Post-Trade Deadline Free For All Mailbag

The trade deadline has past, the direction for the rest of 2024 is set…and There R Giants’ readers have thoughts! And I have thoughts on those thoughts… and might just go on a few rants today.

Let’s get right into the bag after a quick word from our sponsor — you folks!

Travis Bickle

Roger, I am left really frustrated that Farhan Zaidi didn’t just trade Yaz, Conforto, Flores, et al for whatever he could get so more young players could spend the last two months of the season getting reps at the major league level. The half in, half out approach of Farhan is not only frustrating for fans, it comes at the expense of the future as the team chases a meaningless third wild card spot. Short-term thinking, and perhaps job security concerns are hurting this organization.

Travis, I know a lot of fans feel the way you do. But to be perfectly honest, I am not one of them. Frankly, my preference would have been to see them buy a big bat. Whenever I see the notion you’ve expressed here (which is often these days!) — dump all the vets, play every young player in the upper minors for as long as it takes for them to turn into good major league players, always be looking towards some indefinite future in the green fields of the mind — my thoughts immediately jump to the fact that there actually is a team in major league baseball that operates this way — and has for years. That team is the Colorado Rockies, and I don’t see any reason to feel envious of their fanbase. [Increasingly, the Angels seem to act this way as well; they’ve been pushing the “Youth Movement” since about April this year, and already can be seen shoving their 2024 top draft pick up towards the big league lineup, where I’m sure he’ll appear by September. But I’m not jealous of their fans either.]

In fact, I think it must really suck to be a Rockies’ (or Angels’) fan, despite the fact that every single year, they put a team on the field that is almost entirely made up of young, homegrown players, who are given literally 1000s of at bats to prove themselves at the major league level whether their performance supports that decision or not. That honestly doesn’t seem like a great way to run a major league club in my opinion, and I think the long, sad history of that franchise tells us that it doesn’t necessarily build towards anything most of the time. Quite often, it’s just a treadmill. Yaz and Flores and Conforto have been good starting major league players. Yaz is a solid player right now. That is a bar that only a tiny, tiny percent of players in the minors will ever clear.

Generally, I think there’s a significant segment of people who are far too future focused. I think people like to escape out of a present that is difficult and messy and imperfect by dreaming of a long-term plan that will come together without a hitch. But I promise you that when the future arrives, it too, will be difficult and messy and imperfect. And the many flaws on that wished-for future roster will have to be shored up, one imperfect personnel move after another — just as we see the Dodgers and Braves and Astros and whichever teams you’d like the Giants mimic forced to do every year.

I spend an incredible amount of my time trying to understand the world of player development, and I obviously celebrate the work that goes into real development success stories large and small. But when it comes to giving major league opportunities to young players, I tend to agree with something I once heard Dusty Baker say: “I’m in the making you earn it business, not in the giving it away business.” And I don’t see any players who are not currently on this big league roster who can legitimately say they have earned major league playing opportunities right now who aren’t getting them.

The Giants made moves that gave Marco Luciano a clear path to steady play the rest of the way. We’re seeing starting lineups that include Tyler Fitzgerald, Heliot Ramos, Patrick Bailey, and even Casey Schmitt every day — and this weekend, they even added Jerar Encarnación, who, let’s face it, probably faces somewhat long odds to stick as a successful big leaguer unless something has REALLY changed about him at the plate (of course, you could have said the same thing about Yaz five years ago). While I think that players like Fitzgerald and Ramos did earn opportunities earlier than they were given with the Giants, I don’t really see anybody in that situation right now. Not for nothing, but it’s worth remembering that Ramos and Fitzgerald, the guys having the most success this year, were the ones who didn’t get a lot of opportunity last year. I don’t know that just failing over and over at the top level is necessarily the best way to advance. Sometimes that kind of failure may motivate a player to seek major changes to their swings that can lead to better things — a la Brett Wisely. But a lot of times, just getting it shoved at you isn’t all that productive.

It’s also worth noting, as we’re seeing with Ramos right now — young guys get hurt, too. And the more you intentionally thin out your depth, the closer you are to having Ryan McKenna and Trenton Brooks in your starting outfield for a month.

