Prospectus Annual on Prospects

Baseball Prospectus recently published their annual book which is a must read for baseball fans. They’ve also been rolling out some changes to their stats, many of which show up in the annual. The biggest change is their fielding metric, FRAA which you can find out about here. Using FRAA and TAv, or true average (which was also subject to some tweaking), I wanted to take another look at how some prospects did in 2010.

And here’s a chart with the information in addition to each players WARP:

First of all, I used the level each player spent the majority of time at in 2010. I could also only use the players Baseball Prospectus included in book. I decided to add WARP which is similarly composed to Fangraphs and B-Ref’s WAR. It has a positional adjustment as well as fielding, hitting and base running components.The WARP number you see in the chart is for each specific level which is also affected by playing time- David Adams only had 150ish ABs because of his injury while Gary Sanchez and Cito Culver were in short season leagues. Also as I’m sure everyone knows, TAv is scaled on batting average, so .260 is always league average.

A few thoughts…Eduardo Nunez ladies and gentlemen, in all his glory….I was interested to see that Corban Joseph has markedly worse numbers at 2nd than at 3rd. According to Baseball Prospectus since 2008, Co Jo is -30 runs at 2nd base across 3 levels. Yikes. On the other hand he plays well at 3rd base, posting 12 runs above average since he starting playing there in 2009. Those numbers are confirmed by TZ data from 2008 and 2009, the last seasons in which we have TZ minor league data (sob)….I was surprised to see Laird’s FRAA for 2010 in Trenton although it appears to be an outlier. He looks like an average to 1 or 2 runs below average at 3rd- who knows what his OF numbers look like…Out of all the position players listed in the book, Brett Gardner had the best BRR, or base running runs- the next highest in the organization was Dan Brewer, with 4.6 runs above average. Brewer’s defense is negative in right field but he was one run above average in LF. He could be a nice 4th outfielder although he doesn’t have the sort of power you look for in a corner outfielder….Speaking of base running, Montero is really Posada-esque in that regard: -5.6 runs below average for Posada and -5.0 for Montero.

Again this is all just one year of data and relatively meaningless if you ignore the scouting information. Still, it’s fun to look at and certainly pretty interesting. Let’s hear it in the comments, what stands out to you guys?

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