A Study On Organizational Minor League Rankings

 

I've kept it simple. Each prospect is awarded a number of points equal to his overall rating. Corey Seager is worth 70. Exactly ten - yes, ten - Angels' prospects were awarded 40. Totals are divided by 30 to get an average, which is a nice reference to show how teams rank on a scale that no doubt moves by increments every few weeks. There are other ways to award value - 7 points for a 70, 5 points for a 60, -2 for a 40, whatever you like - but I wanted to stay away from arbitrary values.

In the 2016 Hardball Times Annual, Jeff Zimmerman wrote an article that looked at historic scouting grades from the Baseball America top-100 and calculated the subsequent WAR for each specific grade. While everyone can always disagree about how to correctly calculate value, at least this methodology looks at the historical record and comes up with values that are better than arbitrary. And I think it will provide more intuitive results to your work here.

Nice work Jesse... very thought provoking! 

If the historical data exists, I think it would really interesting to make a cross-tab of scouting grades (30, 35, 40, 45, etc.) and ML WAR achievement, including prospect age. How often does the 45 prospect breakout, how often does the 60 prospect fail?

I know the goal of your piece was different, but I think attaching some historical performance figures (in terms of average and distribution) to standard prospect ranking would be interesting. We all get so excited about an A or B prospect, but how much better do they end up than a guy who was given a C as a 20-year old?

Food for thought.... maybe it's already been done too, but given the weight everyone puts on rankings, understanding the margin of error is very important. 

Really cool stuff.

I think keeping to a teams top 30 makes sense. You will likely get noise trying to measure a teams 30th through 50th best prospect and they rarely pan out anyways.

The only suggestion I have is to award more points for players in the 60-70 range. These guys pan out more and are difference-makers. This system suggests two 40's are better than Seager and that is just not a trade the Dodgers consider

Thrylos,

Maybe a happy medium between the number system used and and the exponential system proposed.

Here is a list of all time prospect rankings from two years ago. This is hindsight, but I think it is fair list. Several busts were on here.

If Alex Rodriguez was a 75 or 80, he is clearly more valuable than the Twins 29th and 30th best prospects ( 2 40's). Or you would rather have Rodriguez and 3 40's over 5 40's or even four 50's.

http://espn.go.com/blog/sweetspot/post/_/id/11482/top-50-prospects-of-the-draft-era

Bird,

I agree about the drafting but would contend their draft strategy could have been better.

The biggest issue I have is the amount of early picks we have used on relief pitchers. Pretty staggering of you start about 2007. Lots of supplemental, second, third rounders. It is the cheapest position to fill in FA and to date very few have panned out.

From the Hardball Time Annual article I mentioned above:

Historical WAR value of pre-free agent seasons for BA prospect grades:

80 - 25.0

75 - 18.0

70 - 11.0

65 - 8.5

60 - 4.7

55 - 2.5

50 - 1.1

45 - 0.4

This view is useful, but seriously clouds the value of a stud athlete if he makes it to the major leagues.

 

First, because these career WAR totals reflect both higher per-year WAR accumulation, and longer careers.

 

Second, because you can't put together a winning team by promoting 50 1.0-WAR players to the majors in a season.

 

The constraint of a 25-man roster looms huge, in making grade-60 prospects more valuable than 55-grade. I was being a little flippant in suggesting an actual exponential weighting (and I backed off of it in the next breath). But it's far, far from linear.

Yeah. The Sum of the Twins position players last year was 11.8. Not much more than Mike Trout.

And our pitchers were 16. So that assumes a AA team would win about 55 games (83 games - 28 war).

So in theory, You could take a AA team and give them Trout, Kershaw, and Harper and they could win 83 games.

I understand the issue and more or less agree with you, but with three caveats: first, they weren't using early first-round picks, and once we get down to the 40-50 overall selections, where virtually every prospect has flaws to overcome, it's arguable that picking the occasional flamethrower is a good idea; second, the jury is still out on a lot of these prospects; and third, the KC success story might be telling us that these prospects have been under-valued in the draft.

Yeah, but in the 2008 and 2009 drafts for example, this was before RP's started getting more expensive.  You could sign a set up guy for 2 years in the 4-6m range.  So I don't get why you use the 27th pick on Carlos Gutierrez for example.   Bulock and Tootle 70th and 101st overall. 

If all players in this range are a crap shoot (which they probably are), I would favor a catcher, SS, or starting pitcher so if they do turn out you get more value, harder and more expensive roles to fill, etc.