FanGraphs Baseball

Tomorrow, we’ll be officially revealing our own version of the Top 100 prospects list that has become a staple of the baseball community. However, with more than 100 prospects receiving Future Value grades of 50 or higher, we decided to not arbitrarily cut off the list at 100 names, and ordered every prospect who achieved that FV score: 142 players in all. Because the Top 142 prospects sounds a little strange, however, I also included a secondary tier of unranked-but-still-listed prospects whose FVs fall on the higher side of 45; these are guys who weren’t too far off the list themselves, and in many cases, will be strong candidates for next year’s list.

So, tomorrow, we’ll unveil the FanGraphs Top 200 Prospect list. Today, though, I wanted to give you a little bit of background on how I arrived at these grades and rankings, as well as preemptively answering some questions that may arise about certain types of players.

Team Prospect Lists:
Rangers, Rockies, D’Backs, Twins, Astros
Cubs, Reds, Phillies, Rays, Mets
Padres, Marlins, Nationals, Red Sox, White Sox
Orioles, Yankees, Braves

Scouting Explained: Introduction, Hitting Pt 1 Pt 2 Pt 3 Pt 4 Pt 5 Pt 6

Cuban Coverage: Latest on Yoan Moncada and Latest on Four Notable Cubans

What The Tool Grades Mean

If you’re dropping into my minor league prospects rankings for the first time, thanks for coming, but there’s also a few things I should probably explain so that the list doesn’t look like gibberish to you. I use the 20-80 scouting scale, the same grading scale that pro scouts use to grade players at every level of baseball. It grades a player’s traditional tools — hit, hit for power, speed, fielding, throwing, each of a pitcher’s pitches, and his command — against major league average for each tool. Average is 50, above average is 55, below average is 45, plus is 60, plus-plus is 70 and 80 is just called 80 because it’s so rare and special that it doesn’t need another name; think Giancarlo Stanton‘s power, Billy Hamilton‘s speed, or Randy Johnson’s fastball. A 60 or better off-speed pitch is the standard for being called a “swing and miss” pitch; you need two 60 pitches and at least an average third pitch and command to be a #3 starter, for example.

If you want to go into further depth, then I’d suggest checking out the Scouting Explained links above, where I go into more detail about how scouts do what they do. These tool grades aren’t directly applicable to stats in every case — speed is just speed, not the ability to steal bases — but I go into much more detail on each player and project his potential big league numbers, his ETA to reach that level, a risk grade and more on the team prospect lists, linked to above and in each player’s capsule on the list. Since there are so many players that have tools that are 45 or 50, I use a + to denote 47.5 (fringe-average or fringy) and 52.5 (solid-average), or the half-grades between these most common grades, 45, 50 and 55.

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Here’s your chance to vote for the 2015 SABR Analytics Conference Research Awards winners.

The SABR Analytics Conference Research Awards will recognize baseball researchers who have completed the best work of original analysis or commentary during the preceding calendar year. Nominations were solicited by representatives from SABR, Baseball Prospectus, FanGraphs, The Hardball Times, and Beyond the Box Score.

To read any of the finalists, click on the link below. Scroll down to cast your vote.

Contemporary Baseball Analysis

• Russell Carleton, “N=1,” Baseball Prospectus 2014: The Essential Guide to the 2014 Season, January 2014.
• Jay Jaffe, “The Case of the Disappearing Slugger: Where Did MLB’s Power Go?” SI.com, September 3, 2014.
• Harry Pavlidis and Dan Brooks, “Framing and Blocking Pitches: A Regressed, Probabilistic Model,” Baseball Prospectus, March 3, 2014.
• Jon Roegele, “The Effects of Pitch Sequencing,” The Hardball Times, November 24, 2014.
• Jeff Sullivan, “Alex Gordon Barely Had a Chance,” FanGraphs, October 30, 2014.

Contemporary Baseball Commentary

• Grant Brisbee, “Rumors, Rumors, Every Where, Nor Any Drop to Drink,” SB Nation, December 15, 2014.
• Dave Cameron, “If Someone Has A Good Way To Evaluate Managers, Let Us Know,” FoxSports.com, September 5, 2014.
• Lewie Pollis, “If You Build It: Rethinking the Market for Major League Baseball Front Office Personnel,” Brown University, senior honors thesis, Spring 2014.
• Eno Sarris, “Learning the Language of the Clubhouse,” The Hardball Times, March 13, 2014.
• Jason Turbow, “The Essence of Velocity: The Pitching Theory That Could Revolutionize Baseball, If Only The Sport Would Embrace It,” SB Nation, June 18, 2014.

