Some Words on Baseball Prospects

I love following minor leaguers, especially the studs, because of all the promise as well as all the uncertainty and subjectivity involved in the evaluation process. I’d like to think of myself as a good talent evaluator, but I’ve been wrong on players more than a few times (SS-R Troy Tulowitzki, 3B-R Andy Marte, for different reasons in 2007). It’s part of the prospecting game.

With prospects, the numbers play a part in the evalutation process, but they don’t tell the whole story. Analysts know a lot about the game and trends within the game, but trends are not truths and when it comes to prospects, it is largely an individual-to-individual evaluation. Why did scouts like 1B-L James Loney so much despite the fact that he never performed, at any level, between advanced A ball and AAA (2002-2006)? Because he has a great swing, because he has a projectable frame and because they saw something in James Loney that said ballplayer. Hell, I still don’t know how many home runs he’ll hit in 2008 or in his peak because there’s nothing in the numbers to indicate such. A good guess might be between 10-30. I’ll take 15 in 2008 and 25 peak, but that’s just me.

An even better example is someone like SS-R Hanley Ramirez, who in two short seasons in the majors, went from confounding prospect to one of the most valuable commdities in baseball. No one saw that coming, including Boston Red Sox General Manager Theo Epstein who is one of the greatest talent evaluators in the game. I’ll bet there’s a scout somewhere saying “Told ya’ so.”

The numbers can also be misleading in the opposite direction. Until a player has made it through each level of the minors and has some body of work in the major leagues, players who look promising early on (RHP Yusmeiro Petit, Jeremy Sowers), flame out because the stuff doesn’t match the performance.

On that note, there’s a great piece regarding Colorado Rockies LHP Franklin Morales by Baseball Prospectus scout Kevin Goldstein where he talks about player evaluation that I really liked. He touches on a variety of points that are often contested, such as talent vs. performance and the issue of makeup. Analysts hate words like “makeup” and “chemistry” because they cannot be quantified, but in a game that isn’t defined by entirely its trends, but also by its individuals, these things certainly can be qualified.

Here, Goldstein talks about the disparity between talent and performance in response to a letter from a fan who questions Morales’ receiving a 5-Star grade:

“I grade Morales as not only a five-star prospect, but as an upper-echelon one at that…You don’t need more than one hand to count the number of left-handers at ANY LEVEL who can match Morales on a pure stuff level, and that really does count for something…You say I have no reliable data points, I argue that scouting reports are reliable data points, and in my experience, far more reliable for evaluating prospects than raw minor league statistics. Not that pure performance isn’t important, but it’s not as important to me as scouting reports.”

And here, Goldstein emphasizes the importance of makeup:

“You emphasize “rave professionalism reviews” as if it is a bad thing–-I assume this is because it is not a specific data point. I can tell you, one thing I’ve learned from my many years of doing this, which have given me the wonderful opportunity to deal with people inside the game on a daily basis, is that MAKEUP COUNTS. It really does. Supreme talent can overcome bad makeup, but average, even good talent rarely can. You can look at old prospect lists and focus on the misses, and when you do that, for every player who just wasn’t as good as we thought, there was a player who didn’t become what he could of, or even should of, because he didn’t put in the work necessary to become a big leaguer. Baseball is a remarkably difficult game, and those who approach the game with the proper effort and yes, professionalism have a significant leg up on those who don’t, and can often pass those who are far more talented. You want to know why I was so wrong about Dustin Pedroia? It’s not because I under-evaluated his tools, I can read my report on those and they’re still very accurate. It’s because I underrated just how valuable his effort is to his overall productivity.”

This is good stuff. Why is it that a player like OF-R Elijah Dukes has failed to make it? Obviously, the talent is there, but something mentally isn’t or hasn’t been yet. Still, just like plate discipline can be learned (SS-B Jose Reyes), power can sometimes be learned (James Loney???), so too can a strong work ethic and so-called makeup. Like anything in baseball, its not easy to learn and its even harder to project.