What Is A Prospect?

What is a prospect?

Prospect analysis as an internet activity has been going along for three decades or so now, and yet, “prospect” itself remains a pretty confounding term, when you think about it. In its most basic sense, the word means “minor league player,” so all 4500-ish minor leaguers who haven’t exhausted their MLB rookie eligibility are prospects. Practically, though, the word means something more specific, right? Like, we call low-end minor leaguers “non-prospects,” implying they don’t really have a prospect of making the big leagues. But the line between “prospect” and “non-prospect” or “org guy,” “project,” “suspect,” “filler,” “longshot,” etc. is a weird, hazy one, and different people will draw it in different places.

This might seem like a semantic nitpick, and maybe it is. But it underscores a lot of the challenges prospect writers and their audiences have in creating and parsing discourse about minor league baseball players. One analyst might call an organization’s 50th-most promising player a “solid prospect” and another might call the same player an “decent organizational guy” and not actually disagree on anything about the player. In this piece, I want to talk about the difficulties of packaging nuanced opinions about players into what seem like tidy conclusions, a couple of the ways this is often handled, and what my own approach to the “prospect” label is, so that future analysis I do will have clear context.

Variance and Future Role

One key challenge of projecting prospects is that inherently, their development has quite a wide probability distribution. There is no player who is guaranteed–or even particularly likely–to fit into one exact role in the major leagues, neither falling short of success in that role nor graduating to a more prominent one. The only class of players who kind of fell into such a bucket historically, low-slot lefty specialists, are now much more variable with the three-batter minimum rule. But it generally isn’t satisfying to say that, for instance, Tyler Soderstrom has a 1-in-5 chance to be a middle-of-the-order bat while staying at catcher, a 1-in-5 chance to be a middle-of-the-order bat but move off catcher, a 1-in-7 chance to catch but only be an adequate MLB hitter, a 1-in-7 chance to be a #6/#7-type hitter and play third base or right field, and whatever the rest is–a 32% chance, I guess–of running into whatever attrition and not really making an impact.*

*This is just an example I made up; it does not constitute my actual opinion of Soderstrom.

There are good reasons we don’t tend to articulate these sorts of convoluted probability distributions in actual prospect discourse. For one thing, if you’re going to, you’d want to actually have worked through a lot of the stats behind prospect development. How often do prospects meet their “upside?” How often do prospects of a particular tier, at a particular developmental stage, bust entirely? And so forth. If you’re gonna get mathematically complex, you’ve got to have thought through the math, which most evaluators–myself included–haven’t.*

*Rigorously, I mean. Obviously, good evaluators have a clear sense of the general distribution, but it’s the nuances–are the chances of Soderstrom being an elite bat 14% or 18%? We’re a lot more likely to leave it at “there’s a real chance.” For most purposes, that’s good enough.

And of course, the audiences of prospect writing–dynasty baseball players, minor league savvy fans, card collectors, etc.–are going to have a harder time acting on a heavily-qualified projection of a player than something simple like “Soderstrom looks the part of a bigtime run producer, but likely ends up moving to 1B.” Almost paradoxically, the more nuanced the evaluation gets, the more unsure of itself it seems to sound. Qualifying almost all outcomes as possible for almost every prospect also makes the evaluator themselves a lot harder to evaluate, and can be seen as kind of dodging accountability–”yeah, this player I said might be great turned out to be a bust, but look, I said, there was a 20% chance of that happening.”

So I get why we do this kind of summative reduction. Soderstrom is talked about by most as something like Carlos Santana, even though we all know there’s a chance he turns out to be Paul Konerko and a chance he turns out to be Daric Barton (to pick a range of C-turned 1Bs).

Where the problems come in is that if I just say “A likely outcome for Soderstrom is Carlos Santana’s career,” you don’t know where on the probability distribution that is. Do I mean that Santana is Soderstrom’s 50th percentile outcome? Is Santana the best outcome that’s still relatively likely (so, maybe 85th percentile)? Or is he the 50th percentile of all non-attrition outcomes (and then, what counts as attrition)? All three of these are relatively common mental defaults for how to peg a player’s future role, but the gap between them can be vast. There are not many players in minor league baseball who have a 50% chance of being starting-caliber MLB players. There are many who have a 15% chance.*

*Let me be clear before proceeding: none of what I’ve been saying or will say is meant as a criticism of prospect analysis at large, which is generally conducted with thought, tact, intelligence, and a ton of hard work. Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel, for instance, wrote an entire freaking book about their methodology, so it’s not as though you can’t work through the meaning of FanGraphs or ESPN prospect lists in impressive detail. I’m just saying that rhetorical choices heavily factor into the framing of any individual analyst’s work, so the same opinion can look very different when articulated by two different people, and differing opinions can likewise look similar, which poses challenges for readers trying to translate between analysts.

