Reviewing Last Year’s Top 100 List

Each year, we strive to improve our process for ranking prospects. Part of that is reviewing our past rankings to identify any trends or biases that may have emerged. This post doesn’t represent a comprehensive effort to do so. Rather, think of it more as a first step to finding any low-hanging fruit we may have missed.

The 2018 version of our Picks to Click was less formal than this year’s edition. Last year, we listed 62 players, representing a mix of those in striking distance of the top 100, guys we thought would improve their rankings in 2019, and players we just liked. This year, we narrowed it down further to players who have never been a 50 FV before and who hadn’t appeared on the 2018 Picks to Click list. The aim is to have a leaner list with a higher percentage of players who will become 50 FV prospects for the first time next year.

We identified 15 of the 33 players who were new to the 2019 Top 100 in the 2018 Picks to Click (this excludes Yusei Kikuchi and the players drafted in 2018, as none of them were eligible for last year’s list). A handful of the 18 we didn’t include in our Picks to Click were close to last year’s Top 100 and wouldn’t have been much of a stretch to rank; a few were late cuts from both lists. All told, we picked about half of the new Top 100 talents. The 62 players on last year’s Picks to Click essentially broke down into three equal groups: stock up, steady, and stock down. Our goal is that this year’s leaner and more-focused group of 55 prospects will beat that mark. We also found the Picks to Click group of performers with lesser tools had our worst outcome (the success was Brandon Lowe, who would’ve been shoehorned into another group if this one didn’t exist), so we axed that subset from this year’s incarnation.

On last year’s Top 100, we included honorable mentions for the rest of the 50 FV prospects, which got us to 139 total players. I’ve manually graded whether the stock of those 139 went up, down, or held steady in 2019, and added a “slight” modifier for the in-between cases.

The names you’re most familiar with are in the “Up” group: Ronald Acuna, Juan Soto, Vladimir Guerrero, Jr., Walker Buehler, Gleyber Torres, Miguel Andujar, Wander Franco, Forrest Whitley, and so on. The top tier of the “Up” group only makes up 13% of the list, but that’s also picking from the most elite prospects in the game, so there isn’t much more room to improve.

I’m open to suggestions from the readers as to how best to read this, but the most notable trend I see is that the “Up”/”Slight Up” group tends to have more hitters (18 of 25, for 72%), while the down group is mostly pitchers (24 of 44, for 55%). This makes sense given pitcher attrition, but also suggests that we should perhaps be more cautious ranking minor league pitching prospects. It’s worth noting that in Craig Edwards’ research, generally speaking, the lower you go in the Top 100, the bigger the gap between hitter and pitcher value. I didn’t complete this analysis before we finalized this year’s Top 100, but we did note while making the list that it seemed to have more hitters on the back half than last year’s. This year, 33 of the 87 (38%) prospects with exactly a 50 FV were pitchers; that number was 44 of 97 (45%) last year.