It’s been a while since we posted anything comprehensive and transparent about how we draw our conclusions about prospects. Player evaluation and development are changing very quickly in the game, and those changes obviously influence how we think about prospects here at FanGraphs, enough to merit a refreshing primer before we start publishing this offseason’s organizational lists. In addition to teeing up the lists, this post is meant to act as a central hub that can serve to answer commonly asked questions about prospects and how they’re evaluated, specifically for those in the near future who want to start swimming in the deep end of the prospect pool. As we continue to augment our thinking and methodology, so too will we update this document, which will live in The Essentials section of the Prospects Coverage landing page. Feel free to direct any applicable correspondence to prospects@fangraphs.com. Common queries sent our way may find their way onto this webpage.

What information drives your opinions on prospects?

We see a lot of players ourselves. We talk to scouts from amateur, pro, and international departments about players they’ve seen. We talk to in-office analysts, front-office executives, and people in player development. We also use publicly available data we think is relevant. Some combination of these things fuels each player’s evaluation.

What are some of your shortcomings as far as information is concerned?

Increasingly, teams are using proprietary data as part of the player-evaluation process. TrackMan and Yakkertech aid evaluations on many different components of pitching and hitting, high-speed video of players from Edgertronic cameras allows clubs to better understand and alter hitting and pitching mechanics, and Motus sleeves and Rapsodo are used in pitch engineering. The mere existence and demonstrable efficacy of this stuff has altered the way we’re projecting players, but we don’t have access to the data generated by these devices across the entire population or prospects.

What is FV?

FV stands for Future Value, and it’s the way we distill each player’s scouting evaluation into a single expression. Broadly stated, Future Value is a grade on the 20-80 scale that maps to anticipated annual WAR production during the player’s first six years of service. But there’s also quite a bit of nuance underlying that definition, so let’s break down its components.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Jose Altuve and other players claiming to give (much) more than 100 percent and Joe Mauer‘s retirement and Hall of Fame case, then answer listener emails about Shohei Ohtani’s future role, whether Mike Trout could go contact-for-contact with Willians Astudillo, a baseball romance novel, winning a World Series MVP award without hitting, whether improved pitcher hitting could correct the so-called strikeout scourge, a 60-WAR season vs. 60 one-WAR seasons (and the theoretical single-season WAR maximum), the effects of bigger bases, and teams with no “qualifying” pitchers, plus a Stat Blast about Mallex Smith and the hitters who’ve sprinted their way to extra offensive value.

Audio intro: Ken Ashcorp, "20 Percent Cooler"
Audio outro: Manny, "210 Percent"

Link to Jay’s Mauer post
Link to story on the 1957 A’s
Link to Sam on the ERA title innings minimum

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James Paxton is going to be traded, and he might well be traded very soon. You can never really know for sure what’s going on behind the scenes, now that front offices are increasingly leak-proof, but Paxton rumors have been bubbling to the surface with frequency, and we know Jerry Dipoto isn’t afraid of making a deal in November. The free-agent market is probably going to take its time to develop. The trade market has already opened. Dipoto moved his best catcher. Before too long, he’s going to move his best pitcher.

The Mariners, of course, were just in the playoff hunt for a while. And if there’s something they need, it’s more pitching, not less. More than anything, the Mariners would love to bring an end to their extended playoff drought, and Paxton has developed into something they should be proud of. The Mariners could use James Paxton. The Mariners could use a few James Paxtons. Yet, the big-league roster? It’s not great. And the minor-league system? It’s arguably the worst. Paxton’s looking at two remaining years of club control. The Mariners need to be honest about their timeline. It seems they’ve decided to turn Paxton’s two years into many more years of promising youngsters.

I’m not telling you much of anything you don’t already know. And I already talked about Paxton a little bit the other week. But ahead of any trade, I wanted to write this reminder of just how good Paxton really is. It’s going to be a big-time move, whenever it happens. Give me a few minutes to explain to you why.

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It was hardly unexpected, but within an hour-long period on Friday evening, Twitter brought news of the retirements of both Joe Mauer and Chase Utley, two players worthy of spots in the Hall of Fame once they become eligible five years from now, on the 2024 ballot. Mauer, who had not previously declared his intentions, wrote a personal letter to Twins fans, explaining his decision to retire at age 35, while the Dodgers merely announced they had given Utley — who had declared in mid-July that this season would be his final one — his unconditional release so as to facilitate his retirement.

While I’ve written about both players before at FanGraphs, the pairing of the announcements serves as an opportunity to round up that work and update their credentials.

Mauer is the more obviously qualified of the two. A former No. 1 overall pick out of St. Paul, Minnesota’s Cretin-Derham Hall High School in 2001, he spent the entirety of his 15-year career with the Twins, making six All-Star teams, helping the team to four postseason appearances (though, alas, no series wins), and winning three Gold Gloves and three batting titles apiece. Though he debuted on Opening Day 2004 (April 5) with a 2-for-3 showing against the Indians, he was limited to just 35 games in his rookie season due to a torn meniscus in his left knee. Even in that brief stint, he showed that he was a force to be reckoned with at the plate, batting .308/.369/.570 with six homers in 122 plate appearances for a 139 wRC+.