Suspicion and Hope

This leads me back to the word “prospect.” As I noted above, the term has a wide variety of meanings–some reserve it for the best of the best minor leaguers and amateurs, some apply it to basically everyone with rookie eligibility, and the majority of followers generally understand the term to be somewhere in the middle, though where exactly may vary. Before turning to this middle viewpoint, I want to talk through the more extreme ones.

There definitely are people who view essentially all minor league baseball players, with the exception of generational phenoms, with suspicion. We’ve all probably heard somebody call into a talk radio show insisting that their favorite team should move top prospects for a veteran rental (or slamming their team for acquiring said prospects), ignorant of their value since they aren’t household names. But it’s not just random talk radio callers who project an innate skepticism of minor leaguers–I’ve witnessed more than one scout ridicule a consensus top 20 prospect live, for instance. The analytics community isn’t without their support of this viewpoint, either–we’ve all heard of TINSTAAPP.

This view is, of course, nonsensical on its face–MLB’s got many future stars playing in the minor leagues as I’m writing this. Somebody has to replace the existing group of players, right?

I’ll never forget a particular interaction I had once like this. I was 19, had been writing about baseball for a year on Bleacher Report, and was waiting at the DMV for something, I don’t remember exactly what. In the inevitable interminable wait, I struck up a conversation with an older gentleman, who must’ve been about 70, who was wearing a Yankees hat. It was about to be the trade deadline of 2009, and we were talking about what the Yankees might do. He suggested trading Jesus Montero, then a top 5 prospect according to most outlets, for someone, I don’t remember who. A decent veteran of some sort. “This minor leaguer, he hasn’t done anything,” he said. Aghast at the notion of trading one of the game’s best prospects for some random veteran, I went about explaining the merits of Montero, his minor league production, the tools he was said to have. This man shook his head, gave a half-smile, and looked over my shoulder, at my dad. “He’s not listening to me,” the man said. “I said, this guy’s a minor leaguer. He hasn’t done anything.”

“I’m not listening to him?” I thought. “Like 2,000 people read my thoughts on minor league baseball players!” Ahh, the power trips of a 19-year-old brain.

Well…guess which person in that conversation was right about Jesus Montero?

In the year before and years immediately following that conversation (i.e., up through 2011 or so), my prospect analysis largely consisted of me closely following minor league performance, adjusting for level and a bit for perceptions of toolsiness/raw talent, and…that was it, pretty much. I mean, I can’t really fault myself–I was a college student with no car who lived almost two hours from any minor league baseball, and I pursued the hell out of gleaning what I could from stats and age–but naturally, the resulting prospect rankings I produced were quite a bit out of step with outlets that, y’know, actually scouted the players (or, at the very least, talked to people who had and leaned heavily on their input).

Granted, this was only 5-7 years after Moneyball, so the idea that the numbers somehow cut through the “biases” of scouting seemed less stupid then than it does now, but still, my system had some weird results. Basically any teenager who carved up A-ball would grade out as a top 20 prospect–Jordan Lyles, Cody Buckel, Jason Knapp, David Holmberg, etc. Finesse performance artists–Eric Surkamp, Tommy Milone, Rudy Owens, and the like–would find a spot comfortably in the top 100. It was less weird with hitters, I suppose, but there was still an emphasis on high-performance wonders (remember Vinnie Catricala’s 2011?!) with no actual accounting for what the underlying skill of the player actually was. Every now and then, I’d put the spotlight on somebody who would end up actually coming through (Brian Dozier and Trevor Rosenthal are two I recall fondly), but there were far more misses than hits.

When the reverse was true, however–when I left a consensus top 50 prospect off my top 100 list–the results were far different. The most notable example I recall was Kyle Drabek, who at one point was cracking a lot of top 10 lists while I wasn’t sure he merited a top 200 inclusion. Other players who were well-regarded by eyeball evaluators who I didn’t like were Will Middlebrooks, Casey Kelly, Jarrod Parker, and Brody Colvin, all of whom didn’t really pan out, for various reasons. Again, sometimes the consensus was right and I was wrong (Nick Castellanos, Starling Marte, and probably most notably Freddie Freeman), but being negative was more right than being positive.