I will say this clearly and consistently: I am anti-rebuild. The majority of times they don’t accomplish anything special, and quite often they are abject failures. I think they represent a failure of both imagination and character. In fact, I think words like “rebuild” and “sustainable success” often have more to do with job retention strategies for executives than with successful roster building. I believe in playing meaningful baseball. I believe in competing to the best of one’s ability. And I don’t believe that willingly trotting out Triple-A rosters on a major league field for long stretches of time is responsible or admirable in any way.

My serious question in return for you, Travis is this: why would an actual, tangible appearance in a post-season this year be meaningless, while pursuing some imaginary, future that is not even close to formed — or even particularly nascent — be meaningful? I wouldn’t want to face a top three of Snell, Webb, and Ray in a post-season series. That’s pretty strong! Is there any reason at all to believe that “playing for the future” will lead to a stronger, more competitive roster in 2027 or 2028 or whenever? I don’t see what that argument would be. They’re certainly not likely to have two Cy Young Award winners and a runner up on their starting staff again any time soon. Obviously, there’s a strong chance that the club won’t make it to the playoffs. Failure is always the default outcome in baseball as I repeat over and over. But I’d prefer to watch real big leaguers (and one very special arm!) compete for it than to see an endless series of uncompetitive efforts chasing equally long odds for some insubstantial future.

So Travis, my advice to you comes from the famed Vietnamese monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, who said: “Life is only available in the here and now. The past is already gone, and the future is yet to come. There is only one moment for me to live in. The present moment.” Enjoy it to its fullest!

Brady Klopfer

On a post-deadline KNBR hit explaining the decision to keep Blake Snell, Farhan Zaidi mentioned that the team wasn't too enticed by packages of B-level prospects (my term, not his), and specifically noted that they already had a lot of players like that, with the implication being that there wasn't a lot of value in accruing more. Has the shrinking domestic reserve list impacted how the Giants (or baseball in general) value non-elite prospects in trades? For lack of a more humane term, a lottery ticket becomes a lot less valuable when you have to get rid of another lottery ticket to make room for the new one.

I don’t know that the domestic reserve list has much of an impact in that respect, Brady. We’re talking about 40/45 grade players mostly being dealt and certainly the rosters of the affiliates for every team are made up of plenty of players who aren’t close to that level. I think what Zaidi is talking about is much more about value return.

A couple of years ago, when the Giants were weighing the choice of trading Carlos Rodón, I was talking with someone in the Giants’ scouting area about the complications of such a transaction. The real problem, as he put it, was that, from the Giants perspective, you’re trading a star, and you need to get a potential star back — or, at least a starting player who has the potential to grow into a steady, productive part of winning ball club. The trading team believes that for a chip of that impact (a potential #1 starter in a post-seasons series), you need to get the other team’s top prospect. But most acquiring teams these days won’t move their top prospect — or even their top cluster of prospects. Taking one pertinent example, that scout said “the Yankees wouldn’t even consider offering us Anthony Volpe (then their #1 prospect).” What they’d do instead, this scout said, is offer two or three guys they didn’t really believe in, and probably were internally soured on — players who had power but couldn’t hit, or who could hit but couldn’t really handle the up the middle spot they were currently playing, or who had ability but who had shown character traits that made their club leery. “They’ll try to give you a volume of guys that neither of you believe will really be major league starters, rather than one guy who you both believe will.”

And that I think is really where the trade market was this year — for all the talk of costs being high, no top prospects were moved and no Top 100 prospect was traded (though apparently one was offered in a deal that the White Sox killed). Instead, everybody wants to move two or three guys from their 10-20 range — guys who have some skills, but who nobody really thinks are going to be major league starters. There were one or two exceptions to that this year, but even the player who I’d argue was absolutely the best one traded, Agustín Ramirez, fits the category that scout outlined: he can really hit but it’s highly questionable whether he’s a catcher, and if he’s not, then the path to starting becomes complicated. Basically, everybody these days is trading prospects who profile as complementary types, not their top guys. And they SHOULD be trading their top guys for a chance to have Rodón or Snell starting playoff games for them. There are absolutely teams that should regret not pressing harder for a player of Snell’s talents come October. Fortunately, A.J. Preller exists, because the other 29 front offices are all locked into this hyper-conservative mindset of: “cautious, careful, disciplined.” Don’t do anything too big that you come to regret — apparently, nobody regrets errors of omission these days.

