Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1815: Better Prospects

Episode Date: February 25, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley are joined by FanGraphs lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen and national writer Kevin Goldstein for a FanGraphs Prospects Week discussion centered on the site’s Top 100 (or Top 114) prospects ranking, touching on the swift fall of MacKenzie Gore, the scarcity of pitchers toward the top of the list, whether […]

But I couldn't resist when my fortune lied Now I'm bound to get rich if I keep from dying Well I keep on chippin' and chippin' away There's a little more gold left here today All I gotta do is just pull it right from the ground Hello and welcome to episode 1815 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Rowley of Fangraphs. Hello, Meg. Hello.

Well, it's been a dismaying week for many reasons, most of which have nothing to do with baseball. Nothing like a literal war to put a labor battle in sports in perspective. So our thoughts are being pulled in many non-baseball directions, which I'm sure is also the case for most of our listeners. And anyone hoping to turn to baseball to distract themselves with the pastoral scenes of spring training is out of luck, thanks to the lockout. So as we speak on Thursday afternoon, there hasn't been much progress in the CBA negotiations as we draw closer to the owner-imposed February 28th deadline to start the season as scheduled,

which we could take some time to bemoan, but there may be just as much to bemoan next time we speak. So we will table that for today, I think, and talk about the future, the wonderful future, which will surely be so much more harmonious both in baseball and the world. We can hope. At least we'll be able to watch Adley Rutschman, we hope. So in the meantime, it's prospect week at Fangraphs, and the prospect people on the staff have been busy pumping out rankings and lists and chats and interviews, which we will be talking about today with two of those people, lead prospect analyst Eric Langenhagen and national writer and Chin Music host Kevin Goldstein.

They are two of the three people, along with Tess Tereskin, whose names are on the 2022 Top 100 Prospects ranking, which, as usual, contains more than 100 prospects. We will get to that. Eric, hello. Huh? And Kevin, hello and huh to you too. 110, 111, 112. Yeah, you're right.

Yeah. One of you messed up somewhere. Maybe it's you, Meg. So many times. You had to edit these things, really. 114. You overshot by quite a bit. We are completists by nature.

What's your level of sleep deprivation? That question goes out to all of you, including Mick. It's better now. I will say we were definitely much further along earlier in our process because it turns out when you have three people writing top 100 blurbs, they are able to get through them at a quicker clip than if it's just one or even two. But there are a lot of little bells and whistles that you have to do to get the top 100 out and all sorts of wild checks that you feel you need to do four or five times. So it was a pretty sleepless night for me going into Wednesday, but I'm a little bit better caught up now because, you know,

we didn't have to release it twice. So I got a good eight hours last night. That was nice. All right. Excellent. I know that Kevin and Eric have gotten tons of rest and exercise in the past week from our pre-recording banter. and exercise in the past week from a pre-recording banter. I was down at 3.30-ish the night before the 100, but it's not like Meg where Meg has to wake up to run the site in the morning again. I just knocked out until I don't know when. I just slept until I didn't need to anymore.

And then last night was another 2.30-ish area. I've been winding down after writing and watching people play Magic the Gathering on Twitch. But yeah, I'll hit a melatonin tonight probably and get back on something resembling a normal schedule. All right. Well, the work has not been in vain. It's right up there on the site for everyone to see tons of great prospect content here. So any number of places we could start, I suppose. I'll just ask big picture, I guess, because Kevin, you are no stranger to producing public prospect rankings, but it's been

a while for you. I know you contributed to Eric's List last year, but that was more of a solo act. And now you're back in the swing of things and you used to go to 101 at BP. Now you've gone to 114 today. And in the interim, you, of course, spent several years working for a major league baseball team. So I wonder how that affected your philosophy when it came to your contributions to this list. Do your lists look different because you were ranking for real world value and you had the inside the team perspective for some time i think there's like eight million reasons why i look at players dramatically different than i did a decade ago i think about i haven't i'll be honest i haven't like looked at lists i published 10 years ago plus but i i imagine if i did there's

a reason i don't because imagine if i did i'd get really upset about it yeah of course i you know i think everybody anybody smart i think hopefully doesn't look at players the way they did a year ago you know hopefully you're always learning and and i just think like in the in the time between me doing lists at basal prospectus and now you know the the biggest change and even the word biggest doesn't really do it justice, just the sea change in the industry is just the data that's now available to us about players, as opposed to previous lists were pure eyeball scouting. And now we have so much data on players, and so much of that data is really important and really telling about what a player can presently

do, that it shapes these lists in a way that's exceptionally different than the way it used to be. I'm curious because in addition to having three of you this year instead of Eric and KG Moonlighting, we also had a really different experience of prospect evaluation in 2022 because we had the benefit of a 2021 season. We'll talk about some of the individual players ranked on the top 100, but just more generally, I'm curious if there are any guys who stand out to you as having particularly benefited from having the 2021 season as a period of both evaluation and data generation as you guys were compiling this year's top 100.

Man, specific to the to the hundred if anything there were more players who were who were probably hurt by the fact that they missed a year and then came back and then we actually saw what they looked like again uh mckenzie gore comes to mind where you know the inverse of that is true but there were just you know there's no way of knowing except for making a dramatic inference based on the fact that the Padres promoted Ryan Weathers right instead of Mackenzie Gore from the alt site in 2020 when they desperately needed pitching like that was just an indication that something was wrong you know and then there were lots of players who came out and it turned out that

that things like that were true then you had the guys who like Gabriel Moreno with the Blue Jays had a short exceptional track record leading into the year and then had more or less a full season to produce at the upper levels and reinforce confidence that not only that they were good, but that they were very, very good, like belonged up here toward the top of the list good. Noel V. Marte is another one seattle where spent 2019 in the dsl seattle handled julio rodriguez pretty conservatively in this manner initially and then

did the same thing with marta where you know even though he was physically mature for a player his age he was down in the dsl in 19 and so we didn't really have a long stateside look at him until 2021. And he performed as a teenage shortstop in full season ball. Big, strong guy with huge power. So there are definitely those players whose pro careers would have started during an otherwise lost season. The college hitters from the 2019-2020 draft classes, basically, where performance is a big part of the way they're viewed. And then they didn't have an opportunity to do that until 2021. Yeah, I think maybe like on a positive side, an example that comes to mind for me is Brandon Williamson, who's in the low 60s on our list with Seattle. And this was kind of a pop-up guy

in the 2019 draft, who was like a cold weather kid uh transferred to tcu it was a weekend starter after lodolo so everybody got to see him and you know big left-hander through heart but he also really really intriguing pitch data like it looked really interesting had a really good debut and then we just lost 2020 obviously and then he had a phenomenal 2021 in terms of strikeout rate and it wasn't it feels like he's suddenly like this out of nowhere guy, when in reality, it's just kind of a delayed proof of concept. And I think we have quite a few of those kind of players as well. I didn't intend to start off by talking about someone who is not one of the top 100 prospects in baseball or the top 114, but Eric.

If you ask about Michael Harris, I'm just going to say, okay. Maybe later. But Mackenzie Gore, you just mentioned, Eric, and I was looking back at your list from last February, which was topped by Wanda Franco, followed by Mackenzie Gore, and then Adley Rutschman. We know what happened to Wanda Franco. He made it to the majors and was incredible. We know what happened to Adley Rutschman. He is your number one prospect of 2022. Spoiler. You know what happened to Adley Rutschman. He is your number one prospect of 2022. Spoiler. Mackenzie Gore is not on the list. And I wonder whether that has happened before, that sort of swift fall in the absence of a graduation or some kind of catastrophic injury for someone to go from number two to not on the list. That is quite unusual, I would think.