All of which is to say, before we dismiss this prospects-as-suspects view as always being born of shortsigted ignorance, we ought to understand that negativity is right about prospects more often than we’d like to think. Attrition can manifest in a million different ways—struggling to adjust, injuries, stagnation, loss of bat speed/arm speed, mental health, mechanically getting out of whack, etc.—and factoring it in isn’t easy. I think that in particular, prospect analysis often is framed in that sort of “50th percentile of non-attrition outcomes” kind of way that I talked about earlier, but also gets interpreted as just “50th percentile outcome.” Consume enough of these forecasts incorrectly, and prospects as a whole seem to be an underperforming group, hence then viewing all of them as suspects. That’s why sometimes scouts can often (superficially) seem so negative–they’ve been burned, and they’ve learned.

So negativity is the most correct attitude. The problem with that, though…well, I’ll let the great Kevin Goldstein explain it (excerpted from a 2021 FanGraphs chat):

We can’t lose sight of where I started this section–someone out there is gonna be good. Find those guys. Ruling them all out might have the highest r-squared, but aside from being no fun at all, it’s totally unhelpful.

So let’s turn to the opposite sort of framing, where just about everyone is a prospect. Again, this kind of attitude is more common than you might think. Talk to enough scouts, and you’re bound to hear the axiom “[every minor league player] is on that field because somebody smarter than you thought he could play. Your job is to figure out why.”

In a minor league world where who’s a prospect and who’s not often seems quite clear, it’s surprisingly easy to find examples of guys who emerged from total obscurity and rose to clear MLB success. Jake Cousins was released by the Nationals, who at the time had maybe the thinnest minor league system in baseball, in mid-2018, with no full-season experience; a year later, he was basically an MLB-ready pitcher, throwing 96-98 with big sink and a plus slider, proving completely unhittable in A-ball. In 2021, he ranked second in all of MLB in contact rate against; batters missed his pitches on over 40% of their swings. Examples abound, and you don’t have to go all the way back to the (tired, but amazing) lore of Mike Piazza, picked in the 62nd round as a favor, to find them–former 36th-round pick Andrew Young slugged .484 in the majors last season as a middle infielder, for instance.

A’s fans should know this well. Guys like Lou Trivino, Chris Bassitt, and Stephen Vogt, who all made massive contributions to Oakland teams over the last decade, were all originally picked after the tenth round of the draft and did nothing statistically in the first few seasons of their minor league careers to make anyone take notice. Mark Canha was, of course, originally acquired as a Rule 5 pick. And heck, I remember encountering Ramon Laureano, fresh off a 16th-round selection by the Astros, as a #8 hitter in their Rookie-Advanced Greeneville lineup, where he was hitting about .180 with no power. I kind of like this guy, I thought. Hustles well, looks like he has a plus…gosh, do I go out on a limb and say 65-grade arm? Bat speed looks okay, maybe enough to get to some power at some point. I think he might surprise people and get to Double-A eventually.

Enough of these stories exist that they are easily weaponized as counters to claims that almost anyone should be written off. “How can you say [random A-ball reliever with poor stats] isn’t a prospect? Look at Chris Bassitt!”*

*Indeed, it might seem hard to believe, but Bassitt was once an A-ball reliever, and not a particularly good one (75/54 K/BB in 2012). At age 23, he was moved to starting late in a mediocre High-A season, and he actually started the very first game I ever saw in Winston-Salem in the two years I lived there. My takeaway from that game: “Who the heck thought moving this low-slot guy with this silly 69 mph curve into the rotation was a good idea?”

The weaponizing of these counterexamples, numerous though they may be, is nevertheless tiresome. Remember what we established above: negativity is going to be the most right. It’s not unfair to look at the bulk of the players in any given minor league system as extreme longshots who it’s foolish to pencil into future big league rosters.

Still, I don’t think the casual minor league follower, who tracks prospect lists, the statistics of the players in their favorite team’s system, or what not, necessarily appreciates how little separates even the most fungible organizational players from MLB relevance. As an illustrative example, allow me to use former A’s minor leaguer Leudeny Pineda, the first pitcher cut from minor league camp in 2022.

