one another in the table below, are the only comparative aspect of this piece. Everyone has their fair share of hits and misses; readers can get a sense of those on a case-by-case basis as they play with the table, which is sortable.

Career-to-date WAR for the players who graduated from rookie status in 2018 (and only those players) is included in the first table. In the second table further down, I go into deeper, more meaningful analysis of the players from the 2018 lists whose careers are now far enough along to do so (that’s why I’ve only included WAR for the 2018 grads), those whose pre-free agency service time is for the most part complete. Part of my approach to forecasting players has been to focus on the window of service time prior to a player’s free agency, and now members of the rookie class of 2018 — guys like Shohei Ohtani, Juan Soto, and Tyler O’Neill — have played for long enough to be subject to this kind of analysis.

Why do I have this six-to-seven year cutoff? If you’re acquiring a player while he’s a prospect or young big leaguer, you’re doing so for those years. Once a player hits free agency, the process by which teams evaluate players and decide how aggressively to pursue them is completely divorced from their prospect evaluation. You’re starting fresh. When Player X is in his early 20s, teams don’t have to decide if they’d feel comfortable giving him an extension that takes him into his mid-30s. That’s done after a player has informed teams’ opinions of him over six-plus years of big league time. As baseball fans, we can and should care about longevity, but to do so in the prospect space such that it informs how you line up players would be unrealistic — like trying to predict what the weather will be like six weeks from now.

Here are our collective Top 100 lists:

Some thoughts on this table before we get to the next ones: This was the first year that Kiley and I began to source minor league TrackMan data to aid in our evaluations. We were not fluent enough with the data at that point to evaluate pitching the way it’s done now, nor did we have enough years of data to identify trends. As always, injuries took their toll on our ability to correctly predict pitching, but some of our misses here were self-inflicted for that reason.

We dialed down how many 55 FV prospects were on the 100, from roughly 70 in 2017 to 42 in 2018, and the number of players who I’ll grade as 55 FV prospects has tended to hover around that mark ever since. That said, we still had too many 50 FV players on the 2018 list. There aren’t 150 guys in the minors who realistically project as average everyday players, or whose potential ceilings are big enough that they should be a 50 FV player from a value standpoint despite their profile’s risk. The longer I do this, the more I believe there aren’t even 100 players for whom this is true.

You might recall from last year’s “How’s My Driving” that my peers and I collectively whiffed on half of the top six WAR producers from the 2017 rookie class. In 2018, we whiffed on three of the top nine. Is that good? I don’t know — this is the second year I’m doing this. It’s a hell of a lot better than 2017, though. The only really embarrassing collective whiff from this season was Shane Bieber, who in retrospect was obviously awesome, though the degree to which we whiffed on Jeff McNeil and Pablo López here at FanGraphs was also significant. (Here I’ll note that Baseball Prospectus and Keith Law, who was then at the helm for ESPN, don’t include foreign professionals like Ohtani on their prospect lists.)

Let’s dive deeper into the rookie class from this season. Below are the players who exhausted their rookie eligibility in 2018 and also appeared on a Top 100 list (not just mine) that year. I’ve included their career WAR, their WAR rank among all qualified position players or pitchers since 2017 (to capture cups of coffee from the prior year), Kiley’s and my projected FV grade from the time, and how I believe the player actually performed on the FV scale during his “window of evaluation.” You’ll see that I’ve broken the 2018 Top 100 graduates into two tables: those we ranked at FanGraphs, and those who were ranked at other publications, but not by me and Kiley.

There are a few instances where I’ve put my thumb on the scale a little bit, which I talk about below where applicable. A lot of the players from this era of baseball had one of their peak seasons knocked down by the pandemic, which makes it tougher to do analysis based purely on WAR. There are also simply instances where I think it’s appropriate to take this approach as a way of illustrating the player’s talent, rather than just their production. Obviously, click through to the individual player pages for more stats, nerds.

You’ll see a few players here whose careers have stalled for one reason or another. In cases where a player hung around the upper levels of the minors, you’ll see an “org” designation in the Actual Grade field, while others have been given an “injury” designation.

Lastly, I’ve included thoughts on a couple of the notable collective whiffs, prospects who weren’t on anyone’s Top 100, but graduated in 2018 and performed well enough that you could argue they should have been.