Success And Failure
Posted on February 16th, 2011 by Jeff in Minor Leagues, tags: Bryan Anderson, Colby Rasmus, Daniel Descalso, Tyler GreeneErik pointed out a great post on Royal Review by Scott McKinney in which Scott takes a look at a Success and Bust rates for Baseball America’s top 100 prospects over 13 years to see how they turned out. And I thought that on the eve of spring training, this was a good check on the “hope springs eternal” optimism of Spring Training.
To cut to the chase (and you should absolutely read the whole article), McKinney comes to the mathematical conclusion that 70% of BA’s top 100 prospects bust. The carnage is even greater for pitching prospects who busted closer to 80% of the time. The top prospects obviously were more often successful than their lower ranked counterparts, but the most interesting part of the graph was that the results began to be practically linear towards the 60-100 prospects.
Since one would expect that the ranking of numbers 60-100 is done with a lot of guesswork (and educated guesswork – I’m not trying to rip the prospect list makers, they have a difficult job even with all the inside information they receive), prospects farther down the list would be subject to this theory as well.
So, how does this apply to the Cardinals you ask. Well, based on that research, you can say that roughly 70% of the Cardinals prospects are going to end up as busts. And Scott applied the bust label to 1.5 WAR per season on average during their cost controlled years. Obviously, I’m painting his excellent research with a very broad brush. Check out his post for the full methodology. Colby Rasmus would be one of the Cardinals prospects who would count squarely in the success pile for this experiment.
This resonated with me pretty strongly as some of the Cardinals prospects that were at one time or another highly thought of (thinking about Tyler Greene, Bryan Anderson and Daniel Descalso specifically – even though I still think of them highly personally) struggle to get traction in the majors. And whatever that reason might be (that is fodder for 7 or 8 other posts) they have not. And I think that’s something important to think about as we will get 7 or 8 glowing reports of each and every prospect in the Cardinals farm system over the next month and a half. A lot of these guys will not be successful major leaguers, but I’ll be damned if it is not fun trying to find out who is and who is not.
Entries (RSS)
What an interesting story. Does that mean that those players that are never mentioned as top prospects by Baseball America but are in the farm system have a better chance of making it to the big leagues, or are these statistics compiled from top prospects only? I know of a few players that I think will make it to the big leagues, but they sure haven’t been labeled as top prospects by Baseball America.
It’s only top 100 prospects as ranked by Baseball America.
So Bryan Anderson would’ve been a candidate, but the others you’re thinking of wouldn’t. (I think Daryl Jones qualifies as well, although I can’t remember if he made BA’s list, or Keith Law’s, or both, or something else entirely.)
The survey ends in 2003, so it predates Colby, but includes a lot of the guys on the current team: Albert (who only made it one year, ranked somewhere in the 40s), Wainwright, Carp, Holliday, Berkman …
I don’t think Yadi ever made the BA top 100.
The other thing to remember is that analysis called players with less than 1.5 WAR (wins above replacement level) a bust. These are prospects who made the major leagues, so simply “making it to the big leagues” doesn’t mean you’re a successful prospect. Scott McKinney probably did that because a vast majority of the top 100 BA players probably do make it the majors at some point, and to measure the results of a highly talented prospect, you needed to have higher expectations. If a top 100 SS became a utility player in the majors, for instance, he’d be labeled a bust because the expectation was that he’d be a starting shortstop of some value.
“this was a good check on the “hope springs eternal” optimism of Spring Training.”
Yea! Put that optimism back in the garbage, where it belongs!
While I can see th elogic in assuming that Descalso will fall into the usual pattern of “struggle to get traction” I think it is way to early to put him there.
>> He only has 1 year at AAA.
>> He was put on the 40 man roster and played in the majors prior to needing to be protected from the rule 5 draft.
>> Once in the majors he ended up starting to finish the season.
>> This year will be his first Spring training while being on the roster.
While it is most likely he will end up back at AAA next year no matter how well he does this Spring, I think we should wait for him to struggle to get traction before we actually categorize him as such.
