When I filed my story about LSU’s two-way star Paul Skenes on Monday evening, I thought, “Well, I probably won’t have to think or write about another pitching prospect whose career was complicated by military obligations for at least another 72 hours!”

How wrong I was. On Wednesday afternoon, momentous news filtered up from Florida, and not the kind of news that normally filters up from Florida: Noah Song, late of the Red Sox and the U.S. Navy, is bound for Phillies camp. Read the rest of this entry »

Ah yes, you’ve made it through Prospect Week, reading our Top 100 list, interviews with both prospects and team personnel, Picks to Click, and myriad other prospect-focused delights. You might think that nothing could top that huge eruption of prospect coverage. And you’d be right! But as I’ve done for the past two years, I’m going to contribute a small postscript to the week by picking some hitting prospects who intrigue me and who I think stand a better-than-average chance of making noise in the major leagues.

In the past, I’ve done pretty well at this. My hit rate hasn’t been 100% or anything, but let’s put it this way: of the four betting favorites for NL Rookie of the Year for 2023, one is Kodai Senga, one is consensus all-world prospect Corbin Carroll, and the other two have appeared on the previous editions of this list. That’s Miguel Vargas and Ezequiel Tovar, if you’re keeping score at home, and both also feature on our Top 100 list this year. They’ve gone from being interesting guys with promising statistical markers to capital-G guys, which is exactly what I’m trying to do when putting this article together.

That said, it’s getting harder. The 2021 edition of this list featured some carping about Eric Longenhagen ranking Gabriel Moreno in the 100, because he was the exact kind of player who might not have been highly regarded in earlier eras of public prospect evaluation but who had all the markers of future success. This time around, the Top 100 has even more Moreno types, prospects who combine raw tools that might land them just short of the list with statistical markers that scream future big leaguer. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s common for our readers to ask which of the players who aren’t on this year’s Top 100 might grace next year’s edition. Who has a chance to really break out? This is the piece for those readers, our “Picks to Click,” the gut-feel guys we think can make the 2024 Top 100.

This is the sixth year we’ve conducted this exercise at FanGraphs, and there are some rules. First, none of the players you see below will have ever been a 50 FV or better prospect in any of our write-ups or rankings. Second, we can’t pick players who we’ve picked in prior years, but the other writers can. For instance, Tess picked Harry Ford last year, but he didn’t make the Top 100. Tess can’t select him again, but Eric could if he wanted (and he did).

A few years ago, we decided to make this somewhat competitive to see which of us ends up being right about the most players. Below is a brief rundown of how the site’s writers have done since this piece became a part of Prospect Week; you can click the year in the “Year” column to access that year’s list. Our initials began appearing next to our picks in 2021. In the table, the format for that year’s results is “Eric’s guys (Eric and Kevin mutual selections) Kevin’s guys (Kevin and Tess mutuals) Tess’ guys.” That makes sense, right? We don’t count “click echoes” toward our totals, guys who enter the 50 FV tier multiple years after they were Picks to Click. However, we do count “click meteors,” players who pass through the Top 100 during the season but then graduate, like Michael Harris II last year (though it’s hard to feel good about only having him as a Pick to Click at this time last year). Here’s how we’ve fared in the past:

We’ve separated the players into groups or “types” to make the list a little more digestible and to give you some idea of the demographics we think pop-up guys come from, which could help you identify some of your own using The Board. For players whose orgs we have already covered this offseason, there is a link to the applicable team list where you can find a full scouting report on that player. Read the rest of this entry »

For the eighth time, we’ve reached the point in the offseason where I run down the ZiPS Top 100 prospects. For those wandering in who may hear “ZiPS” and think of the University of Akron or possibly the popular Cincinnati burger spot, ZiPS is a computer projection system that crunches a lot of data about players and attempts to peer through the fog that obscures the future. More can be read about the system here or in MLB.com’s executive summary.

ZiPS is a useful tool, but the projections, whether for prospects or for baseball as a whole, are not intended to replace scouting. The purpose of ZiPS is to get the best answers possible from the data available, not necessarily to be the one-ring-to-prove-them-all-unified-field-theory-giant-Katamari-Damacy-ball of prognostication. ZiPS doesn’t see some things that scouts do. But by being able to process large amounts of data and instantly put those numbers into context and make adjustments, ZiPS also sees some things that scouts can’t. Computers and humans have different strengths, after all.