So what's the outlook for him now? And can you think of any comps for that kind of year-to-year change? Yeah, I don't know. I think that the thing that changed is just our willingness to move off of pitchers, especially who start to take on this trajectory more quickly. Because I think like that I wish I had done it earlier with AJ Puck. I wish I had done it earlier with AJ Puck I wish I had done it earlier with Forrest Whitley I wish I had done it earlier with Brendan McKay who and we're talking about injury for the most part with those other guys I think I saw Mackenzie Gore as much as any other pitcher I saw during the course of 2021 he was in the mix for the list

throughout the entire process he moved to the to the back of the list throughout the entire process. He moved to the back of the list in season last year. And then we sit down and we do a thing called distribution charts, where we basically sit and plot out what we think the probability of a player falling anywhere along the 2080 continuum would be. And Mackenzie Gore was like pulled off to the side with a bunch of other players who we just didn pulled off to the side with a bunch of other players who we just didn't want to think about with relation to the other players. Royce Lewis, Sixto Sanchez, guys who have been hurt a bunch. And we were just going to gut check where we thought they belonged at the very end of the process. And as we sit and worked on Mackenzie

Gore's distribution, just based on what he has looked like now for the last two years, just based on what he has looked like now for the last two years, most of our distribution fell into the 40, 45, maybe a 50 range, rather than someone who we felt like the middle of their outcomes was a 50, which is ideally what you'd want someone to be, someone who's reached the upper levels of the minors. We want to have a better idea of what that guy is. There were reasons to move off of Gore, again, based on the inference from the 2020 season that something was not right and that was sufficient

for him just not to be the second prospect in baseball. The Padres were generating literally no data from their alt site, which was at the University of San Diego. There wasn't even a track man unit there. So there was like no way of knowing. They opted out of the video sharing. There was no way of knowing what Mackenzie Gore looked like, really. But, you know, he has relied on command. When he was the best pitcher in the minors in 2019, it was because he commanded a huge fastball, like mid-90s with carry, Clayton Kershaw type of fastball,

and then a bunch of okay secondary pitches and four good pitches with a monster fastball in command from the left side like that's a really good pitcher and whether he just lost feel or you know was in the weight room too much and stiffened up like some of that stuff maybe subjectively to my eye looks like it could be true and maybe there's a way to like he could do Bikram yoga or something. And like some of that will come back and then maybe he would, you should still be on the hundred, but based on the way he has looked, it is a relief risk fit without obviously great secondary stuff, which just puts him behind the Brandon Williamson's of the world. Yeah. And just a broader point on pitchers. this has to be one of the things one is Shane Boz of the Rays

at number 11, who's already made the majors. Of course, you have three pitchers in the top 20 prospects or the top 23 for that matter, four in the top 25 or top 26. I mean, I guess that is a reflection of a few factors, right? It's the way pitchers are used now that just makes any individual pitcher kind of inherently less valuable just because of the innings totals that you're getting out of any one guy these days. And then I think there's probably also a greater recognition of the risk. Not that everyone is pulling a Mackenzie Gore, but injury risk, of course, is higher for pitchers than position players. And we've certainly seen that reflected in the majors. So is that what it is? I mean, there are ways to evaluate pitchers now that are maybe more telling

than the tools that we had a decade ago, but it does seem like that's been a philosophical change. Eric and I talked about this on this week's Chin Music. Coming Friday morning as your favorite podcast provider. And part of it is what you just said. I do think, like, we have an imbalance right now in terms of the quality of position player prospects versus the quality of the pitching prospects. It's playing a role as well. It's not just a philosophical thing. But there's so much kind of unknown about pitching prospects to this day. And that's part of that's with the way they're being developed.

And I don't think they're being developed wrong. But I do think it's a product of things where, you know, for every one of these guys, guys you know if you think a guy's going to be a starting pitcher in the big leagues there's still this open question of like can they take the bump 32 times and throw 180 innings right and that answer is is unknown for everyone on this list because they've never done it you know and and and they're never going to do it until they try to do it in the big leagues and that's just because of how pitchers are developed and there's just the additional kind of concept like you talked about of how like you know the most glaring example is how the rays use starters and you know how the rays use starters is going to be how a lot of teams start to use

starters you know and i think we are going to become far more comfortable with the four and five inning start and it's harder to kind of accumulate value that way and so i think those are two factors here but i really do think the overwhelming reason for the imbalance right now is just because there's so many so many more really good position player prospects than pitching right now and you know i don't think this is going to be a trend that continues. I'm sure the next list or some in the next three years will have far more pitchers in the top 40 than this year's. I want to stick on pitchers for a second and specifically talk about Sixto Sanchez, who we have ranked at 80 right now, and I think is maybe a good entry point to talking about how the idea of fastball shape has started to alter

prospect evaluation. So, you know, folks who are familiar with 6-0 will know that he really lights up the radar gun, sits in the upper 90s, but you guys have consistently sort of dinged him for the shape of his fastball, not really letting it play to the extent that you would think based on the velocity. So how has fastball shape started to alter the way that you line guys up on this list? And are there prospects who you think in a prior era might have gotten juiced here just because of how hard they throw, but where we're looking now at the pitch data and saying, oh, this isn't going to play as well as the velocity might imply? So yeah, this is common now. I think that most

of the big pillar publication prospect writers have made this adjustment now where working on sourcing the data that Kevin talked about at the top, which in a way is like for our purposes, it is more relevant that we have the ability to like source that data than the ability to parse that data, which is an interesting like media specific dynamic. But yeah, Sixo Sanchez, the axis of his fastball and the axis of Mark Appel's fastball are the same. And so for much of the same reason that Mark Appel was always very frustrating, even though he was humming it in there 94 to 96, is because his fastball just doesn't have real action on it. Fastballs that have backspin and approach the plate at a flat angle

have carry, like that optical illusion that they are rising because they are fighting gravity by spinning the way that they do. And the angle of the pitch impacts how or whether or not a hitter can like get on top of it, quote unquote, right? Like that's not actually what's happening, but the hitter is telling his brain to try to do that. Right. Because otherwise he'll swing underneath of it.

And so six-nose fastball has never quite played the way you think it would play because it's like 97-101. And at some point, like hard is just hard and it still makes a difference. But 200 innings a year, 180 innings a year, he hasn't been able to do that portion of it yet either. So, you know, these pitchers who get hurt, they tend to keep getting hurt. Or the pitchers who tend to have injuries are the ones, like, who you look back and they've had a bunch of injuries. Right.

And whether it's James Caprellian or Sixto Sanchez, just the rate of attrition with pitchers is just very high. And so that's sort of factored in addition to the suboptimal shapes. And Sixto is great. Like, he does other stuff. He's on our 100. Right. He's on the 100.

It's not like he's a bad pitcher or anything. But yeah, this factors up and down, not just the 100, but all the prospect lists, like up and down the team lists. This is a thing that we're sensitive to. And the fastball utility and playability is a big part of why guys do or don't succeed. Let's talk about the top guy. Number one, Adley Rutschman of the Orioles. You have him with a 70 future value.

And as you noted in your blurb, you could have gone higher. You do have three guys in the tier just below at a 65 on the 20 to 80 scale. Bobby Witt Jr., Grayson Rodriguez, and Julio Rodriguez. I know some other publications have considered those other guys in the top spot or even ranked one of those guys in the top spot. I'm with you on your rationale for Rutschman at number one, but was there any serious discussion of anyone else? And if not, what was it that sort of catapulted Rutschman above the other three? Not really. There wasn't really any discussion. It's kind of right there in the FVs in the sense that Rutschman kind of stands alone at a 70. And to be fair, he's not the perfect prospect.

He's not an 80. And when you think about all the people that the three of us spoke to for this list, it probably reaches triple digits. It certainly wasn't unanimity that this guy's the number one guy, but it was very much a consensus. And he might not hit for as much power as some people think at the end of the day. And the other thing that I think it's really important to talk about is just that, and I think this goes for almost anybody who's a number one prospect, you should still bet against them being a face of the franchise yearly MVP candidate. That's still probably, that's not the most likely outcome, even if you're a number one prospect,

right? And so, but there's so much kind of safety to what he does. Like if Adley Rushman disappoints the public, it hits 275 with 25 bombs, walks in plus defense. He's a six win player, you know? And so all of a sudden the chances for kind of failure here, if you will, are really low. I think he's at least going to be a star, and he might be more than that. And there's so many ways he can create value that I think that's why it was kind of clear to us as a group that he was number one. Yeah, the three of us at least were resolved very quickly. We really did not spend a lot of time discussing it.