In a pre-deadline podcast last week, J.J. Cooper, Executive Editor of Baseball America, said that, on average, about 60 prospects are dealt every July, and of that number, if 2 or 3 go on to have a moderately successful career (say five or six years), they consider that a very good deadline. Think of some of the recent big sales. The Cubs dealt the core of their championship club in 2021. Three years later, the chances look moderately high that they will never have even one average major league starter out of that sale — and it’s improbable at this point that they end up with more than that. The Yankees’ famous mini-sale of 2016 — which excited some Yankees’ fans I know more than any of their recent playoff appearances have — garnered them four different top 100 prospects. But only Gleyber Torres turned into a useful big league player, and he’s mostly annoyed and frustrated those same fans over the last six years. History tells us very clearly and very loudly that it’s buyers and not sellers who win the deadline year after year.

What I think Farhan was saying — and I totally agree with him here — is that what they were being offered the up and down guys, the platoon profiles, the bench utility dudes, maybe a backend starter, maybe a bullpen arm. And in return, what those teams wanted was for the Giants to sacrifice the ability to play meaningful games in August and September — which, as I think my answer to Travis above should indicate, I really believe is much more important than people seem to acknowledge. Watching meaningless games in August is drudgery. Watching meaningless games in September is, even for a hardcore fan like myself, an act of almost willful masochism.

If you’re gonna sell a dude — you’d better get a dude back! That’s my credo! And teams don’t seem to want to give up dudes any more.

Scott C.

There’s no hiding that the big league club has been mediocre at best for three straight years after the 107-win miracle. But has real progress been made under the hood? Where do you feel the org stands in terms of developing/ producing assets compared to the last two middling years? The just-passed trade deadline seems like a good juncture for that assessment. If there had been, say, a Vlad Guerrero, Jr. sweepstakes, do the Giants now have the assets to have assembled a much more competitive offer than they could 2 years ago when Juan Soto was on the block? Or than they could have in a hypothetical offer for a star a year ago? Can you quantify that in some way? Maybe a good measure would be to compare the org’s young talent each year—prospects and players who haven’t accrued 2 years of service time. Or if you have a better analysis, I’m eager to read it. All this is getting at: Is the all-important PD engine in a markedly better spot?

These questions all seem to be of a series! So continuing my remarks above regarding A.J. Preller, here’s an interesting thing about the Juan Soto “Sweepstakes” which The Athletic’s Britt Ghiroli (who is very tightly connected with the Nats’ front office), said last week — were it not for the existence of Preller, Soto couldn’t have been traded two years ago, because there were no other offers made that were even serious enough to act as conversation starters from the Nats’ perspective. Which is to say that this is a difficult question to answer, because the “ability” to make a “competitive offer” and the willingness to do so are very different things.

Again, no top 100 prospects were dealt this year. The Giants have some top 100 prospects! Ergo, we might imagine that the Giants would have had the ability to land players who were dealt — and maybe some who weren’t — by offering up players like Carson Whisenhunt, Marco Luciano, Bryce Eldridge, Kyle Harrison, or Hayden Birdsong. But more and more, that’s not how teams operate these days, and I don’t think it’s how the Giants operate either. The combination of management consultant techniques taking over most of MLB and the lowered threshold for reaching expanded playoffs has made risk taking pretty much an extinct species around this game. Dave Flemming, speaking in the wake of the deadline, intimated that the Giants made a strong push to acquire some middle of the order bat in an interview on 95.7 this week, but were unable to get it done — whether that reflected their unwillingness to deal from that pool above or the other team’s greater demands is impossible to say.

That said, I get that that’s not the thrust of Scott’s question here. You want to know if the club is getting closer to accomplishing its goal of getting younger.