When Pineda was released, my first reaction was “I’m surprised he lasted this long.” The Dominican-born righthander was the rare draftee from a for-profit college, ASA University in South Florida, in the 26th round in 2018. Already 22.5 years old when he made his pro debut in the Arizona complex, Pineda didn’t impress, walking as many batters as he struck out and posting a 7.32 ERA in a league where opposing batters were on average nearly three years younger than he was.

By all accounts, Pineda was a good clubhouse presence and a hard worker, which no doubt played a role in his making it through 2019 cuts. Obviously a low-priority guy, he was then deployed to whatever affiliate needed a pitcher, making a spot start in High-A and otherwise shuttling between repeating Rookie ball as a starter and serving as a swingman in the now-sadly-defunct New York-Penn League. He was actually fairly effective in those Rookie ball starts, now about four years older than his average opponent, but was still hit around a ton when he faced anyone above that level.

Yet Pineda still survived in 2020, which is especially impressive considering the following year brought the contraction of the minor leagues, and thus, organizational rosters. He didn’t break camp with a team when minor league play finally resumed in 2021, but in mid-June, he was assigned to High-A Lansing as a 25-year-old middle reliever. That season brought Pineda’s best performance, especially when accounting for age, as he actually struck out over a batter per inning and allowed less than a hit per inning (against batters only three years younger than him). Even so, control issues (24 walks, 6 HBP, 6 wild pitches in 40 innings) doomed the hurler to a 5.45 ERA. Pineda’s March release thus presumably ended his affiliated minor league career at a 6.03 ERA (7.39 RA/9) in 112 innings, mostly in relief, against batters on average 3 ½ years younger than he was. Other than guys who have the yips or something, it’s hard to find too many three-year minor league careers that are less impressive on the stat sheet.

I watched almost all of Pineda’s outings from last season on the milb.tv feed, and…yeah, he wasn’t great. He’s a shortish righty with a bulky, almost catcher-type build, and he didn’t appear to have much athleticism, struggling to repeat an awkward, pinwheeling delivery and getting well-below-average extension to the plate. He’s primarily a fastball-slider guy, and neither pitch grades out as plus.

But the image his performance generates is that of a guy just throwing complete slop out there, and that’s not a fair characterization of Leudeny Pineda either. As a starter in 2019, he mostly sat in the 89-91 mph range with his fastball, but with the Lansing bullpen last season, he more regularly sat 92-93, touching 95, and showing solid armside run courtesy of his low three-quarters slot. The slider, like I said, wasn’t plus, but it showed solid tilt and could generate some swings and misses when located well. The delivery wasn’t pretty, but it was deceptive.

How many big league relief pitchers are there whose skillsets are (more or less) encapsulated by the previous paragraph? There is, practically speaking, a relatively small difference between Pineda and, say, the Angels’ Austin Warren, who was born a week after Pineda and has reached the majors with a very similar arsenal despite less-than-stellar walk numbers of his own. Of course, there is a difference between the two pitchers, and it explains how Warren is a big leaguer and Pineda spent his career struggling in the low minors. But if I were to take Pineda’s 50 best pitches from 2021 and make a highlight video of them with no context, even if you knew the pitcher in question was 25, you’d be forgiven for thinking he had a chance to hang in against MLB hitters. As the scouts say, somebody smart saw this. It didn’t work out, but you can see why the A’s took a shot on the guy.

Pineda’s a convenient example, but he’s not a cherrypicked one. The number of players on full-season minor league rosters that are straight-up zero-percent-chance guys who wouldn’t sniff a 40-man roster spot even with seismic improvements are few and far between. They exist: in the A’s system last year, I’d maybe submit catcher Cooper Uhl, who slugged .195 as a 23-year-old in A-ball, and reliever Brandon Withers, who turned 27 last year, sits 87-90 mph, and had poor enough command to uncork 13 wild pitches in 55 High-A innings, as two examples. Uhl’s a good defensive catcher–maybe he’ll go into minor league coaching–and Withers has a 55-grade breaking ball that he throws over half of the time, and both are by all accounts very good teammates, so I get why they’ve been pro ballplayers, too. Players can contribute value to organizations without ever coming close to the big leagues.