Yeah, if anything, there was some consideration given to making him an 80, right? At least when we were doing the Orioles list. Right. Yes. And we asked ourselves if that was feasible just based on the grind of catching. It's pretty likely during the course of Rutschman's career here that he has years of down offensive performance just because his hand, like his wrist gets hit by a foul ball one day. Like it's just, that happens pretty frequently to catchers. And they tend to play less than someone who's just playing shortstop every day, right? So there were reasons not to do it. The reasons when you compare him to Wander Franco, the only guy who we've, who we've AD'd,

where there just was enough of a gap there. There was daylight between those two, such that, yeah, we didn't think that an 80 belonged on Adley. But the other, the guys behind him in the 65 tier, we did have discussions about how they should line up. And, you know, at one point, Rodriguez, both of them were 60s. We had Bobby Witt as a 65 in a tier of his own early on in

the process and then decided to move the other two in as it went on. Yeah. And I know that we have some questions about the catching position in general, which is something that Tess Troskin wrote about this week. And as that relates to Rutschman, he's a great defensive catcher as well as a great hitter. And he is known for his framing, which, of course, is something that Meg and I enjoy. And I think Baseball Prospectus' rationale or part of their rationale for putting Witt ahead of him was just that they were projecting changes in the way catching works, right? And RoboZone's coming, presumably, at some point in Rutschman's career, possibly soon in Rutschman's career. And the idea that, well, he just won't be able to provide as much value if that dimension is taken away. Is that something that you factored in or are you just sort of projecting the way that baseball works now? And are you saying that even if that is taken away, that he would still be possibly worthy of being the number one guy? Well, I think if that's taken away, he's still very much worthy of being the number one guy. I also think, and I understand, and obviously,

the teams are talking about this as well, that when we do end up with robo-umps, that obviously the framing aspect goes away in terms of the value that a catcher can provide at the same time i think there has been a bit of a shift uh within the industries to the value of framing not that it's not valuable but i think teams have you know realized that they were way overvaluing it in some ways and i think the other thing to talk about is just the robo-on concept which is i don't think this is coming next year i don't think this is coming in two years and and well it's it's good that it's being tested in real world situations, the basic outcome, the basic reaction so far has been,

this is really interesting, but it's not really ready for prime time. And so I don't think we're necessarily looking at a situation where robo-umps, I think they're still very much kind of on the horizon as opposed to right in front of us. It's an interesting thought, and for sure it applies to the way we think about catching in general, especially the catchers at the lower levels. And you could literally quantify, like there is just minor league, not that we have access to, we'd have to, again, source it from someone with a front office.

You could just see how many runs Adley Rutschman's framing was worth in 2021 and yeah, adjust what you'd expect his annual award to be based on just lopping that off of his profile in some ways. But I agree with Kevin that I think this is further down the line, that there were real issues with the consistency and quality of the experimentation that occurred at low a Southeast in 2021, that the aesthetic of the game down there, and certainly it was impacted by the quality of the player down there, right? Like you,

we are talking about the lowest level of full season ball at which they're experimenting with this stuff, but there were way more walks and way more strikeouts in low a Southeast than is normal. Like the peripherals there were kind more walks and way more strikeouts in low A southeast than is normal. Like the peripherals there were kind of out of control. So if ultimately the game that we would see on the field is more of the stuff that people have a problem with now, why would major league baseball decide that that game is what they want to try to shift to? Just, you know, I think there are all sorts of other problems with it. I'm not in favor of robo-umps for all kinds of other developmental reasons that I just would be horrible for us trying to do this job. Like imagine that the SEC has robo-umps and the Big Ten doesn't. Like good luck dealing with that when you're trying to evaluate players on some sort of statistical baseline. So I am anti-RoboWomps, and I do think some of the problems that have occurred mean that

it's going to be kicked – this can will be kicked down the road a little bit. Yeah, and one of the biggest problems with some of them was that there are some parks where the biggest misses were not happening on the edges, but it was actually missing down the pipe once. It had problems in the center, so all of a sudden, like, perfectly centered pitches were getting called balls, and it just didn't feel right. And it's just not ready yet. And I understand we want to live in a perfect world and I'm not sure RoboMaps are a perfect world and they're certainly not right now. Yeah, we have reservations too. I've written

about that. We've talked about it. I'm sure that we will talk about it again. Just to clarify, Kevin, when you're talking about the way that teams value framing, is it that teams have realized that it's not as valuable as it was reputed to be? Or is it that there's just less differentiation between teams or between catchers these days just because everyone is taught to focus on it now and some of the worst framers have either improved or are no longer catchers? Yeah, it's more the former it was a situation where like all of a sudden like teams are coming up with you know all of a sudden it was like this guy's this is this framing alone was worth like 32 runs you know and it's like that doesn't feel right and they would go back and i think they've kind of just ratcheted down the range and they've realized well it's actually's actually super valuable, but it's not

this much. Like it's not, guys aren't creating three, four wins just off framing. And so I think just kind of the range of both positive and negative framing can be, I don't think it's, it's not become invaluable. It's still very valuable. It's just not the extremes we once saw. Right. Yeah. I mean, if you don't have Ryanyan domit on one end and jose melina at the other end and the stat is relative to average then it's just you know it's going to be smaller range but i there are aesthetic repercussions to this too coming if they do it like just imagine what some of the pitches are going to be like when you know if this curveball that would never be called a strike visually that clips the bottom of the zone and finishes in the dirt like that's going to be called a strike there's just a

highlight reel of these like dylan you know where it is you can post it in here again we've posted it in the in the podcast of video highlight reel from the fall league robo zone where these pitches don't read to anyone in the ballpark like a strike and the block third strike rule will become a very important and legitimate thing that like you will see you will see that it is important to make i wanted to to shift gears a little bit and ask about some of the guys who represent sort of the high variance players you noted the distributions that we have here which i hope people will take the time to sort of pick through and check out. But I wanted to ask about two guys who have meaningful sort of boom bust potential, one who has a little less bust potential given what we've seen him do lately, and one who still

could really bust or go supernova. Can you talk a little bit about O'Neill Cruz and then Eli Dela Cruz and sort of how you guys think about the spectrum of boom to bust when you're ranking these guys. I'll leave Cruz to Eric. Eric's the Cruz. Which Cruz? They're both Cruzes, Kevin. I'll leave the O'Neal Cruz to Eric. Eric is the O'Neal Cruz cheese ball and God bless him for it. I like him. Ellie Dill Cruz is fascinating and maybe the most fascinating prospect on this list. This is not a guy who came into professional baseball with a ton of hype.

He wasn't like, you know, this is the, this is the international dude. Like he wasn't one of those at all. And all of a sudden he went from normal size to not normal sized. He's so he's, he's a six foot five shortstop with plus plus wheels,

potentially 80 power and an absolute like rocket arm, like a tool city, baby baby and at the same time like all those tools are on display at times in games but we've talked about the bus potential and and eric and i have talked about this like when you go back on old lists and you're like man that guy busted out what happened and so so so often the answer is the approach was a mess. And because of the bad approach, because of the bad swing decisions, this player could not actualize what his physical skills projected. And Elie Delacruz has a huge approach problem, you know, in the sense that he doesn't have one. And so it's not just a poor approach, it's a bad approach.

And so there's all sorts of potential ranges here. Like if it never gets fixed, he might just athlete his way to the big leagues in kind of a utility role. If it gets fixed, all of a sudden he might be a monster. And then there's even like bigger disaster scenarios where it just doesn't work out at all. And he just absolutely just bottoms out in the upper levels. And so like, you know, on just a tools level, this guy sits or exceeds a lot of the players that we see literally in the single digits of these rankings. He's that impressive. It's just at the same time, this might not work at all.

