As September draws to a close, postseason baseball beckons, and prospect-ranking season is in full bloom. I’m going to take a slightly different approach than most, and simply focus upon overall organizational depth rather than the players specifically. Which systems have the most and least talent on hand, and which have taken the largest steps forward on backward in 2015?

Up front, let’s lay out the basics of my prospect-ranking system. I evaluate position players and starting pitchers separately. All full-season league position players’ on-base (OBP) and slugging (SLG) percentages are compared to the average of their league’s regulars. A sliding scale of performance targets, dependent on players’ age relative to level, are utilized. All players meeting such targets are included on my list; there is no limit as to the number of players who qualify. This year, 329 position players made the cut.

The system is very similar for starting pitchers; the statistics measured are strikeouts per nine innings (K/9) and strikeout-to-walk ratio (K/BB). The same age-dependent performance targets, measured by standard deviations above/below league average, are utilized. This year, 179 full-season league minor league pitchers made the cut.

On the position player side, Carlos Correa lapped the field, with last year’s #1, Joey Gallo, finishing second. This year marked the third consecutive season that Correa ranked within the top-11 position players, and Gallo’s third straight in the top 17. On the starting pitcher side, it was a much tighter battle, with the Dodgers’ Julio Urias finishing first for the second straight season, nosing out the Twins’ Jose Berrios. Prior to finishing first in 2014 and 2015, Urias ran second in 2013, while Berrios’ runner-up finish was his second in the top 10 and third in the top 50.

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Sam Fuld was checking out his FanGraphs page the other day, and noticed that he’s a fairly fast-paced guy at the plate. He produced in 2011 the 36th-fastest pace between that season and the present one (minimum 300 plate appearances), and he’s the 20th-fastest paced batter this year. He also noticed something about the guys around him. “They’re all slap hitters!” he told me before a game against the Rangers.

He wondered if pace was correlated to power, and if this slower pace came through the mechanism of confidence. “I’m the star here,” he said, mimicking a step back out of the box and a shrug of the shoulders that’s a little foreign to the Athletics outfielder with 12 career home runs spread over nine years and 1500-plus plate appearances.

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I have an NL Cy Young ballot this year, and with 10 days left in the regular season, I legitimately don’t know who I’m going to vote for. If I was the kind of voter who looked only at run prevention and credited that entirely to the pitcher on the mound, it might be a fairly easy decision in favor of Zack Greinke, given that he’s at +9.4 RA9-WAR, putting him in pretty historic company in terms of keeping runs off the board. If I went solely by the measures that we have a pretty good idea are primarily influenced by the pitcher and not his defenders behind him, it would be pretty easy to cast a vote for Clayton Kershaw, given that he’s leading the fielding in FIP-based WAR by a pretty good margin.

But as we’ve discussed many times here over the years, both of those extremes are clearly incorrect; giving a pitcher no credit or blame for all the non-HR contact he allows is definitely wrong, but so is assigning the entirety of the results of those balls in play to him and pretending that defense does not play a role in run prevention. In reality, a pitcher should get credit (or blame) for some of the impact of events that FIP does not capture, so FIP-based WAR is definitely an incomplete measure of a pitcher’s performance. How much credit or blame should be assigned isn’t entirely clear, and if you just throw your hands up in the air and split the credit down the middle — blending FIP-based and RA9-based WAR together — you’ll note that Jake Arrieta ends up in the top spot, though the differences between all three pitchers at that point are so small as to be insignificant.

As you probably know if you’re reading FanGraphs, I’m not going to simply cast my vote based on total run prevention, since I believe in attempting to isolate player performance when handing out individual awards, and simply using run prevention metrics and pretending like defense isn’t a thing strikes me as a particularly lazy shortcut. But I’m also not going to just use FIP, and not just because it ignores a bunch of plays that do matter; it also has (albeit to a smaller degree) issues with teammate interaction. As our ability to measure a catcher’s impact on balls and strikes has grown, it has become clear that no pitching event is really “fielding independent”, and a pitcher’s walks, strikeouts, and home run rates are indeed impacted by the performance of the guy he’s throwing the ball to.

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12:02

Comment From Zen eno time!

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Shortly after the Chattanooga Lookouts took home the Southern League championship on Monday, the team’s best player packed his bags for the big leagues. That player, of course, was Max Kepler, who will spend the final two weeks of the season in Minnesota following a well-deserved promotion.