Uhl and Withers are the rarities, though. The fact is, most guys in full-season ball have some kind of MLB analog and/or would become interesting prospects if they randomly pick up 2 mph or make a meaningfully helpful mechanical or approach change.* This was one of the most striking things to me about when I started to going to minor league games in 2012–I had expected that the good prospects would hugely stand out, flanked by a bunch of mid-80s pitchers,** guys who threw heat with no discernible offspeed offering, guys with painfully slow bats, fatally undisciplined hitters, and inept defenders. Nope: 95+% of guys taking the field–at least, once you get out of Rookie ball, where things are admittedly dicier but the players are also younger and thus have more variability–are guys for whom a careful inspection will yield a good reason why somebody smart thought they could play.

*Of course, the odds of these kinds of significant leaps happening decrease with age, so weirdly, there are actually more players who are easy to rule out of MLB futures in the upper minors than there are in A-ball.

**Mid-80s seemed less outlandish expectation in 2012 then than I’d guess it does now.

Defining “Prospect”

All of this is to say that both of these extremes of framing–everyone’s a suspect, and everyone’s got a shot–can actually be grounded in some important realities of prospect evaluation. There are no guarantees that Tyler Soderstrom, Nick Allen, Shea Langeliers, etc. are going to produce positive WAR figures at the MLB level, and it would only be so surprising to see guys who don’t even appear on FanGraphs’ 2022 A’s prospect list–which goes some 60+ players deep, including the honorable mentions–accomplish that feat. It would only take so much of a leap for JJ Schwarz to become a solid backup catcher, or for Bryce Conley to emerge as a solid reliever, or for Chase Calabuig to be a versatile lefty bat off the bench, or for Angello Infante to hang in as a junkballing fifth starter. None of those guys are they-should’ve-been-on-the-list kind of sleepers, either–you could apply the same logic to another few dozen players in Oakland’s or any other system. Someone in that group of guys–the 51st to 100th best minor leaguers in a system or so–is likely to emerge. Good luck guessing who, but someone.

The problem, of course, is that the actual truth behind these points of view can easily be obscured by the rhetorical force of the pessimism or optimism that undoubtedly frames analysis that emanates from them, especially because it’s compounded by the pressure to summarize the probability distribution by referencing some sort of most likely outcome. If you come at prospect analysis from the pessimistic angle, you’re probably using something like a 50th percentile projection. Since most prospects have at least a 25% chance* of outright attrition, the 50th percentile is going to sound low. Tyler Soderstrom is a top 40 prospect–he’s just going to be Yonder Alonso? Conversely, the optimistic approach is going to focus on something more like the best foreseeable version of the player. Sure, Jordan Diaz ranks 37th on FanGraphs’ A’s prospect list, but you could see how maybe he could develop 20-homer power without striking out much and find some non-1B position** to hang in at, like if 2021 Jesus Aguilar could play a Yandy Diaz-level 3B. Saying he “projects” to such a role, if meant this way, means something more like “If he works out, his skillset would probably end up looking like this,” not “This is the most likely outcome for his career.” Ignoring this top twenty percent of outcomes for a player like Jordan Diaz is as foolish as ignoring the bottom twenty percent of outcomes for Tyler Soderstrom.

*To get this figure, I just looked at a few old top 40 lists from like a decade ago. 10/40 more or less busting (say, career 1.0 WAR or lower) seemed about the norm.

**Psst, A’s. Ever thought about trying Diaz at catcher? He’s got the body, hands, and arm for it, and boy would that solve the “not sure he has enough secondary skills to fit in a corner” problem. Seems to be working for Jonah Bride…alas, how many catchers does one org need…

All of which brings me, at last, back to where I started. What is a prospect?

Practically speaking, most analysts probably use the term to apply to somewhere between 250 and 2000 players, so somewhere between 8 and 70 per organization. This sort of works similarly to Hall of Fame discussion, where you have analysts who are “big hall” or “small hall.” Below the tier of “prospects,” you move to your “organizational guys” and then your “filler guys” or “non-prospects.” The question is where and how that line gets drawn, and thus what any individual analyst’s use of the word actually signifies.

Generally speaking, I tend to fall more on the “big” side of the ledger, which probably doesn’t surprise anyone familiar with my old work. As a rough estimate, I’d say the A’s have…maybe 65 prospects, something like that. That’s not really out of step with a lot of places like FanGraphs and Prospects Live, so it’s hardly an uncommon area to draw the line.

But what does the line actually represent? For me, it’s actually pretty simple: A prospect is a player who doesn’t need anything unusual to happen in order to provide more value than a replacement player at some point in their career.

The word “unusual” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that definition, I know. Inherently, anyone hitting their 90th percentile projection is going to have taken an unusual path to get there, right? Well…sort of.