And those guys are exciting and terrifying at the same time. And then O'Neill Cruz is the version of Eli De La Cruz that has performed at the upper levels despite the approach issues and grown three inches and stayed at shortstop. There's real risk in both these guys. We're trying to find a range, a high end and a low end end and not just like go somewhere in

the middle but get a feel for where along this range of outcomes these guys are going to tend to fall and the fact that o'neill cruz like he was six foot seven at age 20 21 and then we were like i mean this looks okay at shortstop now, but for sure, when he's 23, 24, he won't be able to play there. Like let's figure something else out. And well, that time's arrived and he's still playing shortstop and it still looks okay. Certainly as okay as some of the teams are willing to run out there now. It's not any worse than Paul De Young or even Marcus Semyon when he was trying to play shortstop. And Bobachet's not a great defensive shortstop, guys. There are plenty of

other examples where just because this guy hits for so much power, if he's a viable defensive shortstop at all, then he's probably a four plus win player. And I just think that that is clearly in play here. And of all the guys on the list, O'Neal Cruz is one of the few who, if you told me they would become an eight or have some eight seasons where they're worth seven plus wins, it wouldn't surprise me. And so I want to have a guy like this, especially one so close to the big leagues, who's done nothing but performed at this point. Again, there are yellow flags, if not red flags, about his willingness to swing. And guys with levers this long tend to fail. But then Aaron Judge happens, right?

And you wonder why he was only 75th on your prospect list. Yeah, and it's just so weird just because he's such a unicorn. I'm talking about O'Neal now just in the sense that I think so much – I think really good prospect ranking and really good evaluations come from having a good database and i mean like a database in your head and having a history and an understanding of players so you can look at this guy and go well i know what this looks like and this is that's what guys who look like this become um i think that's to play a huge role in how you do this and like i don't it's he's tough

like i don't know what six foot seven shortstops become. Like, I've never seen one before. And so he's such like this very strange, strange thing that it does create a challenge. One broader question about catchers. Rutschman is the headliner, but he is not the only one. And as Tess noted in her piece, there are 12 catchers in the top 100 and six in the top 30. That's a lot. That's more

than usual. And sometimes you can look at these lists and just get too obsessed with the details and you end up doing the close encounters. This means something. This is important as you look at the positional trends and sometimes it doesn't mean anything and it's just sort of cyclical. But is it? Is there anything different happening with catch sort of cyclical but is it is there anything different happening with catcher development now or is this just a coincidence and who are some of the non rutschman names to know here because for me at least it's uh you know on the eve of the position possibly being nerfed a little bit at least defensively it's disappointing to me that we have this potentially historic crop of catchers coming along because I want to see what all these guys can do in every aspect of their game.

At least for me, I've been juicing catchers for the last little bit. Like, I'm just looking at the 2019 and 2020 top 100s right now. 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. And I've got 10 and 12 catchers on those past couple hundreds as well. And Kyber Ruiz, who was part of the Max Scherzer deal, barely exhausted his rookie eligibility in 2021 and would just be in the top 20 of this list were he eligible as well. I just think that this is a random swell of talent in some ways. And then also the way I try to value this position on the universal prospect continuum.

There just aren't good big league catchers who hit. It is a position of need for everyone. Now that the universal DH is coming, I think catchers are the position on your roster for which you are most likely to want to pinch hit during the course of a game. And having three catchers on your roster, especially potentially expanded rosters,

seems pretty smart. And that the industry need for this position is going to increase maybe by like 20% on like in the 40-man roster space. So I tend to like catchers. They bust at a high rate, especially the very, very young ones for the longest time. We had no high school catching prospects drafted early on who panned out at all. Like Devin Masaroccoco who dealt with many injuries after he was an all-star Austin Hedges who has strikeout issues that ultimately you know he peaked in an

average range and has been like shy of an average range most of the time over like a 10 or 15 year span those are the only two Tucker Barnhart I think maybe he's the third one like high school catchers who became any kind of regular big leaguer at all. And then Tyler Stevenson has come along, and there's Yvonne Herrera, and Wilson Contreras is great. And here comes Ruiz and Rutschman and Francisco Alvarez, and Dalton Varshow is fun and unique. And so I think that we have a bit of a catcher renaissance that has been occurring over the last three or so years

that most of the guys who were in this group are going to establish big leaguers at this point, guys like Sean Murphy, or will be pretty soon. There's going to be some attrition. Some guys are going to have weird Mike Zanino trajectories where they're terrible initially and then break out later because that's just sort of what catchers do. Tyler Flowers, Travis Darnot, et cetera.

But I do think that there's a really exciting group of what catchers do. Tyler Flowers, Travis Darnot, etc. But I do think that there's a really exciting group of guys playing this position. I touched on this when we talked about Rutschman, just like the ways he can create value and think about a guy who's pretty low on this list, but still on the list, like Corey Lee of the Astros. And just the way we value catchers and think about what a good catcher is. There's not a soul in the world who has a 50 bat on Corey Lee, nobody. But if Corey Lee hits 230 with 22 bombs plus defense and a seven-arm, he's going to put up three, four-win seasons. And so I think you have to kind of adjust for the position. It is the most important position on the field. It's difficult to play. And to get a guy who can hold

up and play 130 games and deliver just some walks in power and really play the position well is incredibly valuable. I want to ask about a couple of guys who have injury concerns or coming back from injury or have recently succumbed to injury that we have learned is more serious. Always fun when one of your top 10 has to get surgery the day that you release the top 100. No, but let's talk about Josh Young. And then for guys who are kind of on their way back at various points, Corbin Carroll and also Royce Lewis,

I think it's always interesting for people to hear about how you think about injury when you're ranking these guys and the role that it plays. I think we're of the opinion that this would not have meaningfully altered Young's future value, but might have moved him down on this list. So let's talk about the recently injured guys. So yeah, it is hard, especially with the pitching piece of it. Often, as I mentioned before, like Brent Honeywell, you just stay on these guys too long. Hitters, it does feel a little bit different because it is not such a consistent occupational hazard the fact that corbin carroll injured his shoulder in a season-ending way on a swing with which he hit a home run yeah it's like bizarre it's in that freneto tati's area

where wow this guy's like too explosive for his own body's own good and so yeah it does make it hard especially coming off of a lost season for all these guys already corbin carroll who is a hit tool driven prospect like traditional leadoff hitter type of prospect one of the only guys who's not like an overt power hitting prospect in the top 20 of our list he he needs to perform consistently. Now he had done nothing but that for his entire life leading up to his injury. And there are just things specific to me and my experiences being around Corbin Carroll that give me a certain degree of confidence in his desire. This is just a guy I see out at baseball games in Arizona because he wants to go there. So there are subjective things that factor into this.

In Carroll's case, I just thought that he was coming to the big leagues real, real fast entering 2020. And he just didn't have the opportunity to climb the minor league ladder quite as quickly as I hope because he got injured. It's a complex thing to try to weigh all of these injuries because they do have like varying degrees of severity. And there's a lot of stuff about it that we don't know. But ultimately we're trying to bet on the talent when these guys have the injury and then be sensitive to that we might need to adjust

quickly when they come back if something doesn't look right anymore. You haven't published the farm rankings, the organizational rankings yet, and I know that you're still working through some of the individual team lists, but who stands out as having a lot of representatives on this list or not having a lot? And what does that say about the state of those teams? I know it could say different things for different teams, like the White Sox don't have a prospect on this list, right? But the White Sox have a lot of good players that they've graduated, and they're a great team right now. Whereas some teams that might not have a lot of players on this list are not in such enviable position at the major league level. So what were the trends, if you've done any of that math to figure out which teams have the most or fewest players on this list?