In one respect, the answer is clearly “Yes.” From 2019-2022, the Giants had the oldest position player group in the National League, tipping over an average age of 30 years old for several of those years. This year, they’re more middle of the pack, with an average age of 28.9 this year. They’re fielding lineups every night that have players 25 or younger in Patrick Bailey, Ramos, Luciano, and Casey Schmitt or Brett Wisely in the mix (not to mention the injured Jung-Hoo Lee). Twenty-two-year-old Matos has been a part of the team, and a pair of 22-year-olds will be in the rotation for the rest of the way. So the presence and impact of youth has been larger this year.

The underside of that, I think, is that the upper minors at this point are getting close to emptied out at this point. Whisenhunt, Matos, maybe Grant McCray can develop into pieces of this wave. Carson Ragsdale is a big league arm of some nature I think, though the command is still a little work in progress. But that’s really the end of the “close-to-ready” group of players right now, and even there, you’re pretty immediately into the 45 FV with high risk category (which is how I’d categorize McCray at this point) or lower. Eldridge may turn into the type of guy who can move fast, but outside of that, you’re talking about players who are pretty far away and will take time to germinate (if indeed they do). So, the wave of youth that was coming is now here, and it’s an open question how much impact that wave really is going to provide. Potential help, good players, we’re seeing flashes of potential that excites. But are we seeing more than just a homegrown version of the same sort of limited ceiling, complementary pieces that Farhan Zaidi has shown himself fully capable of finding elsewhere in the game? Are the young guys looking like they’re going to become something more than what the Giants have gotten out of scrap heap finds like Thairo Estrada, Mike Yastrzemski, LaMonte Wade Jr., Alex Wood, or Kevin Gausman?

That’s the $60,000 question. It’s certainly good to have every day starters that have grown and developed in the organization, played together and won together, and think of themselves as Giants. That’s an absolute good. But we still have to ask: are there any stars here? Can the team find the real needle-moving type of players they’ve chased externally for years from one of these internal developments? That I think is harder to answer affirmatively at this point. Time will tell.

One thing that I love about player development professionals is their relentless optimism. Talk to anybody who works in player development and you get energized by the sense that every single player is a future big leaguer. Real faith in the potential lying in every player is a crucial part of their jobs and all the ones I know truly do have that faith. And yet, their hope and optimism is never dimmed by the inevitable failures. Rather, a just one or two success stories will put a huge skip into their step. So, seeing Ramos and Fitzgerald and Birdsong etc. take such big steps forward has people in the organization feeling extremely optimistic about this year!

I am, too. I’m extremely excited about the chance to watch players I’ve covered in the minors playing in Nats’ Stadium this week and cheering them on (five in the starting lineup last night)!

Yes, things are in a better place, particularly on the pitching side (at least some of which has to do with their run of pitcher heavy drafts). But there is still an important step that eludes them. They have to find more impact players. Will Luciano develop into that? Will Bailey ever find 20-homer power, or will he always be a defense-first player? Eldridge is just 19, and, as a 1b, is tied to a position that doesn’t really produce a lot of stars in the game, especially in the current game, where every position has players capable of hitting bombs. And beyond him? It’s an open question of where exactly those middle-of-the-order impact bats, those franchise altering talents are going to come from.

TL:DR: Good place, better than past, more to go.

Chuck Murphy

Catch people up on injured and rehabbing players ...I think your readers might be interested in what is going on with players in the organization who have been shut down from injuries and how they are coming along.

Chuck, I would really, REALLY love to do that. So much so, that, to the annoyance of Farm Director Kyle Haines, I do pepper him every now and then with exactly these questions: how is so and so doing in their rehab, when is Player X or Y coming back? This I can say, is not a terribly fruitful exercise on my part. (Haines is always extremely respectful and professional in declining to satisfy my inquiries). The Giants, like most other orgs these days I daresay, are extremely close-mouthed on this topic, often falling back on the NHL style “upper body” and “lower body” injury terminology, if that.

They will always say that it is a privacy issue for players — and that is true to an extent, though obviously professionals across the sports world have that notion of privacy eschewed on a pretty regular basis. And players tend to talk about their health situations pretty freely when I have access to them. More than that, I think most front offices just feel that there’s not a lot to be gained from talking about rehab process. All injury rehab works on a very uncertain timeline — small setbacks are extremely common — and they see no value in putting out information publicly that might need to be contradicted later (the 2024 saga of Alex Cobb is a great example of how frustrating setting expectations that go unmet can be).