How well does it work? ZiPS, like human scouts, has its own share of gigantic misses (hello, Arismendy Alcántara), but it also has a number of notches in its virtual belt. ZiPS regularly ranked lots of future stars, such as Mookie Betts, Austin Riley, and Pete Alonso, significantly higher than consensus. Last week, a reader looked at Top 100 lists from 2018 onward and ZiPS did just as well as others, including naming the most players with 5 WAR so far (29).

Naturally, there is a lot of agreement between ZiPS and other lists when it comes to top prospects. Elite prospects tend to please both the scouts and the silicon, and 68 of this year’s ZiPS Top 100 overlap with the official FanGraphs Top 100. The ZiPS list should be used in addition to other lists, not in a mutually exclusive fashion.

I’ve adjusted the methodology of the rankings slightly, going with the interquartile mean for career WAR rather than the 50th percentile projection. That’s because, with the benefit of hindsight, it consistently slightly outperforms the 50th percentile rankings (though none of the actual rankings will be retconned for the ZiPS Cinematic Universe). ZiPS will still have a tendency to like high-floor, low-ceiling players more than scouts do. This is understandable given the nature of projections; scouts are optimistic by nature, traveling to Hagerstown or Kannapolis to see something special, not just to find a useful fourth outfielder or innings-eating fourth starter.

So, let’s get to the Top 100. The position listed reflects where the player has played the most recently; ZiPS is making no attempt to gauge where a team will choose to deploy a player, so take that into consideration:

To make it easier for fans to know whether they should be delighted or furious with me and Mr. Szymborski’s monster, I’ve also prepared a useful summary chart for each team:

For the second straight year, the Cleveland Guardians do extremely well here. The Baltimore Orioles ranking highly should be no surprise, even with Adley Rutschman graduating. The Cincinnati Reds better rank highly after dumping most of their team, and I’ve already talked about ZiPS secretly being paid off by the Diamondbacks. It’s jarring to see the Braves and Padres so low after how dominant they’ve been in the rankings previously, but a lot of that is the price of success; Austin Riley, Michael Harris II, Spencer Strider, and Vaughn Grissom would all be ultra-elite this year, but they’re all in the majors, a result the Braves no doubt prefer. As for the Padres, they’ve made a lot of trades in recent years, which will naturally reduce the level of talent in a farm system. The only other team shut out of the Top 100, the Detroit Tigers, can take some solace in the fact that they’re tied for third overall when you extend to 200 prospects.

Since a chart of 100 players is unwieldy, let’s break it down by position, and talk about a few of the highlights. Me saying “ZiPS says X” for 100 individual prospects would be rather boring, so please, put your questions in the comments if there are things you’re curious about! And for detailed breakdowns of the players as a whole, be sure to check out The Board. We’ll start with first base:

First base prospect lists just aren’t what they used to be. Teams are generally (rightfully) resistant to moving their prospects to first unless they have to. Generally speaking, there are two tiers of first base prospects here. The top four all rank in the ZiPS Top 200, then there’s a big drop-off from Matt Mervis at 189 to Niko Kavadas at 282. Triston Casas tends to be the consensus top first base prospect, but ZiPS likes Kyle Manzardo even more; he has one fewer year of pro experience, but the minor league translations are more impressive and because he’s younger, ZiPS sees more chance of a tantalizing breakout. ZiPS wasn’t overly enthused by Tyler Soderstrom’s performance, but is much happier when you take his age into consideration. ZiPS prefers Mervis to fellow Cub Trey Mancini, but Mervis finishes fourth here by virtue of being older than Manzardo, Casas, and Soderstrom, and the computer just not seeing as much upside as it does with those three.