While Mauer would only intermittently show that kind of power thereafter — he had just six seasons with at least 10 homers — he established himself as a high-average, high-OBP hitter in a way seldom seen among catchers. He won batting titles in 2006 (.347), 2008 (.328), and 2009 (.365), making him the only three-time winner among catchers. Hall of Fame Ernie Lombardi is the only two-time winner (.342 in 1938 and .330 in 1942), while Deacon White (.367 in 1875), Bubbles Hargrave (.353 in 1926), and Buster Posey (.336 in 2012) are the only others to win. Mauer topped a .300 average six times as a catcher and once as a first baseman. More importantly, he topped a .400 OBP six times, second among catchers to Hall of Famer Mickey Cochrane’s eight, and is the only catcher to lead league more than once, doing so both in 2009 (.444) and 2012 (.416); he ranked among the AL’s top 10 seven times. In that 2009 season, when he hit a career-high 28 home runs, he also led the league in slugging percentage (.587), thereby making him the only catcher ever to win the “Slash Stat” Triple Crown. He was elected the AL MVP that year, receiving 27 out of 28 first-place votes.

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There are 6,000 or so minor-league baseball players at any given moment. By definition, meanwhile, there are only 100 minor-league ballplayers on any given top-100 prospect list. That means there are also around 6,000 minor leaguers not on top-100 lists — all 6,000 of them still intent on reaching the major leagues.

And many of them do reach the majors. For half-a-dozen years, Carson Cistulli has highlighted a number of prospects who failed to make a top-100 list by means of his Fringe Five series, and some of those players — like Mookie Betts and Jose Ramirez — have gone on to become stars. There should be little doubt that prospects outside the standard top-100 lists have value. Determining how much value, however, is a different and more involved question.

When I attempted to determine a value for prospects who’d appeared on top-100 lists, I was working with a relatively small pool of players. Even 15 years’ worth of lists equates to 1,500 players at most. Attempting to determine the value for every prospect, meanwhile, would appear to be a much larger task. Does one look at the roughly 90,000 minor-league seasons over the same period? That seems daunting. Looking at Baseball America’s team-level prospects lists, which feature 10 players per organization, would provide a more manageable 200 prospects per season outside the top-100 list, but that wouldn’t quite get us where we need to be, either.

And yet, as I’ve noted, these prospects have value. On THE BOARD, for example, there are currently 689 prospects with grades (a) of at least 40 but (b) less than 50 (the lowest grade earned by players on a top-100 lists, typically). It’s these prospects in whom I’m interested. What follows represents my attempt to place a value on them, as well.

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Today, I’ve published a pair of posts in which I attempt to estimate the present-day value of prospects, both in terms of WAR and dollars. With that work complete, the logical next step is to turn away from the value of specific prospects and towards farm systems as a whole.

One can get a sense of the stronger and weaker systems just by eyeballing the rankings produced by Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel. What the prospect-valuation data allows us to do, however, is to place a figure on baseball’s top-800 or so prospects, creating a more objective ranking based on the grades assessed to each player here at FanGraphs.

These rankings provide a current snapshot of the farm systems before Longenhagen and McDaniel embark on their winter-long reveal of team prospect rankings. (The first post in their offseason series will appear this week.) As noted, the methodology for valuing prospects based on their grades is explained in my last two posts on the subjects:

• An Update to Prospect Valuation
• Putting a Dollar Value on Prospects Outside the Top 100

Keep in mind, these values are based on the current CBA, where players receive a minimum salary for roughly three years and then have three (or four) years of arbitration before reaching free agency after six full MLB seasons. Players are generally underpaid compared to their value on the field during these seasons, which is what creates the high present-day values and partially justifies the high value placed by teams on prospects when executing trades.

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Over the years, a good deal of effort has been put into determining the value of prospects. Victor Wang, Scott McKinney (updated here), Kevin Creagh and Steve DiMiceli together, and Jeff Zimmerman have all published work on the subject, roughly in that order.

The reasoning behind such efforts is fairly obvious: teams trade prospects for proven players all the time. Finding an objective way to evaluate those trades is useful to better understanding how the sport operates. Indeed, FanGraphs has benefited from those prospect-valuation studies on multiple occasions.

With another year having passed, I’ve attempted to build on the work of others and produce updated valuations of my own. Previous efforts have been very helpful in the process, while the input of prospect analysts Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel has helped me find results that would be most useful.

In building this study, I set out with the following aims:

• To separate players into as many useful tiers as possible without creating unnecessary distinctions.
• To use as much data as possible so long as it was useful and likely still relevant today.
• To make the valuations as forward-looking as possible.
• To recognize that player development is not linear and that players appearing on prospect lists vary from major-league-ready to raw, Rookie-level talents.

To those various ends, here are some of the parameters of this study:

1. Baseball America’s top-100 lists from 1996 to 2010 serve as the foundation for prospect grades.
When I started the study, I looked at the lists dating back to 1990, separating out position players from pitchers and organizing by year. I found that the evaluations from the earlier part of the 90s — especially those for pitchers — had considerably worse outcomes than those that came after. I debated whether or not to throw out the data. Eventually, though, I decided that since 15 years of prospect numbers were showing decidedly different results, and that there was considerable turmoil occurring within the sport during that time — expansion, a strike, and a lockout — it seemed reasonable to toss the earlier years and go with the assumption that the 1996-2010 lists more accurately represented prospect evaluation today and going forward than the rankings of 25 years ago.

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