I think it's really hard to be a really good team and have a really good system. It's really hard. Dodgers are exceptionally good at it, and that's one of the reasons the Dodgers are always good. But a very smart person once told me if you try to have the best system in baseball and try to have a really good major league team, you're going to do a middling job at both. Or you can be the Rays. Or you can be the Rays, and that that's its own let's not get into that the white socks you know they don't have a good system and part of that is because some players haven't worked out and part of that's because they've traded guys away to improve the big league club so sometimes your

system is down for all the wrong reason anytime you kind of say this is how the systems line up it's kind of a snapshot in time and and some of those teams are down it's not an indictment of their scouting or player development it is an indictment of the way they're currently operating at the major league level and so i i you know i don't think we know we should necessarily it's it's fine to line up the talent but i don't think it necessarily tells you a lot about you know how that system does all that it's not always 100 informative how that system does in terms of scouting and player development i think that's a really important distinction to make and that the other thing is just that like no one wins an award for having the best system in baseball nobody you know it just it just doesn't work that way and it's good

to have a great system but you still have to you a get those guys the big leagues and b supplement that that team with with players from the outside of your system in order to be a really good baseball team like nobody can create a great team just from their own system you need to create a core from that that's really important but it's it's it's almost impossible to create a really good team just from your own system. The White Sox have kind of done – obviously, there were a lot of trades involved that built up the guys who came up through the system like Eloy and Moncada. But yeah, like the White Sox are at the bottom because all of their prospects graduated.

Like they – Garrett Crochet and Kopech and Vaughn and Eloy and like they're just all there now. And this is part of why farm system rings like, ah, yeah. It's just not just, ah, yeah.

Like, is this part of why I'm glad that we just do it the way we do, where we evaluate the players, they fall into their future value tier. And then Craig Edwards math generates the farm system rankings for us. And for sure, there are times when I would take the Rangers system higher than 12th, which is where it was last year,

because like it has so much depth and they seem to have shifted in the way they are targeting players. And like, there's all sorts of other contexts that should be baked into the farm system rankings that as of yet, like I haven't come up with a way to put it in there. So Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Tampa Bay, some rankings that as of yet like i haven't come up with a way to to put it in there so uh baltimore

pittsburgh tampa bay arizona cleveland cleveland's amazing at developing pitching they they take these college pitch ability arms and they get them to throw harder there were three or four examples of it on the backfields during instructs last year guys like doug nikesi and trenton denholm and tommy mace like it wouldn't surprise me if any of those guys was on the top 100 a couple years from now. Tanner Burns from last year. You know, like there are teams whose processes are so, such a big part of what ends up determining this stuff.

I had a scout the other day tell me that he would take the Dodgers 17 through 30 prospects over like the bottom third of baseball's top top tens and it's just part of the way the teams are operating on the competitive spectrum and there are so many context dependent things that fall into where the farm system rankings uh end up solidifying such that like I think it's it's an overblown part of the, the zeitgeist seemingly. Like people seem to care about this every time I do a radio hit or whatever, like this is always the type of thing that comes up. And I don't know if it's as

important as people seem to think it is. I want to give you the opportunity to sing the ballad of Stephen Kwan. Cause every time, every time we do a Top 100, we have a couple of guys who end up getting stuffed pretty meaningfully. And it's really exciting when those guys hit because you feel like you saw something other people didn't. But tell us about Stephen Kwan because I think a lot of the names on this list are going to be familiar to listeners as they go through it, but they might not know about Kwon. Kwon was at Oregon State when Nick Madrigal and Trevor Larnik and a bunch of other high-end prospects were there. Everyone saw him a ton. He did nothing but perform in high school, or high school, in college, probably in high school too. But the tools were short visually.

He wasn't even really running well. So the idea that he could play center field was not necessarily solidified in everyone's mind. He had a gap year in pro ball like everybody else did in 2020 where a guy like this would have had a longer statistical track record and foundation built coming into 2021 such that we wouldn't have been blindsided by the fact that he ended up slugging 560 between double and triple a he doesn't have that kind of power this has always been like a tweener fourth outfielder looking prospect if you liked him but some of the stuff

like the performance through the minors changes to his his swing that seem to have unlocked a little bit more power, viable power. And all of that playing on top of terrific baseball instincts, feel to hit. He is so compact and short levered. He is impossible to make swing and miss. I do think I am guilty of having overcorrected on this type of player at some points a little bit with like the Nicky Madrigals of the world who don't swing and miss at all, but also don't have power.

And who you buy into, who you think is going to become David Fletcher or Nicky Lopez versus who you don't still depends on other subjective stuff related to like athleticism and physical composition. You know, I don't think Jose Devers and Tukapito marcano are very good but like nikki lopez i do and kwan is just i buy it enough that uh you know two and a

half percent swinging strike rate in the minors was the lowest in all of minor league baseball i just think that he's going to put the ball in play at such a high rate and do enough other stuff include play play a good center field that he's going to produce on par with an average everyday player. Yeah, and I think the power is actually a really big piece of it in the sense that, you know, this guy hit three home runs in 150-something college games and came into baseball. Or pro ball is a guy with 30 power, and no one's saying he can get it for power now. But he did hit 12 home runs in 77 games, and there some some evs to back up some of the things he does not in the sense that he has real power but at least he has sneaky pop and the ability to impact a baseball when at times before he was

really just kind of a slap and dash guy and so the fact that he's doing that and and to absolutely no cost whatsoever of the incredible contact scale i think really speaks to something we talked about the catchers at the top of the list there's also a catcher toward the bottom of the incredible contact scale, I think really speaks to something. We talked about the catchers at the top of the list. There's also a catcher toward the bottom of the list, just at 113, Joey Bart of the Giants. And he has, of course, been thrust into a pretty prominent role this year because of the retirement of Buster Posey. And you noted in the blurb that this could be a big make or break year for him so what are some of the concerns and what is still the upside did anybody take johnny pareda in your minor league free agent draft i don't think so but maybe we should wait maybe i did did you i took a giant's catcher ah okay all right i don't remember now i think I think I took it because I was like, they don't, they're not keen on Bart. I think that's what I did. Cause I historically am

really great at the minor league free agent dress. Anyway. Yeah. Like in addition to Joey Bart swinging and missing a ton and some of this stuff was already present in the profile. Right. But there just would start to be on the phone with baseball people made it sound like the Giants didn't really value Joey Bart very much based on some of the tones of trade discussions and stuff like that so if this guy does the Zanino thing and to this point he is tracked almost exactly like that where he was thrust into the big leagues prematurely because of other circumstances right like this guy was just in the big leagues for a little while in 2020 so you know is there going to be some late career bounce here where he starts getting to more of this power maybe uh and so maybe he does end up

having like his zanino trajectory where things end up being very good but there's real risk around the hit tool now uh he's just in that Corey Lee Dylan Dingler bucket where we're not confident that they're going to hit but they do so much other stuff but I do think that this catching situation in San Francisco with Casali who I who I also like and Bart and then yeah Johnny Pareda who's run strikeout rates in the low teens basically his whole life he's been was traded from the Cubs to the Red Sox at one point signed as a minor league free agent with no buster posey in san francisco like i will have my eye on johnny parada during you know theoretical big league spring training coming up here just because i think that this is an interesting mix that still has some volatility

yeah it's fourth round minor league free agent draft pick, Johnny Parada, to all of you. They didn't 40-man Ricardo Genovese, right? Like there's other stuff happening here that indicates they don't have a third 40-man catcher right now. Like I do think Parada has a chance to work his way into this mix. We still have half an offseason to go. Don't remind me. don't remind me. I'm curious if you can pull the curtain back a little bit and tell us which of the guys

who either made this list or maybe were left off generated the most internal disagreement between the three of you and then also maybe represented the broadest range of potential future value tiers externally when you were talking to team sources. Who do we fight about?

I'm higher on CJ Abrams than Kevin. That's true. I think that we're talking about plus plus run and real feel for contact, plus still room on the body, performed okay at AA as a 20-year-old, then got hurt. If you want to say that we're too high because of some of the risk related to the injury and the loss of developmental time, I'd buy that. But I really think there's still so much more raw power coming for CJ Abrams, and he's going to play somewhere up the middle. Don't know if it's going to be shortstop.

I don't think it is. He's definitely gotten better there, but the guys who tend to stay there aren't the ones who we have any doubt about. So he's one of them. Yeah, I'm the guy who hates Quinn Priester more than the other two. Quinn Priester's fastball is 6'0", Sancho's shape, but six or seven miles an hour less. And so it's a real scary, scary pitch for me.