No, ZiPS did not give additional points to Jorbit Vivas for having such a fun name. The second base list has some of the same characteristics as first base, simply because a lot of the “true” best second base prospects are currently playing shortstop. Vivas ranks 78th in the Top 100, while Adael Amador, a shortstop who ranks six places ahead of him, doesn’t even crack the top 15 at his position! Connor Norby, along with Jordan Westburg and Joey Ortiz, is why I’m sort of annoyed with the Orioles for making one of their few free agent signings second baseman Adam Frazier. Even by 2022 minor league offensive standards, a second baseman with a .960 OPS is someone you shouldn’t sleep on, and as a former second-rounder, it’s not like Norby doesn’t have a pedigree. Justin Foscue has been a ZiPS favorite for a while, with the computer seeing him a bit like Nick Solak if Solak had met expectations. There’s still a question about Edouard Julien’s ultimate position, but he has a fascinating offensive profile. The projections know to not go too nuts over walk-heavy minor leaguers, but Julien isn’t a passive, power-less bat; he hit .300 with 17 homers at Double-A in 2023. There’s a pretty wide range of possible outcomes when it comes to Julien, but with a little luck, his long-term projections would involve a higher batting average than the rather unimpressive mean projections he currently has.

Here’s where you can see some serious prospectage from top to bottom. I hope Orioles fans can forgive me for Gunnar Henderson ranking behind Corbin Carroll, but he’s still the best shortstop prospect among a very impressive group. And if he moves to second or third base, he’s the best prospect at those positions as well! Henderson had one of the biggest breakout seasons for a shortstop in prospect history in 2022, and it’s with good reason that he’s quickly moved into ultra-elite territory.

The most controversial projection here may be that of Orelvis Martinez, who ranks above some seriously high-quality shortstop prospects. Most of that is a dispute over position; there’s a real question whether he can stick at short or will move to third base. ZiPS uses a Total Zone-esque method for looking at minor league defense, for which I have the location/angle hit of every defensive play in the minors. This method nailed players like Luis Robert Jr. as minor leaguers, and right now, it thinks Martinez is below average but not alarmingly so. If he turns out to be Hanley Ramirez-esque at shortstop, he drops very quickly in the rankings given the competition here.

The Cincinnati Reds have accumulated a comical number of shortstop prospects. Elly De La Cruz, Noelvi Marte, and (surprisingly) Matt McLain all make the top 15. Edwin Arroyo missed, but he ranks 58th overall, and yet another shortstop, 2021 third-rounder Jose Torres, finishes in the Top 200. Spencer Steer and Christian Encarnacion-Strand, both higher-floor/lower-ceiling guys in ZiPS’ view, ought to feel a bit of urgency because someone here is inevitably going to join the fight for third base!

Jordan Walker doesn’t get the shiniest mean projection — ZiPS projects 1.8 WAR from him in 2025 — but his upside is quite explosive. If we look at the 75th-percentile projections for 2025 instead of the 50th, that 1.8 WAR jumps to 3.7 WAR. Simply put, ZiPS think there’s a decent chance that Walker puts up some obscene home run totals, even if that’s not necessarily the over/under line. ZiPS is a fan of Curtis Mead causing a position battle at third for the Rays, which I imagine will result in someone ending up in an outfield corner. I hope the presence of Coby Mayo discourages the O’s from prematurely moving Henderson to third like they did with Manny Machado when they gave priority to J.J. Hardy. Last year’s surprise third base inclusion, Bryan Ramos, maintains his rank, and ZiPS doesn’t know that the Dodgers will probably have Miguel Vargas play other positions more often than third in 2023.

ZiPS is going to be Super Annoyed if Francisco Álvarez spends a good deal of the season at Triple-A Syracuse, to a degree that humanity is fortunate I’m nowhere near smart enough to program Skynet. I like Omar Narváez, but Álvarez has a good chance to be something truly special, and there comes a point where the Mets are just wasting his time in the minors. Endy Rodriguez has leapfrogged way ahead of Henry Davis among Pirates catching prospects thanks to his 2022, and while it doesn’t have an effect here, I like that the Bucs are still occasionally using him at second base and in the outfield, which could make him some kind of Beast Mode Austin Barnes.

Bo Naylor’s power blew up in 2022, so it ought to be no surprise to see him rank so highly, and the Angels now have two catchers here, with Logan O’Hoppe likely being a semi-starter as a minimum in 2023. Harry Ford is one of the names on the list that really interests me. As an aside, I’m going to keep saying Harry Ford whenever possible because my dumb brain still calls him Henry Ford about half the time. ZiPS is a bit concerned about his defense; 14 passed balls and eight errors for Harry Ford is a lot in 54 games, and while Harry Ford’s not hopeless at controlling baserunners, it’s also not really a plus. But Harry Ford’s bat, which went from high school to full-season ball very quickly with few consequences, may end up playing anywhere. Harry Ford.

