FTW
Baseball America, Top 100 Prospects By The Numbers
March 23, 2009 by kris · Leave a Comment
I’m a bit slow on this, a couple weeks slow — but this weekend has been spring cleaning weekend around these parts. Baseball America put up their top-100 prospects a month or so ago, and now Matt Eddy has gone and analyzed them in Top-100 By The Numbers.
If you’re not a prospect junkie, things like these are fairly useful to bookmark. The fantasy community as a whole will over-value and overrate, just about every conceivable top-100 prospect. Unfortunately even if they’re top-100 players, they’re not all going to have an immediate fantasy impact. I’d say 1-of-5 top-20 prospects end up making a difference in the fantasy world.
Eddy breaks the the hitters down into their core groups: Power Hitting Positions (1B,3B, LF, RF), Speed Positions (CF, 2B, SS) and Catchers. Each prospect is evaluated using easy to understand metrics such as BB:K, ISO, Contact Rate, and Speed. All of which are solid enough indicators of a players actual propensity for Patience, Power, Contact, and Speed — the cornerstones of a hitter.
All of the fantasy websites will rave about Power and Speed, which is to be expected, but what you’ll want to pay attention to is his “Batting Eye” and “Contact”. Both of which you can also view over at thebaseballcube.com
The hardest thing for a player to develop, and is almost more of an instinct than a skill, is his batting eye and patience. You’ll find that guys with average power in the minors can put up solid major league level power, but if they’ve got a terrible batting eye — they’re pretty much stuck with it. There’s always exceptions to the rule, but this is something you definitely want to pay attention to. If a player gets called up to the show, and the internet’s ablaze with hype — this is what you want to look at prior to blowing your waiver-wire claim.
If you’re someone who spends a good chunk of time on their fantasy baseball roster, you’ll also want to check out how quickly he adapts to being moved up a level. You can do this pretty easily without crunching numbers by just checking out the minor league game logs. Look at the cumulative ISO, BB:K, and OBP every 4 or 5 games…
This concludes what was supposed to be a ten word post to share a Baseball America link with you
