This week MLB Pipeline released their Phillies Top 30 prospects. This completes the release of individual team prospect lists for the Phillies from the major national sites (Baseball America, Fangraphs, MLB Pipeline, Baseball Prospectus, ESPN, and The Athletic). Most of these lists are behind paywalls so I am not going to give individual lists or write ups. Instead, what I am more interested in is the data trends, group think, group diversions, and overall perspective on the Phillies system.
When I did my own list, I broke it up into tiers, and I wanted to see if tiers emerged among the expert groups. There were groupings, as expected, when I sorted my composite listing by the average rank across those 6 sites. I also added the high and low ranks for each player because that brings forward so interesting analysis later. It is also worth noting that the average rank is not 100% an accurate measure as Baseball Prospectus’s list was published before Starlyn Caba was traded and ESPN’s list only went to 10 (BA had 40, FG 30, MLB 30, BP 20*, and The Athletic 20).
| Average Rank | Player | High | Low |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1.2 | Andrew Painter | 1 | 2 |
| 1.8 | Aidan Miller | 1 | 2 |
| 4.2 | Eduardo Tait | 3 | 5 |
| 4.3 | Moises Chace | 3 | 7 |
| 4.6 | Justin Crawford | 3 | 8 |
| 8.8 | Griffin Burkholder | 7 | 11 |
| 8.8 | Dante Nori | 6 | 11 |
| 10.2 | Gabriel Rincones Jr. | 7 | 14 |
| 10.3 | Aroon Escobar | 5 | 17 |
| 11.0 | Mick Abel | 8 | 14 |
| 11.4 | Devin Saltiban | 6 | 20 |
| 11.7 | Jean Cabrera | 4 | 18 |
| 12.2 | Seth Johnson | 6 | 16 |
| 12.3 | Bryan Rincon | 7 | 18 |
I think the first two groupings are obvious. Painter and Miller are the consensus top 2 prospects in the system. Tait, Chace, and Crawford are not the consensus next 3 prospects, but they are consensus top 8 prospects and while we find derivation as a whole they are well regarded.
I was actually surprised that Burkholder and Nori had their own distinct grouping. Only one of the lists actually ranked them back to back as the 6th and 7th prospect in the org, but they each only appeared outside the top 10 on one list and appeared on all 6 lists. There might be the least amount of information on them of any prospect in the system, but still they were less volatile in view than those around them.
The end of this listing really exemplifies this part of the organization. You can find an evaluator that believes in any of these players and one that is not as optimistic. You could argue that they are sometimes viewed as well as those above them, but it also might be an indictment of those above them in that they are not viewed clear of these players either. It also would be wrong to view this group as a monolith either. Aroon Escobar, for example, is viewed as a top 6 prospect by half the lists and no higher than 13 on the others. This gets into the idea of outliers.
Each evaluator has players they really believe in and those that they are more skeptical of. For this, I went and looked for where a player’s rank did not vary from the average (like our Escobar example above), but varied from all other evaluators. So here are the areas where a list goes out on a limb.
- Jean Cabrera #4 – Fangraphs
- Seth Johnson #6 – Baseball America
- Bryan Rincon #7 – ESPN
- Alex McFarlane #9 – Fangraphs
- Michael Mercado #7 – Fangraphs
- Mavis Graves #8 – Baseball Prospectus
For each positive there must be a negative, so here are some doubts.
- Jean Cabrera #18 – The Athletic
- Bryan Rincon #18 – Baseball Prospectus
- Carson DeMartini #29 – Fangraphs
- Mavis Graves #27 – Baseball America
- Devin Saltiban #20 – Fangraphs
One thing that does emerge is bias from this, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. MLB Pipeline which largely talks to a bunch of scouts and teams varies very little because their data is already fairly aggregated. Outlets like Fangraphs that are smaller in number of writers tend to have more outliers. Outliers and biases aren’t bad. On some level a player is going to be a binary, they will either do things or they won’t. So the probabilistic curve of their career, an evaluator might be thinking the upside is likely to happen, or that the curve is just wrong. For a more aggregated outlet, they are betting on that smoothed out outcome and might get more guys closer to outcome, but are going to be less right or wrong about specific players.