Historical Analysis/Commentary

• Frank Jackson, “Shots Fired But Not Heard ‘Round the World,” The Hardball Times, October 7, 2014.
• Erik Malinowski, “Swing Away: The Untold Story of the First Home Run Derby,” FoxSports.com, July 10, 2014.
• Sam Miller, “Baseball’s Seven Wonders: Kerry Wood’s 20-K Game,” Baseball Prospectus, March 18, 2014.
• Bryan Soderholm-Difatte, “The 1914 Stallings Platoon: Assessing Execution, Impact, and Strategic Philosophy,” SABR Baseball Research Journal, Fall 2014.
• Steve Treder, “The Strikeout Ascendant (and What Should Be Done About It),” The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2014.

Voting will be open through 11:59 p.m. MST on Monday, February 16, 2015. Details and criteria for each category can be found here. Only one work per author was considered as a finalist.

Mobile or Safari users, click here to access the survey

Results will be announced and presented at the fourth annual SABR Analytics Conference, March 12-14, 2015, at the Hyatt Regency Phoenix in Phoenix, Arizona. Learn more or register for the conference at SABR.org/analytics.

A month ago, we put out an open call for applications for a writing position here on FanGraphs. The responses were overwhelming, which is why it took us nearly a month to sort through the hundreds of received resumes and conduct as many interviews as we could. In the end, what was intended to be one open position turned into five new people joining the team, as we simply had too many good candidates to turn away.

If you were one of those who applied, I highly encourage you to keep writing and prove that we missed the boat by not hiring you this time around. The Community Blog is a great place to get noticed, as four of the five people joining the writing staff had previously published work there, and we’ve hired a handful of others directly after noticing their contributions to the Community Blog previously. We’re really excited about the five new people joining our staff, but we know many of you would be great contributors as well, so don’t give up.

With that said, let me briefly introduce the five new writers whose work will be debuting on these pages very soon.

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The legal sparring between the Washington Nationals and Mid-Atlantic Sports Network continued last week, with the Nationals asking the presiding judge in the case to modify the preliminary injunction issued last August. As background, the dispute centers on an arbitration decision issued in 2014 by MLB’s Revenue Sharing Definitions Committee (RSDC), which determined that MASN owes the Nationals roughly $60 million per year in broadcast rights fees (for more on the dispute, click here, here, here, and here).

MASN and the Baltimore Orioles (who own a majority share of the network) appealed this outcome to New York state court, alleging that the arbitration proceedings were biased for a variety of reasons. In August, Judge Lawrence Marks issued a preliminary injunction, blocking MLB from enforcing the arbitration decision until the suit was resolved. This was a modest victory for MASN, allowing the team to continue to pay the Nationals a lower broadcast rights fee pending a final hearing in the lawsuit (a difference of approximately $21 million per year).

Part of the reason that the judge decided to issue the injunction was his belief that the dispute could be resolved “expeditiously.” Originally, the court scheduled a final hearing in the case for December 2014. That date was eventually pushed back to mid-March, and then again recently to May 18, 2015.

The Nationals now contend that this delay has imposed a real hardship on the team, depriving it of the full broadcast rights fee determined by the RSDC for a much longer period of time than the court had originally envisioned. As a result, on Wednesday the team asked the court to order MASN to pay the Nationals the first quarterly installment of the full RSDC-approved broadcast rights fee (an installment of around $15 million, rather than the roughly $10 million MASN intends to pay). Washington justified its request in part by contending that because it is “not receiving fair market value for [its] broadcast rights,” it is being “placed at a competitive disadvantage compared to other teams, and [is] hamstrung in [its] ability to invest in efforts to improve the team and the stadium.”

MASN responded to the Nationals’ request later that same day. The network offered to increase the size of the bond it had secured to ensure that the Nationals would receive the additional broadcast revenues should the court eventually rule in Washington’s favor. But MASN argued that it should continue to be allowed to pay a reduced sum to the Nationals pending a final resolution of the lawsuit. The network also contested the claim that Washington was unable to fully invest in its team’s roster due to the injunction, citing the Nationals’ recent $210 million contract with Max Scherzer as proof that the lawsuit was not hampering the team financially.