He's trying to mitigate that by developing a cutter. But his fastball shape just terrifies me as to his ability to mitigate that with you know by developing a cutter um but his fastball shape just terrifies me as to his ability even get to the big leagues at this point i think i was more willing to take a long-term bet on christian pache than the two of you guys and i'm probably also a little bit higher on just the guys I've seen a lot in person and tend to believe in. So like Kevin Alcantara, mostly Kevin Alcantara, and the other two Cubs kids I think maybe are in that mix. That's probably about it. Priester was definitely a hot button issue for a little while. There were various shortstops who ended up littered throughout the 50 future value tier, close to 50th overall, who at times we wanted to 55 and like really amp into that top 30 area.

And Jeremy Pena was the only one of that group who ended up sticking. Kevin thinks that Pena will get to a little bit more power than I tend to. But I think that's largely the crux of it. But I think that's largely the crux of it. What's the story with Jason Dominguez, who I feel like even non-prospect people know Jason Dominguez and his record-breaking baseball card sales. But he's number 73 on the list. He's actually your third-ranked Yankees prospect, which doesn't seem to quite match some of the hype that's out there. Is that just a product of the fact that he's 19 and a young 19 and you have a 2025 ETA on him and that's a long ways away? I mean, it plays a big role. I mean, this is another high variable guy and he didn't live up to expectations when he finally played.

And at the same time, living up to the expectations that he had were impossible. You mean he's not actually Mickeykey mantle i i like i if he played like mickey mantle people would be oh no i thought he'd be better than this skip bales would be all over his ass and so yeah the body has changed in a way that was not good but it looked better during kind of the second half of his season and it's just like this variability and we talked about this on on on the did of Chimney's ago there. But like he's 73 now. If Jason Dominguez is number 11 next year, I'm not going to be shocked.

And if Jason Dominguez isn't on the list next year, I'm not going to be shocked. You know, that's the kind of variability we're talking about. Like all the tools on the upside are there. But at some point when you're talking about prospects you have to stop talking about that because they have to do something and he just didn't do much and it's not that he's suddenly bad it's just that he was only fine as opposed to amazing and again like this was mentioned on chin music but the elite guys tend to just be elite all the time. And so we can kind of scratch that off as being a likely outcome for Jason Dominguez,

that he will be, I think the chances of him being 11th on next year's list are probably less than Kevin does. I don't think that's actually feasible. Maybe it is, but I'd be surprised if he were that high. I just think that this is a good teenage centerfield prospect. There's some weird stuff going on with how buff he is. And I make the Zion Williamson comp in the blurb where it's like in this area where, wow, this guy's big. I don't know if that's good. It is so distinct separate from the other guys. big. I don't know if that's good. It is so distinct separate from the other guys. There was a wide receiver at USC named Mike Williams, who the Lions drafted, who was also in this area. It was like

6'6", 240. Is this guy even a wide receiver? And it didn't work, but Calvin Johnson worked. And like, these are just the types of guys who stand apart from everybody else physically, and you're not always sure if it's good. And it's o'neill cruz and sometimes it's not but jason dominguez he's still a good teenage center field prospect like the fact that he is average raw power measurably and plus raw power visually at his age and is a switch hitting center fielder like that's exciting and we've seen there are plenty of examples of of guys who have leaned back down and reclaimed like we saw julio rodriguez do it right julio rodriguez was bulky running 4-4-4-5 in the fall league in 2019 and it was fine he was crushing and it was fine it didn't matter because he was crushing uh and there's still plenty of time for Jason Dominguez. I mean, how much weight did Forrest Whitley lose between his junior year of high school and his senior year of high school? You saw what that did for him. And I think that all that stuff is still in play for this guy.

you do the chat that accompanies the top 100 is who who is going to make this list next year because people don't let us enjoy things for even 10 minutes before they try to hoist another top 100 on us and your guys's answer to that is the picks to click column i will not make you go through every one of these guys because i think there are 40 some odd players who you've identified as picks to click but are there a couple of guys who did not make the cut this year, so they are not 50 future value players at this moment, but who you feel particularly confident in their ability to sort of move up that list, either as we do updates to this in the course of 2022

or as new arrivals in 2023? I kind of like Jiromo. Eric and I both noted him as a pick to click, which makes me say, maybe we should have just put him on the list. But it's a solid defense, very big arm, and performed offensively,

I think, better than people expected coming out of high school. I think he's a really intriguing catching prospect. One of the guys, some of these draftees you think could end up really performing. Trey Sweeney is a really good example of that kind of guy who might just like throw up big numbers and then you know Eric and I have both got like early intel on Pete Crow Armstrong who you know was a first round pick who got traded from the Mets to the Cubs who you know

the Cubs are very big on re-engineering swings and they've re-engineered his swing already and and i know that they're very encouraged by the results and this guy was always somebody who you know was a plus plus center fielder like just a monster defender with with some interesting offensive profiles and if he can end up really hitting i was i think it's very interesting yeah kevin and i are both on romo and pca i I saw Pete Crow Armstrong take BP a couple weeks ago and his swing is different. So it was funny that we came to know that in different ways. And I was shocked and surprised as people started filling out the sheet with their picks to click, that he was on there for Kevin already. Romo, yeah. The other catcher I really like is Andy Rodriguez with Pittsburgh.

Just really great field to hit. Can catch, can play the outfield corners and first base. He's going to be not quite like Dalton Varshow where you can justify running him out there in center field, but there is can catch, multi-positional utility,

bat-to-ball skills, a lot of the stuff that that i tend to like uh and then the group that the most click the most clicks tend to come from historically is the this is what they look like group where there's nothing statistical about why we care about them it is just boy look at this guy's body. Look at his athleticism. He can play up the middle of the diamond and is going to have power when he's physically mature. And my guy in this group this year is Jose Ramos with the Dodgers, who's 21. He went ballistic on extended spring training, had like six or eight homers during the four-week extended spring training, had like six or eight homers during the four-week extended spring

training window, and then went to Rancho Cucamonga. And some of his approach was exposed there, but he continued to hit for power. And it's the Cal League, and so take that with a grain of salt, but big 6'3", 180, projectable, has a chance to stay in center field and hit for a real big power. to stay in center field and hit for a real big power. Andy Pajes, who's on the, towards like the back third of the list, is the same age as Jose Ramos and was basically doing this type of stuff a level and a half ahead of Ramos. And so it was hard to justify like slam dunking Ramos on the list with that context, especially immediately like in the Dodgers system to 50 pahes and Ramos both, didn't seem correct to do. So he's on my list for guys next year. Let me ask you about two guys who I guess should have been on the picks to click list last year in hindsight.

I think I may have heard you talk about them on Fangraph's audio, Eric, but two teenaged middle infielders in the AL East who have climbed lists lately. And that is Anthony Volpe of the Yankees at number 12 and Nick York of the Red Sox at number 29. These are both former first round guys who have surprised. So how is it that they have vaulted themselves to where they are now and is there anything that can be learned that is more generalizable to future prospects like them i think with a guy like volpe he just like nobody kind of i hate to say took advantage of nobody made better adjustments to what was going on in 2020 better than volpe who you know worked every day but a worked on just his body in terms of working out,

but also worked every day on his swing with a private hitting coach and really kind of re-engineered it and was able to both develop power and tap into it. And, you know, you see the results in the stat sheet. And at the same time, kind of working on his body gave a little more comfort as to his ability to stay at shortstop. And so, you know, you combine those things, and all of a sudden he becomes this, you know,

okay prospect to a real shortstop with real power. And that changes everything in a player. And York is one of those guys who kind of, you know, if you measured his trajectory from where we started this process to where we ended it, he just kind of kept this, this slow and steady climb up, up, up, up, up. And then we made him a 55 and up, up, up, up. And, you know, he did everything you'd ask him to do. He hit everywhere.

The approach is great. He developed some power. It seems like just a legit hitter. Really safe floor. There's very few paths where he doesn't get to the big leagues because he's such a good hitter. Yeah, the two of them, we love up-the-middle players who can hit.