Until players actually return to active duty, it’s always radio silence on this topic —unless players choose to put information out themselves in some way (Instagram feeds are popular). I would guess that you would actually know much more about at least one player (and possibly more) in this situation than I do! Ryan Murphy disappeared from Richmond with a shoulder issue, I believe, and I haven’t heard hide nor hair of him since. Same goes for Matt Frisbee, though I believe a different ailment in his case

That said, there are some players about whom we can talk.

Whisenhunt, who suffered a foot injury, pitched one inning this weekend in a camp game at Scottsdale, and should be on his way back at some point this month.

Aeverson Arteaga has been playing steadily in Arizona after undergoing thoracic outlet surgery, though I don’t think he has played the field yet. I would expect him to get an assignment to one of the A-ball clubs before the end of the year and then finish his season in the Arizona Fall League. Dariel Lopez, who suffered a very serious injury to his kneecaps, started taking BP several weeks ago about the same time as Arteaga, and he may be close to ready for game at bats at this point as well.

Tyler Vogel, who disappeared in April, has recently returned to Eugene. He got in a few rehab games in the ACL before being activated. His velo wasn’t quite where it was pre-injury, but his strength was apparently built up enough for a return to active duty. It will be interesting to see if the same is true for Liam Simon, who was also throwing one-inning stints in Arizona after returning from Tommy John surgery. Simon never looked terribly comfortable in his ACL outings, and he was having real issues with back to the backstop level wildness, so I’m not sure if we’ll be seeing him at an affiliate. Hopefully. Spencer Miles on the other hand, looked fantastic in his brief return from a forearm flexor strain this spring. However, his eye-popping return was short lived, as his velocity dropped precipitously in his fifth rehab appearance and he hasn’t pitched since.

Maui Ahuna hasn’t played defense since April, and even his attempt to stick to just DHing wasn’t sustainable in the long run, and he’s disappeared now, too. The Giants have had an incredible run of injuries so there are so many more on this list.

But I think I want to leave this section by returning to something I posted a couple weeks ago from a great series of videos that the Royals’ PD group put out about the rehab process. There are three of these videos and they’re all worth watching, but I’m going to leave you with a couple that I think people should really pay attention to to understand what this process is like:

A.G.

Is there as clear a presence of newly sanctioned sports bookie types trawling the minors as in MLB? What's the consensus opinion on betting amongst the veteran baseball folks you encounter? No congressional committees to be convened to assess the sanctity of the national game? Never thought when Barnum & Bailey folded their tent, the center pole would be erected over the entire country. Curmudgeonly yours, over n out.

Certainly, I don’t see that type around the stadiums. No sports book room at The Diamond! But I wouldn’t want to speak for off-the-field environments. That said, given the recent severe punishments that MLB meted out to a variety of minor leaguers, up to life suspension, for very small dollar amounts of sports betting, I would say that any minor league who gets involved with these types probably has some extra holes in their heads.

However, I agree with your overall curmudgeonness on the topic. I, too, am fairly sickened by the zest with which all sports owners have leapt into bed with gambling money.

MikeH

Just seen San Jose have added Ryan Reckley, Jose Ortiz, and (newbie) Robert Hipwell to the roster amongst a flurry of moves. Do you see many more of these on the month ahead, Roger? Thinking firstly Rayner Arias and Walker Martin.

Well, good news, Mike! Martin was assigned to San Jose yesterday and will, presumably be making his full-season debut today or tomorrow. And yes, I do assume there will be more. San Jose’s season runs another five weeks, likely with a playoff appearance after that, so there’s plenty of time to integrate new players in. I’d frankly be surprised if Tibbs and Jordan don’t join the club in that time, and possibly Christian as well. Arias is more of a maybe for me at this point. He’s still just 18 and didn’t exactly tear the cover off the ball this year in the ACL, and his swing looks like it’s gotten a little loopy this summer. So waiting until next spring to see if he can push that assignment is a possibility. Though, as we see with Martin, it’s not just about the performance when it comes to some of these decisions.

Nick Yatsko

Hi Roger - wondering about the process the org will be going through when they must add the drafted players to the 165 list? For opening slots, some combination of performance, potential, positional need, etc.? You've spoken a little bit about this but can you expand on the challenges? Thanks much!

Jason Doherty

Hey there, Roger, my question is regarding the sort of bats the Giants focused on in the 2024 draft, breaking the FZ Model. (Big raw power, and lower hit tool). Given the new 165 rule, which of our current prospects are in jeopardy? Barring Tibbs III and Jordan, which bats are you most interested in and why?

The key factor here is really the timing of when players are added to the list. There are “in-season” decisions that need to be made for players who are added to active rosters while the season is still ongoing (like Robert Hipwell, who was added to San Jose’s roster last week). Let me table those for a moment.

For the players who are NOT added to a roster over the next five weeks, they get folded into a much different, and much larger series of moves after baseball’s “championship season” has been completed (i.e., after the conclusion of the World Series).

This is going to be super confusing and maybe more detail than you’d like, but let me try to explain how the domestic reserve list operates once the season is over, because there are a lot of different things going on at that point:

• the domestic list expands to 175 in the offseason;

• all 40-man members are taken off list (players who are optioned to the minors are placed on the domestic reserve list, but obviously there are no optioned players in the off-season)

• all players on the 60-day IL or Injured Full-Season lists are returned to the list

• all players eligible for minor league free agency are removed from the list. This includes so called “six year free agents,” (or every player who made their pro debut in 2018) as well as nearly every player who was signed to a minor league FA deal the this year (with very rare exceptions, minor league FA deals are always for one year)

• all newly signed players (draftees and UDFA) not previously added to list in-season must be added.

So, as you can see, there are countervailing push-pull pressures being exerted once we get to the off-season. The list expands, it gets a bunch of people lopped off; it gets a different bunch added back in, and all of the above happens on the same day, so front office folks have to be really agile to make the numbers work out right. And, of course, teams are cognizant that they want to leave some room throughout the offseason, because all of the non-roster guys with invites to spring camp and minor league FA signed during the offseason will need to be added onto this list during the winter.

That’s maybe an overlong tangent from your primary question (and, I think, Jason’s as well), which, as I take it is: how does the team decide which players to let go when that is the only way to make space, whether that happens now or in the winter?

Positional need does play a small part in the story — particularly for pitchers and catchers, who are always in critical need to keep the minor league machine turning on a daily basis. And, of course, no team wants to leave itself with a roster full of left fielders and no middle infielders, to make a broad but obvious point.

But really, when it comes to releases, the question is pretty simply about performance and time: has this player progressed as much as we need them to. Mostly, you’ll see a couple of different types of players dominate the release notices: players who have made it to the upper minors, but appeared to plateau there (think of last winter’s release of Carter Aldrete, or the more recent one of Dilan Rosario, as an example there), or players who have been at the lowest levels for several years without showing the type of progress that would lead to moving them up (Mauricio Pierre, recently released is an example there).

Younger, more inexperienced and raw players are going to be given more chances for things to click, but at some point, you have to show that you can move beyond the very lowest levels (because there are more players coming up behind you). Once players get up to Double-A, I think it doesn’t take as long for the line between who is cutting it and who isn’t to become apparent. Two years without progress in Double-A is probably about where it gets drawn.

Of course, that’s always been true. Where the 165 rule really starts to have an effect, I think, is in the time that players are given to prove themselves. I don’t know that a P.J. Hilson type would get four years in the complex league under these new rules, for example. Justin Bench and Tanner O’Tremba only got parts of three years to prove themselves before their recent releases. Both were college players who really didn’t prove themselves capable of commanding daily spots in the lineup in A-ball, so the decision was understandable. Still, that’s a very telescoped timeframe to have to make a final decision on players. But that’s the new reality for Farm Directors. New players are coming in and old ones won’t get the same number of chances they once did.

