How’s My Driving: 2019 Top 100 Audit

I have been FanGraphs’ Lead Prospect Analyst since the summer of 2016, and enough time has now passed that many of the players from the early era of my prospecting here have had big league careers unfold (or fail to). 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 to gauge any gap that may exist between my evaluation and what the player ultimately became. Looking back allows me to rate 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. For the third year — the 2017 review is here, while the 2018 review is here — I have gathered the various Top 100 prospect rankings from seven years ago for the purposes of such a self-assessment, an exercise I call “How’s My Driving?” This is my audit of the 2019 rankings.

For those who are new to these audits, a refresher on my approach. Below, I have compiled the 2019 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 2019 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, in hindsight, they should have been on our Top 100 lists by my measure of production. Finally, I’ve added a handful of players whose output didn’t necessarily merit a Top 100 spot, but who I think are interesting to talk about for one reason or another. My goal here was to reflect on my work, not to create metrics that measure these publications against one another; the Top 100 rankings, which you’ll find next to one another in the table below, are the only comparative aspect of this exercise. 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 2019 — 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 2019 lists whose careers are now far enough along to do so (that’s why I’ve only included WAR for the 2019 grads), those whose pre-free agency service is complete or close to it. 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 2019 — guys like Kyle Tucker and Bo Bichette — have played for long enough to be subject to this kind of analysis.

Why do I use 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 pre-free agency 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. That’s done after a player has informed teams’ opinions with six-plus years of big league time. No serious front office discussion about how many years and dollars to offer Zac Gallen is centered around how he looked at North Carolina. As baseball fans, we can and should care about career longevity, but to do so in the prospect space such that it informs how I line up players would be unrealistic — like trying to predict what the weather will be like on a specific day four months from now.

Here are our collective Top 100 lists from 2019:

This class had about the same number of 50 FV and above players, and 60 FV and above players, as the other two years on which I’ve conducted an audit. There isn’t a Judge, Soto or Ohtani at the very top of this class, but there are a handful of perennial All-Stars and occasional MVP candidates. The prior two years had eight players graduate and go on to produce 20 or more WAR before they hit free agency; the 2019 rookie class had 10. All three years have had about 20 players who generated 10 or more WAR during the window I care about for this exercise. The Prospect Ranking Industrial Complex did a better job of avoiding whiffs at the very top of this class, but still performed poorly when it came to projecting pitching, and again missed on several hurlers who ended up being awesome because they have game-changing command. Like Shane Bieber and Jordan Montgomery in prior years, this class had a few guys with excellent secondary stuff and command who were cast aside during the Top 100 process due to a lack of fastball velocity. Our background use of TrackMan data took a hit in this year. While we had access to a data load the prior year, after 2018, Kiley and I struggled to compile a complete industry-wide data set to help us with these evaluations. We were still learning how best to source and organize that stuff, developing ways of collecting and managing resources that we’d start wielding more effectively the following year, only to be stymied again by the pandemic the year after that.

Let’s dive deeper into the rookie class from this season. Below are the players who exhausted their rookie eligibility in 2019 and were also on a Top 100 list that year, with their career WAR, WAR rank among all qualified position players or pitchers since 2019, my projected FV grade from the time, and how I believe the player actually performed on the FV scale during his “window of evaluation.” I’ve also included a few players who haven’t graduated, but whose careers have stalled for one reason or another:

Now let’s examine a few of the rookies who were ranked by other publications:

Lastly, here are some thoughts on a couple of the notable collective whiffs, players who should have been on our lists if we had perfect foresight: