KATOH Projections for the Top 200 Prospects

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.

Before diving into the list, I’d like to point out that KATOH is not intended to replace the scouting aspect of prospect evaluation. Statistical analysis is an important tool in player evaluation, but traditional scouting is also a very important piece of the puzzle, especially for minor leaguers who are still learning the fundamentals of baseball. As a result, KATOH’s projections are likely a bit low on raw, toolsy players, and is probably too high on guys who reached their upsides at a young age. Still, despite its flaws, KATOH tackles prospect evaluation from an objective point of view, which I think can be useful in identifying statistical factors that may have been overlooked by traditional prospect evaluations. Do not take these projections as gospel; they are simply alternative perspectives provided through the sole lens of a player’s performance.

With all of that in mind, here’s a look at how Kiley’s 142 ranked prospects correlate with KATOH’s forecasts. Note that this graphic only includes players who logged at least 200 plate appearances or 200 batters faced in 2014:

I think the trend is pretty clear. On average, the prospects ranked from 50 on back receive very similar projections; somewhere in the range of +3 WAR through age 28, meaning that they are forecast to have little or no impact at the big league level. But the projected WARs start to increase in a hurry once you get into the top 50, as higher-end prospects both reach their ceilings more often and are better players when they do.

I’ll be diving into some of the cases where KATOH disagrees with our list later this week. But for now, here’s each player on our Top 200, along with their KATOH projections. Keep in mind that the algorithm only considers what took place during the 2014 season, so players who sat out all of 2014 — like Miguel Sano — do not have KATOH projections. Projections that were calculated using fewer than 200 plate appearances or batters faced are marked with an asterisk (*). Again, absolutely not gospel, but perhaps interesting to look at.