ZiPS sees Corbin Carroll as the class of the 2023 prospect contingent, a franchise player who the Diamondbacks should try to sign to a long-term deal as quickly as possible. (They appear to be doing this.) Jackson Chourio ranking second in the outfield group isn’t a shocker, and ZiPS loves his combination of power and speed. The first big surprise is Alexander Canario. ZiPS thinks his defense is better than the consensus in center field, and based on some of the advanced hit data from the minors, the system thinks he got totally hosed in the BABIP department. Add in impressive power upside and you have a pick that might look genius or absolutely crazy in three years. Remember, all of the projection misses remain Carson Cistulli’s fault.

The most notable projection here may be how low Nats outfielder James Wood ranks. In this case, ZiPS is designed to be skeptical about players with little minor league time — and completely agnostic about high schoolers yet to debut — and it’s actually fairly impressive that he ranks this highly. If all goes well, Wood has an easy path to the ZiPS overall top 10 in 2024. That is, if he doesn’t blow through the minors quickly; the Nats were certainly willing to give Juan Soto a chance very, very quickly, and if he continues to hit like this, it’ll be hard to not use Wood similarly. Colton Cowser slipped a lot after a rather weak Triple-A debut; without it, he’d rank 87th overall rather than tumbling to 105. One other big slipper is George Valera, who ZiPS still sees as a prospect despite dipping to no. 71 after placing fifth overall last year. The scouts seem to have gauged him better than the computer, at least in 2022.

Surprisingly, there’s quite a lot of agreement between the ZiPS list and the FanGraphs list at the top of the pitching ranks. Eight of the top nine prospects in ZiPS are basically the top pitching prospects on Eric and Tess’ list. I’d have liked to see Grayson Rodriguez stay at the top, but you can’t deny that 2022 added some additional uncertainty to the mix. A lot of the disagreement on the remaining pitcher, Daniel Espino, may simply come down to the fact that ZiPS isn’t aware that his shoulder problems have continued, which is something that should always frighten you about pitching prospects! Ricky Tiedemann may be the most impressive big jumper here, as it’s hard for a pitcher to rank this highly based on so few professional innings; that simply reflects his dominance in those innings.

Blake Walston is the first big surprise here, a low ceiling prospect who didn’t have an impressive season on the surface in 2022. But on a play-by-play level, ZiPS thinks his high BABIP and too-high HR/9 (.341, 1.35) weren’t actually earned from his pitching, and given how offense exploded in the minors, ZiPS is much sunnier about his recent campaign. ZiPS continues to like Matthew Liberatore, and he’s joined by two teammates, Gordon Graceffo and Tink Hence. Hence’s rank is more impressive than it looks for a reason similar to Tiedemann’s: he only has 16 starts above rookie ball! But what a 16 starts they were. Fourteen strikeouts per game with a low walk rate and just a single homer? Sign me up. More of this, and Hence will rank like Rodriguez or Eury Pérez in ZiPS (I checked). Drey Jameson and Ryne Nelson join ZiPS’ Arizona Bias Factory to give the team four of the league’s top 30 pitching prospects by ZiPS. Mason Montgomery is one of the ZiPS low-ceiling/high-floor specials; pitching in the Trop against the backdrop of a pitcher-friendly big league offensive environment, ZiPS sees Montgomery’s control as just good enough to give him a shot at crafty lefty territory.

Kodai Senga’s relatively low rank reflects the fact that he’s already 30 and has fewer years remaining than other pitchers who work out rather than indicating any skepticism about his abilities.

Comments? Questions? Complaints? The comment section is open!

[Note: Masataka Yoshida was originally not flagged as a rookie and left off the list due to the slight incompetence of the author -DS]

Episode 1013

It’s Prospect Week at FanGraphs, so our scouting department shares how the prospect list sausage is made before we hear from a fellow ranker who is now on the team side.