Kepler put up crazy good in the minors this year. The 22-year-old spent nearly the entire season at the Double-A level, where he hit an absurd .322/.416/.531 in 112 games, while also kicking in 18 steals in 22 attempts. Kepler also accomplished the rare feat of walking more than he struck out this year, posting walk and strikeout rates of 14% and 13%, respectively. Even more impressively, he complemented this control of the strike zone with a healthy amount of power. Although he hit just nine homers on the year, his 32 doubles and 13 triples at the Double-A level produced an isolated power of .209.

There isn’t much to dislike about Kepler’s minor league performance this year. He drew walks, rarely struck out, clubbed oodles of extra base hits and stole a fair amount of bases. In other words, he did it all; and as a result, KATOH’s very bullish on him. My system projects him for an impressive 13.2 WAR through age 28, making him one of the highest-ranked prospects in the game. This represents a dramatic improvement over the weak 1.1 WAR yielded by his 2014 campaign.

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Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by viscount of the internet Rob Neyer, and expanded at the request of nobody, NERD scores represent an attempt to summarize in one number (and on a scale of 0-10) the likely aesthetic appeal or watchability, for the learned fan, of a player or team or game. Read more about the components of and formulae for NERD scores here.

Most Highly Rated Game
Cleveland at Minnesota | 20:10 ET
Anderson (77.2 IP, 111 xFIP-) vs. Gibson (186.0 IP, 100 xFIP-)
No second-place club is currently within fewer than three games of their respective division’s first-place club. Between that and an abbreviated Thursday schedule, none of tonight’s matchups feature much in the way of stirring consequences. The closest thing to urgency? Minnesota’s pursuit of the American League’s second wild-card spot. The Twins sit merely a game behind the Astros for the opportunity to participate in the play-in contest. Tonight represents an opportunity not only to observe how the club fares in that endeavor, but also to observe two of the AL’s most productive rookies, Cleveland’s Francisco Lindor (3.8 WAR) and Minnesota’s Miguel Sano (2.1 WAR). And for those among us who have a state car inspection scheduled for 5:30pm at the region’s best and/or only Nissan dealership, tonight also represents an opportunity to pass an hour acting out a strange, one-man performance of Sartre’s No Exit in that same dealership’s poorly lit waiting room.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Cleveland Radio.

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Ben and Sam answer listener emails about bullpen catchers, past playoff odds, a Nationals Park promotion, and more.

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A funny thing about doing a job like this is that you’re expected to write all the time. Which means you’re expected to write early in seasons, and you’re expected to write analytically, and when you write analytically early in seasons, you can end up looking like a moron. Earlier this season, for example, I remember writing reasonably positive things about Carlos Peguero. And early last year, over at JABO, I wrote about how the Rockies weren’t striking out anymore. You can guess what happened to Peguero. And you can guess what happened with the Rockies. The Rockies resumed striking out. They lost lots of games.

So, this isn’t anything new, but early information can mislead. We’re always just trying to separate what’s real from what’s fake, and we tend to be too impatient about that. But every so often, you can spot something legitimate. Several months ago, also at JABO, I observed that the Royals were barely ever striking out. They were on a potentially historic pace, and it was definitely something to stay aware of. To be honest, I at some point stopped being aware of it, but then I noticed again. The season’s about over, now. The Royals are thinking about the playoffs. They’ll be taking with them one hell of a group of contact hitters.

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Yogi Berra’s playing career ended well before my time. He was a superstar of an earlier generation, and though he never left the public eye, I certainly don’t know him any better than any of you do. So much of his stardom was due to his character, and to receive revealing anecdotes, we have to turn to the storytellers. Others are better equipped to talk about Berra’s personality. Others are better equipped to talk about their interactions with him, about all the things he said, about his graciousness and about his legacy. Berra, like all of them, was more than a baseball player. Berra was a person like few of them, and to fully understand him is to spend most of the time thinking about what he was off the field.

But of all the functions of statistics, one of them is to allow us to connect to the bygone eras. Stories provide information about the type of person Berra was. Statistics provide information about the type of player Berra was. Berra played before I knew what was going on. He played before most of you knew what was going on. We never got to watch him, outside of a few old video clips, but by digging into the data, we have a means by which to appreciate how talented he was, and how unlikely his story turned out to be. Berra did have one of those rare larger-than-life personalities, and that’s what made him more than just a great baseball player. Yet he was an unquestionably great baseball player, and as it turns out, he was also unquestionably clutch.

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