I find it kind of useful, when I’m sorting through my thoughts on a player, to work backward. Imagine that Future You, from, say, seven years in the future, tells you that the player in question has had some measure of MLB success. Is your reaction “How’d that happen?” Or is it “Oh, okay, I can see how that happened?”

Take the young pitcher the A’s sent to Chicago in the Andrew Chafin deal last year, Daniel Palencia. He was put in that trade essentially as a lottery ticket. Palencia throws very hard–up to 99 at times–and shows some feel for spinning a curve, but that’s about it. He didn’t sign until he was 20 and then the pandemic happened, so he was very raw for a 21-year-old at the time of the trade, showing very little feel for pitching. Palencia’s long, uncoiling delivery isn’t conducive to consistency, and he’s basically the definition of a “thrower.” Still, if Future Me came down and said Palencia was a successful big league hurler in 2029, I’d have no trouble piecing how that probably came together. He probably moved to the bullpen, went stretch-only, got to fringe-average command, held his velocity, and improved the breaking ball a bit. That’s all within the normal range of development. It’s still a really nice outcome for Palencia; to do that, he’s got to dodge all sorts of potential hurdles. But the path for him to become a big league pitcher is still quite clear. Palencia is a prospect.

For a counterexample, consider A’s Triple-A mainstay Parker Dunshee. Dunshee is a longtime favorite of the more statistically-oriented prospect watchers–he started his career with an absurd 38 ⅓-inning scoreless streak in short-season ball, and continued to dominate opponents through Double-A, only struggling when he got to the admittedly impossible-for-pitchers environment of Triple-A Las Vegas. Never a big stuff guy, Dunshee carved up the low minors with impeccable command of a four-pitch mix, headlined by a solid cutter in the mid-80s. His fastball parks in the 88-91 mph range, albeit with some backspin up in the zone, and he’ll also toss in a decent changeup and occasional curve. He’s got a clean delivery that allows him to spot his pitches well, but it doesn’t offer any distinctive elements that would make you think there’s a lot of deception adding to the quality of his stuff. Dunshee is 27.

If Future Me tells me Dunshee is a solid big league pitcher five years from now, I’d have trouble knowing how it happened. Did he…gain 3 mph all of a sudden? That would probably be enough to do it, given his command. Did he come up with some new plus pitch that he could lean on heavily as a reliever or something? Did he just turn out to have Kyle Hendricks-level command? Did…the stuff just magically work anyway, somehow? If the latter, the only current MLB righty starter comparison other than Hendricks himself would be his teammate, Alec Mills, which…I guess maybe Dunshee could be Alec Mills?

Each of these things is possible, for sure, but at this point, it’s hard to anticipate them (for me; certainly, others may have good reasons for optimism about Dunshee that I don’t see), so, for me, Dunshee is a nice organizational pitcher, not a “prospect.” For me, that’s what the word is about: Can I easily visualize how this player could turn into a helpful big leaguer, or does his big league relevance only happen if the player has positive development that couldn’t be reasonably anticipated?

Elasticity and Durability

Naturally, even with a clear distinction of what a prospect is, some challenges still remain in sticking to a clear methodology. The biggest one, which I want to discuss here, is that of how permanent these categories are. If Parker Dunshee suddenly is sitting 92-93 in his next start, does he immediately become a prospect? What if Daniel Palencia’s velocity falls to 92-93–is he immediately no longer a prospect?*

*Of course Palencia still is, because we’d all think he’s hurt (bad though that may be, too). But you get my point.

On one hand, it does nobody any good to hard-headedly stick to rankings without good reason. The thing I find most profoundly wonderful about baseball is that even though we can precisely quantify the current ability of players more than we can in almost any other team sport (that I know of), players have an incredible ability to make adjustments that can render those detailed statistical histories and insights almost meaningless at a moment’s notice. Every day, a handful of professional baseball players do something that will prove to meaningfully change the trajectories of their careers–some positively and some negatively, unfortunately. This, of course, leads to all sorts of weird and unique career paths. Winning Rookie of the Year is no guarantee of stardom, and being a minor leaguer through age 29 doesn’t rule out future All-Star appearances. Part of the exhilaration of following the sport and attempting to make sense of it is trying to figure out who just made those critical adjustments and who might be next to make them. Pretending that everything somehow stays static, even over a couple of months, is untenable.