• To start things off, lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen is joined by contributor Tess Taruskin to celebrate making it through Prospect Week and to shine a light on how the Top 100 was made. The duo walk through a ranking exercise, using a group of relief-risk pitchers to show how they would evaluate comparable players. Eric and Tess also discuss some of their favorite players on the list, including Addison Barger and Miguel Bleis, and how nowadays they sometimes have to watch players’ TikTok accounts for the best scouting footage available. [3:44]
• After that, David Laurila welcomes John Manuel, former editor-in-chief at Baseball America and current scout for the Minnesota Twins. John tells David how different prospect lists look now that he is on the inside of a front office, as well as how much clubs actually pay attention to them. The pair also discuss the origins of prospect lists and how BA founder Allan Simpson deserves credit for originating the exercise many years ago. Finally, John reflects on some of his own evaluations on players such as Félix Hernández, Joe Mauer, Mookie Betts, Justin Verlander, and Freddie Freeman. [43:22]

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Since joining MLB as an expansion team in 1993, the Rockies have won 46.9% of their games. Among active franchises, that mark stands as the third worst. Granted, most other teams have had a lot more time to establish themselves, and the Rockies have bested their 1993 expansion counterparts in the Marlins (though given the option, they’d probably take the Marlins’ two World Series championships). But they have also been handily outpaced by the 1998 expansion teams, the Diamondbacks and the Rays, who have each posted winning percentages of 48.5%. Further, the Rockies still have the fifth-worst winning percentage even if we limit our scope to 2000 onwards. These results don’t line up with the Rockies’ spending, especially as of late, which has placed them in the middle of the pack in terms of payroll — that is, until we consider the Coors effect.

The Rockies’ pitching has long dragged down the fortunes of the team as a whole. Since 2000, they’ve easily been the worst staff in the majors with a 4.93 ERA. But it isn’t entirely their fault: pitches move sub-optimally and balls fly further in Colorado. The front office has tried various remedies, in particular opting for more groundball-heavy or low-BABIP pitchers. Neither of those strategies has worked all that well, but some proposals carry promise, like the idea of relying more on gyro spin and/or using the lesser impacts of Magnus force in Colorado in an advantageous way.

But the innovation in Denver appears to be at a bit of a standstill, possibly due to unrealistic expectations about the Rockies’ current level of competitiveness. Self-evaluation issues aside, on a recent episode of Effectively Wild, Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley described the Rockies as a team that could theoretically be more consistent if they truly figured out how to navigate playing half of their games at Coors. That got me thinking, and while I certainly don’t purport to provide the final answer, I do hope to supply a different perspective on the problem. Read the rest of this entry »

With players and team personnel reporting to their spring camps, the 2023 season is almost upon us, with 30 teams set to play over 2,000 games in an effort to qualify just for a chance to reach the ultimate goal of a World Series. It’s a marathon of unparalleled scale in American professional sports, and when all is said and done, some of those teams may be separated by as little as one or two wins — or, though it hasn’t happened since the tragic assassination of Game 163 last winter, any of a series of tiebreakers buried somewhere in the season standings.

That such a long race can come down to the final days is part of what makes our sport brilliant, like some amplified version of Monday’s UAE Tour cycling photo finish my colleague Michael Baumann shared on Twitter. It is part of what makes us all tune in so faithfully for this marathon; over a long summer, the margins between the playoff-bound and the homebound can be paper thin. Just ask last year’s 87-win Phillies and 86-win Brewers, who finished their seasons with extremely different tastes in their mouths.

All this to say: competitive balance is, well, a delicate balance, and with the debut of our 2023 playoff odds last week, there’s no time like the present to evaluate the state of the league from a parity perspective. Competitive parity in MLB has been a hot topic for the better part of a decade as we’ve started to see megateams like the Dodgers and Astros routinely eclipsing 100 wins, and others getting more comfortable with finishing somewhere around 60. In the five full seasons since 2017, 17 teams have reached 100 victories; just five did so in the previous 11 years. On the other side of the standings, prior to 2019, there had been just one season in which as many as four teams lost 100 games; then four clubs did so in each of the 2019, ’21, and ’22 seasons. With that in mind, here’s a look at the disparity in team winning percentage at the end of each season since 1960:

A few things are clear: measures of parity are pretty susceptible to swings in either direction, and as for right now, we are playing through a particularly disparate era. After a seven-year low in 2014, disparity spiked over the next five years to a peak standard deviation of .098 in 2019 before effectively leveling out around .090 in the last three. Left unchecked, this could pose a risk to the delicate balance of maintaining an exciting and marketable 162-game regular season. A wider spread means fewer tight playoff races and more teams with known playoff fates in the latter months of the regular season. Read the rest of this entry »

Yu Darvish’s six-year, $108 million extension with the Padres looks innocuous enough. Darvish is absolutely essential to the Padres’ success, and he’s now one of those rare MLB players who’s signed multiple $100 million deals, despite not having reached free agency the first time until his age-31 season.