And both these guys had, there are some prospects who just have overt physical projection, like an Eli De La Cruz, like Fernando Tatis Jr., where you can see where another 20, 30 pounds of muscle is going to be added over time. And with Anthony Volpe and Nick York, both of them at age 18 looked physically maxed out already. Volpe was a contact-oriented middle infield prospect. He was on Jack Leiter's high school team and was seen all the time. And he was like a low variance 45. Like, hey, I think this is a high probability big league utility guy. I would not have guessed that Anthony Volpe would have added this much strength. And then when you layer that strength onto this contact-oriented foundation, this field to hit that is now like

leaning into this new power he has, you have a meaningful, like explosive breakout. Whereas some of these longer, lankier, more traditionally projectable guys like Louis Brinson, even if they perform like their lever length is their lever length, the same doesn't apply like to them. They can't suddenly manifest better feel to hit in the same way that some of these like jose ramirez type guys can suddenly manifest strength it would seem so now i think york and volpe are both in this category uh i was i thought york was overdrafted when he when he was picked like i saw york at at area codes and at high school events,

and he was what I thought was just like a generic, maybe 500 to 700K version of this profile we're talking about, where he can kind of stand at second base. There's not a lot of room on his body. He can definitely hit, and I have confidence in that, but that guy's Cesar Hernandez or whatever when he's in double or triple A. I'll just worry about Nick York when he's performing in pro ball. And then that happened very, very quickly where he was not only doing it, but doing it in an unignorable way.

So last thing, as we speak here on Thursday, there are still a few Prospects Week pieces that have not yet been published. And so I have not yet read them. But there is one that will be up by the time most of you hear this on Friday called Managing Prospect Expectations. I don't know. I'm so not finishing that today, by the way. Okay, so that is a Kevin piece. By the way, Meg. About that, how do we manage prospect expectations?

Because that's something that, you know, is not easy to do in Prospects Week when everyone wants to get excited about these guys. And, of course, you are also excited about these guys. That's why you follow and cover prospects. But there are some limits and some boundaries. on the list with the graphs that you have for each player of the potential distributions of future value that are based on research and the likelihood that they'll actually turn out to be what you hope they will be. But I can remember even back at BP, Kevin, you did a piece once maybe about the number of future major leaguers or good major leaguers that are in the average system at any given time.

I think people just kind of tend to inflate that in their minds, maybe. So, yeah, for sure. And you just end up like, I just, you can't look at a prospect list to go when these three guys are in our rotation. This is our catcher and this is our second baseman. These two guys are outfield. Everything's going to be great. Like you can't do that. And because someone was going to fall off.

Absolutely. Every time. It's just not going to work out that way sorry and and and you know if you look at the these distributions no one has an overwhelming chance to be a star like like you know it's just the the attrition rate here is galling at times and you just can't play that game and you know i remember not to pick on it you know anyone particular but like you know when we published the orioles list someone said you know i only count five guys who might be in their rotation i was like man if five of these guys have been their rotation they've done a remarkable job and and you know you have to remember like most of these guys aren't going to work out and like a number 10 prospect in a system this guy's top 10 prospect it's great

it's probably not good. You know, and it's just like, I think the variability, like people see the prospect and they think that's just a lock that they're going to be something. And, you know, most guys in the bottom half of a top 100

aren't going to really be significant big leaguers. It's just how it is. The bust rate, just the baseline bust rate for someone in like the back half of 100 is something like 46%. I don't know. There's definitely something about the current media climate that has shifted the way people talk about prospects. In the same space that a lot of this analysis is occurring, people just have direct access to the prospects themselves. Like there's a

Fangraphs Twitter account that's tweeting out, hey, here's our top 100 prospects list. And on Twitter is just Joe Adele or whatever, right? Like it is weird the way the lines between reaction, analysis, reaction to the analysis, the people who are being analyzed, like everyone is just sort of in this weird same space right now a lot of the time. The stuff that people care about prospects for has shifted to sports cards seem to be popular again, just based on the activity at the store down the road. Like the family that owns that store said that during the pandemic, like they've done some of the best business that they've ever done. And I don't like that's done a weird thing to the dynamic because people are like trading baseball cards as if they're stocks.

But the stock price is based on the performance of like an 18 or 19 year old. And that's kind of weird. And so I think the space that people are playing in dynasty leagues, like most of the people who read our lists, we try to, I try to write them for as if everyone in the baseball industry is going to read them. But most of the people who click on our list just play fantasy baseball or care about, you know, they want to pick someone in their out of the park league orpark league or something like that. That's the reason most of the people click on our lists. And I try to be realistic about the players when we're writing about them without sounding like I'm denigrating the players'

flaws. Mike Trout is the only one where you... Even Gary Sanchez has had some huge seasons, and it's like, you could say some pretty easy criticisms of Gary Sanchez, right? So anyone who's doing this for a living, playing pro baseball or playing high level amateur baseball is already incredible. And like, they're the lifeblood of all of this stuff. But yeah, the likelihood that any of them is going to become an established big leaguer is pretty low. Some of the way roster management has changed over the last five, 10 years makes it more likely, I think, that any of

them will be big leaguers for a little while just because the way some of these teams are building farm systems with this depth suggests that they just think a lot of them on the fringe of the roster are interchangeable. Your optioned relievers, you know, your fourth or fifth or sixth infield type guys like Mike Brasso when the Rays, Mike Brasso hits arbitration, the Rays just have one or two other guys like him in the system already

and feel free to move on. And so you're cycling through a lot more players on the fringe of your roster than I think we used to be. And so I do think that there are more of them who are going to become big leaguers than the rate has historically been to this point. But it is a difficult cultural, like we want to create excitement. We want

positivity. We want people to be interested in this work. And we are certainly appreciative of the players and scouts and dev staff who are basically feeding our analysis. But at the same time, there are some things about, some of this stuff gets out of control. Like Kylie and I wrote about Jason Dominguez in our book. I don't know if that has had anything to do with how hyped he is or if it's just the pinstripes, baby. But I would maybe change the way we wrote about him knowing the expectations might have an impact

on Jason Dominguez's life. Right, well, get excited, but not too excited. People, project your prospects responsibly. Just try to think about it in a healthy, balanced way, everyone. Jeez. All right. Well, we will link to all the pieces and lists that we have mentioned today on our show page, and there's a lot more that we haven't talked about. If you go to Fangraphs as of Friday,

you can find fantasy rankings. You can find Dan Simborski's zips-based, stats-based, projection-based prospect rankings. There's much more. There are other players on the list that we haven't talked about that you can find Eric and Kevin and Tess talking about at a chat on Fangraphs.com and as was already mentioned on the Chin Music podcast.

And of course, you can find them on Twitter at Kevin underscore Goldstein. And if you insist, at Longin Hagen, although Eric does not really recommend it. So thanks to you guys for all the work and for joining us today to talk about it. Thanks, guys. Well, yet again, there were next to no developments in the CBA negotiations on Thursday. Nothing new or notable to report, just tiny incremental changes in the proposals that are not going to get us to a deal anytime soon. So I can only hope that all of the 2022 ETAs that Eric and Kevin listed for prospects on their rankings were not over

optimistic. They did not factor in the owner's recalcitrance when they were making those projections. But Meg and I can get into that next time. A few follow-ups for you. Last time in our email episode 1814, we discussed who the heel of MLB is these days. Not an actual bad person, but someone everyone likes to boo and root against and is kind of the villain character without being an actual villain. Not counting the sign stealers either. We came up with a few possibilities, but we got some nominations

after the fact. Manny Machado was mentioned. Nick Castellanos was mentioned. Yadier Molina was mentioned. Although it seems to me that much of the enmity that Molina has engendered, if there is much, is more a response to Cardinals fans talking about how great he is than any actions of Molina himself. But each of those three has some qualifications. A few people, including Patreon supporter Jimmy, mentioned Joey Votto. Jimmy wrote in, As a Cincinnati fan, it made me think of a sort of unconventional and possibly a bit dated pick, Joey Votto. Maybe not the most conventional heel, I admit, think of a sort of unconventional and possibly a bit dated pick, Joey Votto. Maybe not the most conventional heel, I admit, but if a heel is someone that fans love to hate and who loves to egg on the fans' hatred,