At the same time, you can’t be a prisoner of the moment. Remember what I said about Leudeny Pineda earlier. If everyone’s got some rough facsimile of a workable skillset, then of course everyone will have their moments from time to time. Pineda had some outings last year where he would show solid command of the slider and sit up near 94 mph, but it would make no sense to watch one of those appearances and declare him a prospect for the next three days, only to go right back to calling him a filler guy after the next three-walk, one-out performance. There has to be a level of stability.

For me, it’s harder for a player to gain prospect status than to lose it. The logic here is simple–once a player shows a skillset that opens the clear path to MLB competence that I used to define what a prospect is, it takes a while for that path to close, even if the player subsequently struggles. Take famed Royals prospects MJ Melendez and Nick Pratto, who suffered through abysmal 2019 seasons but then both essentially doubled their slugging percentages despite moving up levels when minor league baseball returned in 2021. Naturally, the 2019 season significantly blunted the prospectdom of the duo, who were among Kansas City’s most highly-touted farmhands prior to that year, but the struggles didn’t erase their prospect status entirely, and for good reason.

This durability of the “prospect” designation is, to me, one of its most foundational features, and serves as an important sanity check. Nobody is a prospect for a week, or a month, or even a couple of months–once they’ve done enough to really open the possibility of a significant MLB role down the line, that possibility ought to stay afloat for awhile. So I like to ask myself the question, “If this guy struggles (skills-wise, performance-wise, or both) for the next calendar year, what will I think then?”

The players whom this kind of method is going to regard most suspiciously are so-called “performance prospects:” guys who put up good numbers in the minor leagues, but lack loud tools or stuff. Let me be clear here: as I talked about earlier, I started out doing prospect analysis mostly based on statistics, and analytics were a lot of what got me especially interested in baseball in the first place. In my two decades of minor league baseball fandom, I’ve followed A’s prospects and gotten excited from afar about plenty of performance guys, from Shane Bazzell to Michael Madsen to Ben Hornbeck to Conner Crumbliss to especially current A’s hitting coach Tommy Everidge (to say nothing of the countless performance prospects from other organizations I took an interest in).

The problem with performance prospects is that, well, their prospect status is entirely conditional on their performance. The A’s, for instance, are an organization that, for decades, has drafted lots of polished college pitchers who quickly tear through A-ball with gaudy strikeout numbers. The aforementioned Hornbeck, Anthony Capra, Mitchell Jordan, Drew Granier, Brendan Butler, Evan Manarino, Matt Milburn, on and on the list goes. By and large, all of these guys–most of whom were mid or late-round college picks, would get up to Midland and lose their statistical excellence, settling in as upper-minors depth starters, if that. Manarino’s 2016 statline–in 150 innings, he struck out 121, walked just 28, allowed just one home run (!) and posted a sterling 1.98 ERA between Beloit and notoriously hitter-friendly Stockton–is excellent enough to make one think, from afar, “Hey, sure, this guy is said to throw just in the upper-80s, but who’s to say he can’t make this work? There are some MLB lefties who throw that slow, so why not Manarino?” Then, of course, the next year he went to Midland, and in 26 ⅔ innings, he allowed 45 hits (including 4 homers), and got pasted to an 8.10 ERA. Already 24 years old at that point, that brief struggle is enough to make one go “Okay, yeah, wow, I guess this finesse arsenal is indeed too hittable to make him a viable big leaguer. Oh well.”

So Manarino was never a prospect.* That doesn’t mean he didn’t become a really interesting organizational guy for a bit there–that 2016 season really was something, once every couple years somebody like him gets to have Brent Suter’s career, and if he had somehow found a way to throw a bit harder, his command might have given him a real shot to fit in a Cole Irvin-style backend lefty role. If you squinted hard enough in 2016, you could see it. But again, that’s true of most organizational players, right down to the poorly-performing 25-year-old A-ball relievers.

*I actually don’t know a ton about Manarino–I only saw him very briefly on milb.tv in 2016 or 2017, which was immediately after I stopped writing about/following baseball and I was pretty disconnected from that world. I did follow the A’s system statistically somewhat at the time and read farm system rankings occasionally–he was usually reported to throw 86-88 with decent secondaries, so I’m mostly working off that to make this point. Regardless, even if I’m missing something more specific about Manarino that maybe would make the “prospect” designation somewhat more appropriate in 2016 than I’m indicating here, the general point I’m making here about performance prospects stands.