If anyone can pitch until he’s 42, it’s Darvish, the man who’s got more pitches than can fit in Mary Poppins’ carpetbag. This extension actually has me looking forward to watching Darvish once he gets into his latter-day Zack Greinke era. No, the interesting thing about this contract is not who’s getting paid, who’s doing the paying, or how much money is set to change hands. It’s when. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball season is almost upon us. Spring training competition has begun and the hot stove of free agency has cooled off a bit, though not entirely. Many players, especially on the relief market, have yet to be signed. But over the past week, two former starters with a recent track record of excellent relief performance have taken their talents to Southern California – one finding a new home in Anaheim while the other returns to the big city.

Angels sign Matt Moore to a one-year, $7.55 million deal

Moore’s path through professional baseball has been as interesting as any. A highly touted high school draftee, Moore was once ranked as the top prospect in the game by MLB.com and Baseball Prospectus, ahead of Bryce Harper and Mike Trout. He established himself in the majors at the age of 23, making the AL All-Star team in his second full season. He then missed almost all of 2014 and ’15 with a torn UCL. After returning, his performance quickly dipped from solid to disastrous. He bounced from team to team and posted a 5.99 ERA in 2017-18 while splitting time between the rotation and bullpen. He appeared in just two games in 2019 before a knee injury prematurely ended his season. With his track record of injuries and poor performance now six years long, Moore took a new path to rejuvenate his career, signing with the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks of NPB for the 2020 season. There he ultimately excelled, with a 2.65 ERA and 3.21 FIP in 13 starts. Moore’s performance impressed the Phillies, who brought him on in a hybrid starter/reliever role where his struggles continued, allowing almost two homers per nine innings and a walk every other frame. However, one team still saw something in him – the Texas Rangers. They signed him to pitch out of the bullpen, and he was excellent: His 1.95 ERA and 2.98 FIP in 74 innings were career bests, as was his 10.1 K/9. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, we published our playoff odds for the 2023 season. Those odds contain a ton of interesting bells and whistles, from win distributions to chances of receiving a playoff bye. At their core, however, they’re based on one number: win totals. Win totals determine who makes the playoffs, so our projections, at their core, are a machine for spitting out win totals and then assigning playoff spots from there.

We’ve been making these projections since 2014, so I thought it would be interesting to see how our win total projections have matched up with reality. After all, win total projections are only useful if they do an acceptable job of anticipating what happens during the season. If we simply projected 113 wins for the Royals every year, to pick a random example, the model wouldn’t be very useful. The Royals have won anywhere from 58 to 95 games in that span.

I’m not exactly sure what data is most useful about our projections, so I decided to run a bunch of different tests. That way, whatever description of them best helps you understand their volatility, you can simply listen to that one and ignore everything else I presented. Or, you know, consider a bunch of them. It’s your brain, after all.

Before I get started on these, I’d like to point out that I’ve already given our playoff odds estimates a similar test in these two articles. If you’re looking for a tl;dr summary of it, I’d go with this: our odds are pretty good, largely because they converge on which teams are either very likely or very unlikely to make the playoffs quickly. The odds are probably a touch too pessimistic on teams at the 5–10% playoff odds part of the distribution, though that’s more observational than provable through data. For the most part, what you see is what you get: projections do a good job of separating the wheat from the chaff.

With that out of the way, let’s get back to projected win totals. Here’s the base level: the average error of our win total projections is 7.5 wins, and the median error is 6.5 wins. In other words, if we say that we think your team is going to win 85.5 games, that means that half the time, they’ll win between 79 and 92 games. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results, but for what it’s worth, that error has been consistent over time. In standard deviation terms, that’s around 9.5 wins. Read the rest of this entry »