Considering that the court was willing to issue a preliminary injunction last August, the odds that the judge will set that ruling aside now to allow the Nationals to collect the full broadcast rights fee authorized by the RSDC are relatively low. However, the court will likely take MASN up on its offer to provide an additional bond to ensure that the extra funds will be available for Washington should the Nationals prevail in the case. In any event, this latest legal maneuvering indicates that the parties are not any closer to a settlement in the case, despite comments by Rob Manfred last week suggesting that the litigation could be resolved in relatively short order.

What follows is a brief excerpt from the latest edition of FanGraphs Audio featuring Kiley McDaniel, and also the approximate moment when I started conducting research for this post and subsequently stopped giving my undivided attention to the aforementioned podcast:

A very literal transcript, for those unable to listen to the embedded audio for whatever reason:

Carson Cistulli: Starling Marte is really — uh, is so good.

Kiley McDaniel: How good is he?! (sarcastically)

CC: Well, he’s good! He also has a strange profile — you’re probably aware of this. But, his plate discipline is still not particularly well-developed. But he probably has, at least, one of the best batted ball profiles of any major leaguer at this point.

KM: I remember when I was in Pittsburgh, the sort of — well, I don’t want to speak for the organization — but the question I was asking is, is he the guy that can walk very little and still, like, has the bat-to-ball skills to make it work? And, y’know, hit .280 with a 4% walk rate or whatever his numbers are. And I watched him in Altoona — he was in Altoona the year I was there — and I thought yes, but I wasn’t willing to bet tens of millions of dollars on him being, like, one of the very few guys that can do that. Yeah, he’s definitely a unique fit.

So now you know where I’m coming from.
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As we move tantalizingly close to pitchers and catchers reporting dates, with many players already descending on spring training complexes in Arizona and Florida, the New York Mets are beginning to draw a little buzz. It’s understandable, but there’s just one problem — those pesky projection systems. While the three systems that I regularly reference don’t bury the Mets, they aren’t exactly pushing them into any sort of pole position — be it for the National League East or Wild Card. That’s not to say the Mets can’t get back to October for the first time since 2006, but much will depend on which version of the starting rotation they get.

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Ben and Sam preview the Braves’ season with Alex Remington, and Sahadev talks to MLB.com Braves beat writer Mark Bowman (at 32:00).

On both Friday and Saturday, the author published GIFs here documenting footage from collegiate games less notable for the events captured within those GIFs and more notable for the fact that there were baseball events to be captured at all.

What separates the footage below from that recently featured here is that it depicts a potential first-round selection. According to Kiley McDaniel, Illinois left-hander Tyler Jay was a relative unknown entering the summer but pitched in relief for Team USA and exhibited a “93-97 mph [fastball] with above-average to plus curveball and changeup.” He was ranked 42nd overall by McDaniel among draft-eligible prospects.

Here’s an example of Jay’s changeup from this afternoon’s contest between Illinois and Lamar, which pitch he has utilized to strike out Lamar left fielder Kevin Santana.

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It’s become well-known that minor league players earn meager salaries. Little attention has been paid to the earnings of the instructors responsible for their development. They’re not getting rich either.

Salaries at the big league level are fairly generous. Some managers make seven figures. Hitting and pitching coaches are paid anywhere from $150,000 to $350,000, with a select few earning far more. Bench coaches earn between $150,000-$250,000. Third base coaches are around $130,000-$140,000. First base coaches are in the $100,000-$110,000 range. Bullpen coaches bring home roughly $90,000.

It’s a different story down on the farm.

Minor league coaches get paychecks year round – unlike minor league players — but that doesn’t mean the majority can afford to spend their winters on the golf course. One baseball lifer I talked to said he managed in the minors for over a decade and never made more than $42,000 a year. He worked camps and substitute taught in the off-season to help make ends meet. Others manage winter ball in Mexico or Venezuela to earn extra money.

Not everybody I spoke to would get specific with salaries, but a front office type told me his club pays minor league coaches and managers a minimum of $35,000. Another put that number at $30,000. Multiple sources estimated the high end to be in the $150,000-$175,00 range, with long-time managers and coordinators typically at the top of the pay scale.

Player development staff salaries vary by organization. One contact cited the Marlins as a team that pays poorly, and the Braves as one of the more generous. Qualifying that he doesn’t know the exact difference in dollars – he’s with another club – he said, “That’s why Miami has a lot of turnover and Atlanta doesn’t.” Read the rest of this entry »