When you get to guys who have performed in the upper minors, the prospect designation can a bit more viable, especially if the player has accumulated a long track record of performance. But there is no such thing as a low-minors performance “prospect,” other than maybe the oddball Eguy Rosario type who doesn’t have loud tools but hangs in in full-season ball at age 18, where the current skills at such a young age + projection gives the player a higher level of intrigue. Everybody else with interesting numbers but uninteresting tools fails the “What would I think if he struggled for the next year?” test.*

*I don’t think I’ve accidentally implied otherwise, but in case you get the wrong impression here: 24-year-olds in A-ball can *absolutely* be prospects, and for that to be the case, they probably *have* to be performing well at that level–it is obviously difficult to have much trust in an older player who isn’t doing well against younger competition at a level far from the big leagues. What I’m getting at is that for almost all lower-level guys, the prospectdom has to primarily stem from tools/skills they have, not their statistical performance. The performance is, of course, relevant–for one, it will generally indicate what the skillset is with at least a bit of precision. Struggles reveal flaws, success reveals strengths. But there are reasons all those previously-mentioned pitchers hit a wall in Midland and, say, Colin Peluse hasn’t, and those reasons are key to why those other pitchers were all regarded less highly in the midst of their A-ball dominance than Peluse was during the 2021 season. To flesh out how this works more specifically, I’d have to get into more detail about the mechanics of adjustments across promotions, and that will have to be a different article.

Of course, within the broad categories of “prospect” and “organizational player,” any smart analyst is constantly moving guys around. Player development is all about adjustments, and players successfully implement adjustments or unsuccessfully attempt to implement them all the time, and that matters tremendously. To go from being an organizational player to a prospect, though, a player has to have made a meaningful enough adjustment to open up that unsurprising road to the big leagues and held it for a meaningful length of time, say a month or so.

To go from a prospect to an organizational player, the player has to stagnate or regress for a year or perhaps more–most often, the axe comes at the hands of time. It made sense to think Yerdel Vargas had a chance to develop a competent bat to go with his good infield glove when he hit .208 in the complex league as a 17-year-old in 2017. Five years later, he’s a 22-year-old with a career .508 OPS, and it’s simply way less plausible for him to get from his .492 mark last season to some kind of big league offensive competence than there was five years ago (the fact that he’s now deployed almost exclusively at second base, rather than shortstop, doesn’t help). Vargas stayed on prospect lists for awhile, as did fellow highly-touted Dominican signee Marcos Brito: and it was only when they failed to show any offensive progress over three or four seasons that they were moved out of the prospect category, perhaps around the onset of the pandemic in 2020.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this ridiculously long writeup gives some insight into how I think about prospects, and is helpful for contextualizing my thoughts about any particular player. I also hope that I’ve perhaps provided some food for thought about the word “prospect,” its differences in meaning, the differences in the way minor league analysis can be framed, and some of the underlying challenges in both evaluating minor league players and then communicating said analysis.

I’m certainly not here to say I’ve arrived at The One Right Way to think through minor league player evaluation, and am in fact quite certain that there are many people inside and outside the industry who have schemas that are far more intricately developed than mine (again, see for instance the Future Value book). If I actually keep writing about baseball for any length of time, I’m sure some parts of my thinking may change, and perhaps significantly so.

I should emphasize that, as self-assured as my thinking might come across here, I have by no means always approached prospect analysis from the perspective I’ve outlined. A lot of the clarity I have now stems from the fact that I’ve taken a lot of time across these past seven years or so–the time I was pretty disengaged from baseball in general–to reflect on my past analysis. Of course, I reflected on my previous work in the eight years I was writing about baseball, from 2008-2015, as well, but that’s not the same thing. Minor league player analysis is not really something you can judge especially well on a year-to-year basis. If you liked MJ Melendez and Nick Pratto in 2018, 2019 made you look awfully foolish, and then 2021 made you look retrospectively brilliant. When you’re in the heat of content creation, it’s not easy to have the time and space to take a ton of steps back and think through things abstractly from the ground up. But taking seven years? That offers all the time and space one could need: enough to pretty much fully see what analysis proved prescient and what proved imprudent in the short, medium, and long runs.

There are many other nuances in my perspective, and stuff I learned from going to a ton of minor league games from 2012 to 2015 in particular, that inform my analysis. At some future point in this space, I might talk about those at some length as well, but in the interest of not making this a book all on its own, I’m cutting myself off here.