MVN: Most Valuable Network

Tomorrow, I will post my top-30 prospects in baseball. I've been covering the Yankees' minor league system for years now. I think that I have ranked the Yankee system a dozen times. This was a fairly simple task: my pool of players to choose from was pretty well-defined, and I knew the individual history of each player. Ranking the top-30 in all of baseball is a little more difficult. I'm going to use this post to talk about the criteria that I use to determine who I think is the best prospect.

First off, I define a prospect as any player who is still rookie-eligible but has either just been drafted or is currently in the minor leagues. So, older rookies coming from Japan will not be ranked, nor will college or high school players who have yet to be drafted. I also for the most part tend to shy away from any player who has just undergone a major medical procedure - I don't like to speculate about players recovering from Tommy John surgery. I do this because any objective ranking would need to be based on medical knowledge which I neither have access to would I understand even if I had the information.

I believe in performance. I want to see a guy succeed at his level, relative to league difficulty and age, before I consider him a top prospect. Lots of guy are full of tools. Lots of guy are the darlings of scouts. The thing is, scouts generally need a fairly long period of time to develop a good understanding of a player. Many people speak with authority about an 18 year old from the Dominican Republic who has the best tools since Alex Rodriguez, but it takes them time to identity the flaws in his game. Minor league performance is an incredibly projectable and accurate indicator of future success, when analyzed correctly.

What do I mean by performance relative to age and league difficulty? A couple of things. First off, the minor leagues tend to have much more extreme park effects than the majors. The Pacific Coast League has enough hitters ballparks to make it a well-defined hitters league. The Florida State League, due to the local weather, is very tough on hitters. For age, I want to see how a player did against more or less advanced hitters and pitchers. Jesus Montero's .326/.376/.491 line wouldn't be as impressive had he not been 18 years old in A ball, or if he hadn't done it in the South Atlantic League, a mild pitcher's league.

I also care a lot about closeness to the major leagues. People tend to overrate players who show tons of promise, both on the field and in their tools, when they are lower in the minor leagues. No matter how good a player looks in A ball, he's still got a long journey ahead of him full of land mines that he will have to avoid. Time is both a prospect's worst enemy and best friend. It may be his best friend when he has flaws to work out - a pitcher in A ball has years to figure out how to throw a changeup - but it also gives him time to develop them.

There is a debate within the prospect community about whether or not to put more weight toward a prospect's ceiling or his reliability. That is, should a high risk, high reward prospect be ranked ahead of a medium risk, medium reward one? Generally, I tend to shy away from risk. That said, being that this top-30 is the absolute cream of the crop, I do not have any tremendous risks included. If the list were to be expanded to top-100, then there would be some debate about ranking guys who fall into different parts of the risk/reward matrix. In other words, pretty much all of these guys are medium-risk, high reward.

So, my top-30 will be slanted toward players about to break into the major leagues, perhaps more so than other rankers on the internet. As far as I can tell I'm the first to rank baseball-wide prospects and publish the list, so we'll see where I compare to others in a few weeks. Next week, I will commence with prospect profiles. I will count down from 30 to 1, and write a full report on each prospect, including a scouting report and an explanation of why I ranked each prospect.