So, to answer Jason’s question: look at the Stats Review when it comes out later today and see who is at the bottom of those tables in overall performance metrics. And then look at the daily lineups and see who is losing playing time to their teammates. Those two things will point you in the right direction.

As for bats beyond the first two who I’m excited about? I like to try to keep an open mind and see what guys do once they get into professional training, but I guess Hipwell and Darby get the most talk of that group. Jeremiah Jenkins is a huge dude with big raw power. Michael Holmes swears by Christian’s athleticism. I’m open to surprises!

Bob L

McCray still isn’t running much. Why?

Also, any chance we see Meckler at Oracle this year?

A couple people asked the same question about McCray. I took my best shot at answering this question in the last mailbag, so check the final answer there:

"Let's Get the Second Half Started" Free for All Mailbag

As for Meckler in Oracle, I’d say there’s a pretty good chance! He’s back in Sacramento now, he told me he’s feeling healthy, and he’s one of only two healthy outfielders who are currently on the 40-man in the minor leagues. So if an outfielder gets hurt over the next couple of months, there aren’t too many choices outside of him!

Jodi

Hi Roger, I'm sure you'll touch on this once the new rankings for farm systems and prospects are published. I have two questions in relation to player and system rankings 1) How are prospects evaluated and thus ranked? Who ranks them? It seems like different outlets seem to have different yard sticks for evaluating players and their tools--Baseball Prospectus, Baseball America, Fangraphs etc. 2) How are farm systems ranked? I would assume that player rankings and their future values play a huge role, but it doesn't seem that simple. I'd love to hear your insight on this and whether or not these rankings ought to be taken as a holy grail, with a grain of salt, or somewhere in between. Thanks!!! Love your content!

Hi Jodi, thanks for the question. I’m not crazy about commenting on the content of the work of other outlets whose work I greatly respect, but let me say a couple of things about your question that will hopefully satisfy you.

Every outlet — mine included — has its own methodology for these rankings and lists. Some rely more on their own first-hand scouting, others are more reliant on speaking with industry sources. Baseball America, which I would consider the Bible of prospect writing, has always stated clearly that they are journalists, not scouts, and while they corporately get out to see nearly all of these players, their work is meant to reflect the industry’s broad consensus on players. Fangraphs’ work is much more reliant on first-hand observation and so on. Equally, every one has some slight difference in the “special sauce” of org ranking, but generally speaking, it’s some combination of the amount of high end quality that an org has (how many 55 or up FV players are there) along with the depth of the system in terms of useful role players (actually, Fangraphs prospect work is highly transparent, and you can read on their site exactly how the org rankings and other lists build up from the value they’ve assigned to players).

What all of these lists are attempting to do in some way or form is to give public shape to a process that is always going on inside front offices. Teams build and keep “pref lists” of every team in MLB (including themselves). They send scouts and cross-checkers to cover every club, and the paperwork that scouts do on a daily basis is frankly staggering. Every time I see scouts at the stadiums, they are just come from filing reports on players that have taken up their entire day. Those reports are assembled, cross-checked, and fed into some sort of modeling program to create a ranking that a front office can use for trade talks with every other club, as well as things like Rule 5 targets, minor league free agents and so on.

Though it seems obvious, it must always be repeated that this isn’t a science. Every club will evaluate the 5000 or so prospects they cover slightly differently. One scout may see a future starter where another sees one whose issues will be exposed by higher competition. No two scouts see exactly the same player — indeed, scouts who go back to cover a player a second time may not see the same player! The variance of opinion is as wide as one would imagine when you understand that the goal here is to predict the future — and anybody who was really good at that would go get themselves rich and not live on a scout’s salary!

The future is unwritten. With only a couple of exceptions, I had trouble getting most people in the industry to agree with me that Tyler Fitzgerald might turn into quality big leaguer (and let me say, that skepticism wasn’t always external to the Giants). But he has done the work to limit his flaws and accentuate his strengths to the point that he is going to be given the opportunity to craft a career as a starter for himself. Few people expected that! But watching the future unfold is always a curious and rewarding venture. Part of learning is to learn how little you truly understand.

And with that, we’ll close up this week’s bag! Onwards! We’ll see what the future holds.