Managing Prospect Expectations

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.

On our Top 100, we included Estimated Probable FV Outcome distribution graphs with each writeup in an attempt to better communicate the chances of each player becoming a big leaguer, let alone a good or even great one. As an example, here is Nick Pratto’s distribution graph:

Those numbers weren’t set out of the blue; we based them on historical data on how prospects given 50-grade or higher FVs actually turn out in the end, and then applied our own judgements about the player.

People spend a lot of time looking at the right side of the scale and with good reason. That’s where the fun is. That’s where stardom lies, where team wins comes from. But too often, we ignore the left side, the role player side, the (gulp) bust side, where the data shows an overwhelming chance that none of this will work out the way some fans might hope.

I think our Top 100 is really good, but I also buy the research that suggests that a meaningful percentage of these players just aren’t going provide any major league value. None. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Indeed, if we average the bust odds for all 114 ranked prospects and apply that average to the population, we can get a rough idea of how many of the those players we might expect to bust — in this case, about 36 players.

Properly setting readers’ expectations is perhaps best done by starting with an extreme example. Right now the Baltimore Orioles have the best position player prospect in baseball, as well as the best pitching prospect in the game. Indeed, Adley Rutschman and Grayson Rodriguez are one of the better hitter/pitcher combos in a single organization in recent memory, and their expected outcomes are equally impressive:

But let’s do the math. As the top prospect in the game, we are saying, and I think accurately so, that Rutschman is the most likely perennial MVP candidate on our list. We’re saying the same for Rodriguez in term of his year-to-year Cy Young chances. Their odds of becoming a 70+ FV player aren’t topped by any other prospect in their player group. But the chances that both end up being that player? How about just 6%, or roughly 1-in-16, because that’s what the math tells us. Let’s lower expectations, and see what the chances are that both become star-level players (60+ FV). That’s 22.5%. Think about that for a second. This is, once again, the best position player prospect and the best pitching prospect in all of baseball. The chances of both becoming stars is outstanding compared to any other combination you might come up with, but it’s also less than 1-in-4. Assuming Rodriguez will be the staff ace and that Rutschman will be a perennial All-Star? The odds are stacked against that, and in fact, quite strongly. That said, the chances are good that they’ll provide something. There’s a 91% chance that both will be big leaguers, using the low bar of both becoming a 40+ FV. But the odds that only one of the pair provides big league regular level performance (50+ FV) are exactly the same as both doing so:

Both of them working out, even just in terms of being big league regulars? Probably not. Just barely probably not, but nonetheless under 50%. And this is in no way an indictment of the players or their respective rankings; it’s an indictment of how prospect rankings are perceived following their release.

We can do this math with any pair of highly regarded prospects. The Tigers have first baseman Spencer Torkelson and outfielder Riley Greene sitting as the fifth and sixth best prospects in baseball. The chances both of them are 60+ FV stars? That comes out to 17.1%, or roughly 1-in-6. The chances that both are 50+ FV big league regulars? Just over 40%. Again, the most realistic outcomes are those other than both players becoming even major league average regulars or better.

This is why teams need depth as much as star power. The more high-end prospects a team has, the better those outcomes become, not in terms of them all working out (that’s never going to happen), but in terms of some working out.

Still, there is incredible risk, especially when a system is populated by players who are still very far away. A great example is the Chicago Cubs, a team that has an incredible number of intriguing, high-upside prospects, many of whom are still teenagers. Four such players are in the bottom part of our Top 100, ranking from No. 87 to No. 114. But Cubs fans who are already pencilling Kevin Alcantara, Owen Caissie, James Triantos and Reginald Preciado into their favorite team’s 2025 lineup are setting themselves up for considerable disappointment:

And to be clear, these are not their chances of stardom; these are just the odds of them being major league regulars at an average or better clip. They’re a wonderful quartet of players, but the realistic odds are set at just over 90% that half or more won’t live up to what amount to only moderately lofty expectations.

Prospects are great, prospects are fun, and prospects are exciting. They can offer an enticing glimpse of how your team gets better. But that doesn’t mean they will. No team in baseball can build a champion entirely from within. Even the team with the best system is baseball — and even a system that enjoys better-than-expected outcomes from its bulk of prospects — at some point needs to spend money and/or trade said prospects in order to improve its roster from the outside. As my good friend Jason Parks used to say, “Prospects will break your heart.” It’s always important to have that in the back of your mind when accurately considering the future of an organization.