Prospect rankings and LB performance

[old nurse]

Several years ago there were a couple of articles that stated if your prospect wasn’t in the top 20 the chances of them being a good ajar league player were sli. The internet being what it is, I can’t find the again. People get excited about rankings so I did some looking.. 

MLB.com is the quoted source most often so I used their ranking for the 2013-2017 rankings. It is also free to look at. Ito evaluate success or not, I used WAR. That is generally accepted as a decent measure of play.  Fangraphs says that a 2 WAR player is a solid starter, 3 WAR a good player, 4 or ore have superlatives attached.  The numbers. 4 is an all star level.  The other studies considered only the player’s play up until free agency. That is the accumulated WAR total I used. I did not add or subtract a pitcher’s WAR for batting. In consideration that the 2020 season was involved for most of the players I defined a Star at accumulating 20 WAR,, Good 15, Solid 10.  For pitchers I dropped it down to 9.  The explanation will come later. The WAR totals are from Baseball Reference as it was easier to double check the ranking and service tie.  The patterns for pitchers vers hitters are distinctly different. The results will be posted that way. For the players that had not completed 3 years of service tie and still on the way up, I did not include them  I did not include Ohtani as he was not developed in the minor leagues. I did not include Oscar Tavares because he did not have a chance to play more than one year 

The dismal first. Pitching 132 were ranked at some point in their minor league career.

2 pitchers were at the All Star level

12 were at the solid starter level

18 were solid starters

59 did not even accumulate 9 WAR  

18 dropped out of the rankings and none accumulated enough WAR

10 never made it to the big leagues

13 were given incomplete data

13 pitchers had final rankings in the top 20. 3 rated as good, 6 as solid, 4 as not so good. 

22 pitchers were ranked between 21 and 50 Gerrit Cole, 3 good starters, 3 solid starters 15 as not so goods

Over 20 missed time during their career, as this showed up as blank seasons. Shoulder and UCL repair was the culprit. That tmie for some was non productive in their service time. I looked up news articles on the.m  

The not so good pitchers were not all useless. I did not keep track of the number, I should have, but many were the ones developed as relievers. WAR is not a good ease for a solid or good reliever. I did not want to figure out what defines a solid reliever. Being that very few came up as relievers, I left it alone. Perhaps that would have made the solid pitcher number look better. I did not keep track of it but a lot of the solid pitchers turned in great seasons after season 6. Gausman comes to mind  analysis of why these totals are so low for pitchers will require digging and crunching  On average Fangraphs the last 3 years each year has 20 pitchers at 4 WAR or better, 20 as good, and 35 as solid.  When you look at the 3 years in aggregate, the numbers  drop to 9, 19 and 32.  None of this really has anything to do with the rankings other than showing why the success rates do kind of reflect the rankings.

 19 of the not so good prospects ended up as traded for solid to star players.

To give you a little context, according to baseball reference over 750 pitchers made their professional debut between 2013and 2017 Among them and unranked by MLB.Com  were.Tanner Roark,, Chris’s Bassit, Kyle Hendricks, Edwin Diaz, Sandy Alcantara, Jack Flarety, Jordan Montgomery, Shane Bieber. They missed a few solid to star pitchers 

 

The section on hitters will come later.

[4twinsJA]

A few years ago I read an article, I believe it was from Baseball America. They had done a 10 year study of minor league baseball. I may not be 100% accurate, but their finding were in a given year each club had 30-35 minor league players in their system (excluding players that had already debuted in MLB) that would eventually play at the MLB level, That number dropped to around 13 players that would eventually have at least the equivalent of a 3 year MLB career. It further dropped to around 3 players in each system would end up allstars.

This year there is a 165 player limit in MiLB, down from 180 last year, so 450 less players in MiLB this year compared to last year. However, using study from above, excluding 30 players at AAA, of the 135 at other levels, around 100+ will not even have an at bat or throw a pitch in MLB.

[old nurse]

On 3/6/2024 at 1:35 PM, 4twinsJA said:

A few years ago I read an article, I believe it was from Baseball America. They had done a 10 year study of minor league baseball. I may not be 100% accurate, but their finding were in a given year each club had 30-35 minor league players in their system (excluding players that had already debuted in MLB) that would eventually play at the MLB level, That number dropped to around 13 players that would eventually have at least the equivalent of a 3 year MLB career. It further dropped to around 3 players in each system would end up allstars.

This year there is a 165 player limit in MiLB, down from 180 last year, so 450 less players in MiLB this year compared to last year. However, using study from above, excluding 30 players at AAA, of the 135 at other levels, around 100+ will not even have an at bat or throw a pitch in MLB.

If Bref had service tie for all players it would have been used. They only list it for active mlb players 

[Parfigliano]

On 3/6/2024 at 12:35 PM, 4twinsJA said:

A few years ago I read an article, I believe it was from Baseball America. They had done a 10 year study of minor league baseball. I may not be 100% accurate, but their finding were in a given year each club had 30-35 minor league players in their system (excluding players that had already debuted in MLB) that would eventually play at the MLB level, That number dropped to around 13 players that would eventually have at least the equivalent of a 3 year MLB career. It further dropped to around 3 players in each system would end up allstars.

This year there is a 165 player limit in MiLB, down from 180 last year, so 450 less players in MiLB this year compared to last year. However, using study from above, excluding 30 players at AAA, of the 135 at other levels, around 100+ will not even have an at bat or throw a pitch in MLB.

Sounds right.  Appearing in a MLB game is tough to do.

[Linus]

I did a back of the napkin calculation a while back and posted it. Came out about the same. 6-7% of any group of minor leaguers will make it. The number is much smaller than most people realize which is evidenced by people posting unrealistic prospect outcomes which I have snarkily named prospect puppy love. 
Anyway very interesting info and topic. Thanks for doing it.