Here’s what the author, Scott McKinney, says about 2nd basemen in the BA top 100:
“Among position players, second base prospects have the least success, but this data is somewhat less reliable because the number of second base prospects in the overall top prospect population is so low (only 42). But this low number reflects how poorly second base prospects are regarded, and I think there is likely good reason for this.”
I’m curious about why Descalso has made two consecutive Topps all-star teams for his level — AA and AAA. What do those voters see that BA and others miss?
Maybe worth noting that another really successful 2nd baseman from the Cards system, Polanco, was never ranked in the top 100 by BA. But Adam Kennedy was.
Polanco was a late bloomer with an OPS of over .700 (.709) once in his minor league career. He really came on the map at age 29 when he put up his first .800+ OPS.
True. But thanks to his defense, he surpassed McKinney’s 1.5-WAR threshold every full season in the majors, starting in 2000, his age-24 season. (I used B-R’s numbers, which may be higher than others, but I think McKinney used them as well.)
He had negative WAR in two partial seasons before that, so his 1.9-WAR 2000 put him at just about replacement level for his young career.
Then in 2001 he had 3.9 WAR, and has been around MLB average or above every year since. For his career he’s now at 33 WAR, with defense accounting for about a third of that.
Thanks for that amplification. To be honest, Iever knew Polanco’s defense was so good.
I think fans some times lose perspective. For intance, the data shows that second base has the least success. Other data shows that shortstops are the hardest position to develop. I don’t think most casual fans realize this. You see alot of criticism about the cards not developing middle infielders, but I don’t think those realize this is common among all teams.
Second basemen probably have the least success because that position tends to be a destination for failed shortstops. There’s more competition for the position, and prospects drafted for the position tend to be less valuable and unable to change positions. It’s like the value of a reliever prospects–it’s not a high demand position for young talent because there’s so many cheap ways to fill the position effectively.
It appears from these data that Cardinals farm hands who make it onto the top-100 lists have a somewhat better than average chance of qualifying as a “success” (or at least not a “bust”) in the bigs, but fewer than the statistical share make those lists to begin with. Neither number is far enough from the average to qualify individually as a statistically significant outlier (the way, say, Atlanta’s 43 top-100 players or Arizona’s 11 — yes, 11 — do), but the combination of the two suggests that fewer “busts” than usual emerge from the Cardinals system.
I speculate that what we’re seeing here is more evidence for the “East Coast bias” thing that Cardinals fans have complained about for as long as there have been Cardinals fans. A prospect seemingly has to be better than average to attract the writers’ notice if he’s in the Cardinals system, from which the smaller number of “busts” follows. On balance, things are probably better that way, even if it gets irritating to read about it. Look at it this way: the much ballyhooed Atlanta system has had 31 busts, more than the Cardinals have had top-100 candidates total. Would you rather be like that?
Probably some truth to that. But historicly the cards have also taken many college players. Lots of time HS and younger players are deamed prospects based solely on potential, where college kids rankings are more production based. By this premis alone college kids will have a lower bust rate.
I will try to read the article, but one thought just on this descriptor is that a 1.5 WAR threshold would mean every relief prospect who’s not jon papelbon is a bust. A guy who comes up as a reliever and is a successful setup man in the majors will probably not break 1.5 WAR season after season. Is there any accounting for that?
Remember that we’re not talking about a team’s top 100 (or 20 or even 10) prospects here; we’re talking about the top 100 prospects per year in ALL of baseball. I would agree with you that if you’re Kyle McClellan, were a 25th-round draft choice, and never appeared on anyone’s top-100 list except your mom’s, a setup/middle-relief career averaging 0.8 WAR doesn’t make you a “bust;” rather, it makes you a success beyond your, the team’s, and even your mom’s wildest dreams. But there is a big difference between K-Mac on the one hand, and Jair Jurrjens, Chris Tillman, Gio Gonzalez, etc., on the other. You EXPECT those guys to go on to big things; that’s why they were top-100 prospects (in 2008). A top-100 prospect who tops out at setup may have had a major-league career that you and I could only dream about, but he is intrinsically still a bust compared to what a top-100 guy *should* achieve.