The Limits of Prospect Lists

We’re right in the thick of prospect ranking season right now, with all of the national prospect writers feverishly emailing scouts their top 100 lists and making adjustments with plans to unveil them in the next couple weeks or so.  I’ll hold the details of what and when we’ll be putting up our list, but it will likely be well over 100 players. I’m nothing if not wordy.

Undermining Team Prospect Lists

An interesting thing I’ve noticed while balancing the individual team list research with the overall big list research is how team lists change after I’ve posted them. The reasons I give FVs to players is to categorize them, guessing where I’ll put them in a top 100, to save some time. It’s inevitable, then, that some player I call a 50 FV on his team list will end up being ranked ahead of a that I call a 55 FV on his team’s list. This is expected and part of the reason I’ll be continually updating the team lists (more on this at a later date), so that discrepancy in the team list will be fixed after the big list goes up.

When I write a team list, I talk to 3-5 people with the club, then more from outside the club. I massage the data into a list and usually feel pretty good about it. When I combine all these team lists into a big list, I feel pretty good about it and then I send it to scouts and execs from every team and when I get replies, I start feeling less good about it.

I know that I can’t run all 30 lists by every person I know in baseball, which is why new information comes out in the large-scale blasts to dozens of people that I’ve only talked to in depth about a handful of organizations each.  I’m offered new information that would shuffle a list, I repeat that info/potential new ranking to a few more people and realize I’m a little closer to the “correct” answer than when I wrote the team list.

I realized this before I started list season, though I’m not sure all of the readers do. These lists are not only fluid when games are being played (reports come in, players get injured, etc.) but also in the offseason as the search for the “truth” comes more into focus, especially with a list like the Mets.

Behind #1 RHP Noah Syndergaard, there were 9 players ranking from 55 down to a 45/50 borderline (which I’ve now started calling 45+, to differentiate it from more ordinary 45s). That’s a lot of tightly-packed players that changed order a few times after I wrote the list.

Some Mets fans were outraged I didn’t put LHP Steven Matz #2 on my Mets list, as other publications had, instead ranking him 7th. He’s moved up a couple spots after surveying a larger swath of the industry since I posted the list (but still isn’t 2nd). The compelling information I’m getting that changes some rankings is sometimes medical or just industry-wide preferences being slightly different than I had expected, but often is trade-related (and always not for print).

“We talked to a club and asked for x prospect, they said no and countered with y prospect, which we turned down and then moved on.”  I don’t know which team had aborted trade talks with another, so sometimes unexpected sources have real insight into a rival team’s thinking, like when prospects x and y are in reverse order than what I expected. I can then go back through my notes and see hints in phrasing from the org that has the prospects in question, indicating this preference that I may have missed when writing the list.

Call this an in-advance mea culpa for when my top prospect list comes out and some names are shuffled from where I’ve had them before. I promise I’ll keep changing my rankings as information dictates and the players will change once the season starts, so try not to get too attached to any specific ranking, especially when my grades present the players as pretty close in talent.  This is in keeping with my tradition of being a wet blanket to readers who prefer hot takes and never-changing, ultra-confident opinions.

Ranking The Organizations

Since I have the 45+ FV and higher players identified for every org, it’s been challenging trying to rank the orgs themselves (though I have a tentative 1-30 ranking). There may technically be a more objective way to handle this than I currently am, but my system is using a huge grid of each team and the players they have by each FV.  Here’s two hypothetical systems, but I’ve included the names of real prospects to give a better representation of what I’m talking about. Which top of a system would you take?

Since the way I do my list is based on trade value, the question is: could you get Giolito for Butler, Dahl, McMahon and Toussaint? My inclination is to say you could, but do you think the Nats in real life would make that deal?  If Washington says no, would the motivation be because they’re afraid Giolito could become an 80 FV and make them look bad, or because he’s the type of prospect that fits their market/payroll and overall strategy the best?

Ideally, we’d have a dollar amount asset value for every player to make these computations easier, but it’s near impossible to capture everything in one number for any complicated decision. The problem with basing the lists on trade value is some prospects may never be traded for reasons other than pure value.  So, the tiebreaker of, “would this team do this deal?” may not apply in the most high profile cases.

The other aspect is something that isn’t captured by this rankings grid. For instance, Johnson may be a soft 50 for me and Fedde, Nimmo and Toussaint could all be strong 50s for me, further muddying the waters. Or maybe I’ve only seen Turner play poorly, but other scouts love him, so I think of him as more of a 45, but the industry has him higher, thus the 50 grade.

None of those things in the above paragraph are true but the concepts come up often. There’s obviously limitations of this grid or a general list-based or FV-based approach.  It’s turning my brain to mush and I want you people to solve my problems, so what would you do with decisions like this?