Votto loves to mess with opposing fans while on the road. He's garnered a reputation for denying fans souvenirs, whether it's in Philly faking a throw or chasing down a foul dribbler, or rocketing a ball nearly out of Wrigley. All the while, he'll sport a big grin, and he'll chirp a bit good-naturedly with them too. But like any good heel, Votto understands he's a character on a grand stage and generally knows how to not go too far, evidenced by times when he has generously given time to fans. I know he's not a perfect pick, and he may not be quite the heel he once was, but in a world where so many more traditional heels just turn out to be gross bad dudes, it's refreshing to have someone who knows it's all just good fun. And yeah, I think Vado is just too beloved to be a

heel, even though he occasionally pretends to be one. Everyone knows he is pretending. And granted, I guess most wrestlers who wear heels are not known to be bad people either. But everyone loves Vado, and he constantly undercuts any claim to being a heel that he might have by doing nice things and saying nice things. So I think everyone is fully aware that it's an act. And so it's kind of hard to hate him even in a fake way. But I get it. Thanks for the suggestions. And one more follow up for you here.

Last week, we did our so-called stanky draft in episode 1813. We drafted rules changes that were solely or largely precipitated by the actions of one person. And we got an email from a Patreon supporter named Dana who says, I have a question about a rule that may or may not exist depending on who you ask, but written or not is definitely associated with a single player, Jimmy Pearsall. My dad is a fan of both the Red Sox and Anthony Perkins, so I think among the things he wanted to do with me once I showed an interest in either was watch Fear Strikes Out. It was the first baseball movie that I watched that was made before I was, and it's also the first time I remember having a conversation

with my dad about his life before me and my mom, so needless to say, it made a big impression. Over the course of talking to my dad about baseball when he was young, he mentioned that for many people, the last straw in the tolerance of Pearsall's antics, quote-unquote, was when he hit his 100th home run and, quote-unquote, showboated by running the bases facing the wrong way. According to my dad's memory, he was instantly released by the Mets and the league made a rule that you had to face forward during your home run trot. Recently, my mother-in-law gifted me a copy of Jonathan Fraser Light's cultural encyclopedia of baseball. Flipping through it, I came across this section

on home run trots, and he basically confirmed my dad's memory of the backwards facing trot, which made me smile. So I smiled again about it recently when he did the stanky rule episode. I assumed one of you would draft the rule because I'm basic and you are smart. I smiled even bigger when Ben betrayed his ignorance of the rule when he said you can't run the bases in reverse order, but you can run them facing the wrong way. Gotcha, I thought. I'm going to write them and ask how they could have missed such an obvious, fun, person-named rule. Instead of just jotting down that question and firing it off, I thought I could maybe have a couple citations ready for you when you asked me to come on the show as an expert on the topic. Turns out, Light's encyclopedia is full of fun, but light on citations. He says, the National League immediately enacted a new rule requiring

runners to face the bases. Whatever that means, face the bases. Alas, no reference, and there is no mention of it anywhere else that the story is told. So I have a question. Is this a rule that exists or existed in the NL or MLB rulebooks? Or is it only in the no fun slash characters allowed section of the Gossage rules? And I bring this up not to impugn the memory of Dana's dad, but because it sent me down a rabbit hole. As far as I can tell, none of this is true, except for the fact that Jimmy Pearsall did in fact run the bases facingcyclopedia baseball, you can find this everywhere. Reputable sources, the New York Times, MLB.com. A lot of them will say, if not necessarily that a rule was passed against it, that Pearsall did this, that everyone was mad, that Casey Stengel, the Mets manager at the time, was

upset, and that Pearsall was released because of this incident. Or at least it's implied that it was because of this incident. The New York Times says, Pearsall's unusual home run trot angered three people in particular, Phillies pitcher Dallas Green, who surrendered the home run, Mets manager Casey Stengel, who felt all clowning should be restricted to the manager. There's room for only one clown on this team, Stengel said famously, and Commissioner Ford C. Frick, who warned Pearsall never to do it again. It is true that Frick wasn't pleased. He said he didn't want to see it again, but no action was taken against Pearsall. As far as I can tell, no rule

was passed. I can't find any citation of a rule being passed to prohibit this or anything in the current rulebook that would prohibit it. It also doesn't seem to be true that Casey Stengel was upset about this. Stengel said, it got us the run just the same, didn't it? I mean, he touched all the bases. If he didn't touch them all, where would he be? But he touched them. He wasn't pulled from the game or anything. And Pearsall said, nobody said nothing. They was just as surprised as I was. I'd been planning it for a month, but I was surprised. And not only did Stengel mind it, but Pearsall was not released because of this incident. The Mets released him a full month later. He played in 14 games after the one where he hit the home run, and he was

released because he was batting 194 for the Mets. He just hadn't hit. And he'd also injured his leg in a separate incident. Some articles said that he was clowning around before a game and hurt his leg. There's another story where Pearsall says that he called the assistant to the Mets club president and asked him point blank if my clowning had anything to do with my release. He told me absolutely not and assured me they would give me 100% recommendation to any club. Your salary was too high and you just didn't do the job, Pearsall was told. Furthermore, yes, there's more. As far as I can tell, Stengel did not say there's room for only one clown on this team about Jimmy Pearsall. If he said it about anyone, it was

Frenchie Bordigaret, a player he managed with the Dodgers in the 30s. And this could very well be apocryphal too, but here's a story from the 50s about that. Stengel managed the Daffy Dodgers when Frenchie Bordigaret was a member of the club. Frenchie reported for spring training wearing a mustache of Groucho Marx proportions. Listen, Frenchie, warned Stengel, if there's going to be any clown on this ball club, I'm it. Frenchie took the hint and got rid of the mustache knowing that you could only presume so much on Stengel's good nature. That could be apocryphal too. I don't see that quote cited in stories from that time, but if he said it about anyone, it wasn't Pearsall as far as I can tell. Anyway, I mention all of this to you not just to say that we did not miss this rule in

our stanky draft, but also to make a point about how history gets remembered or misremembered and distorted, which is something we talked about on that episode. But it's kind of incredible when you actually go back to the primary sources and you see how they differ from what other reputable sources say. There's a great picture of Pearsall crossing home plate backward, and I will link to that and all of these stories in the show notes. That actually did happen, but everything else that is said to have happened after that, Casey Stengel being upset, the Mets releasing him because of this incident. Stengel saying there was only room on the team for one clown. Really, none of that seems to have happened. So Pearsall had a tough enough time during his career because of his bipolar disorder and how that affected him and how he was treated. No need to make up anything else additional, but just remember that you can't

always believe what you read, whether it's on Twitter or in a book or in a newspaper. History is fascinating but also imperfect. Lots of little things that were kind of true get twisted and conflated, and a game of telephone happens, and suddenly there are some seeds of facts that become part of a tall tale. It is true that Pearsall ran afoul of another rule that we did draft last week, though, the Eddie Stanky maneuver rule that says you can't distract the batter. There was an incident in 1960 when Ted Williams was hitting at Fenway and Pearsall was in the outfield, and he started dancing out there right in Ted Williams's line of sight. And there was a rule against it by then, so he was ordered to stop, and when he

refused, he was ejected. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going and help us stay ad-free while getting themselves access to some perks. Jared Hirsch, Dylan Heinzen, Joseph Orgezi, Andrew Kicklighter, and Brian Goldgeier. Thanks to all of you. Our patrons can expect a bonus monthly episode dropping in the next few days. And of course, they can get access to our exclusive Discord group for Patreon supporters. Now more than 500 members strong.

You can all contact us via email at podcast.fangrafts.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectivelywild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at

EWPod, and you can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash effectivelywild. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing and production assistance, and we will be back with one more episode before the end of the week. forgotten things you don't need anymore in your home