Let's face it, unless you work on scouting minor league players practically full-time, it's pretty tough to really do a solid assessment of minor league talent. I have my resources, but even the best ones are usually channelling information from scouts about players they have never seen play.
With the limited information available, how do you go about ranking minor league talent? Do you primarly rely on key stats? Do you attend a lot of minor league games? Do you read a lot of articles about minor leaguers? Do you do some combination of the three methods that I've listed above? Do you do something really cool that I've probably never even heard of?
How do you go about assessing minor league talent in order to construct your top 100 prospects list?
ukjohn wrote:baseball america is where I get most/all of my info
as far as looking at certain players and predicting if they can be a good MLB player I look at K/BB ratio the most
This is probably going to generate a whole tangent away from my originial topic, but oh well. Can't both free swingers and patient hitters who control the strike zone be successful through the minors and into the majors leagues? Or do top prospects who don't draw a lot of walks also not strike out much in the minors?
How many people see more sense in using K/BB vs. OPS? Do you think those are two good stats to assess a hitter's potential?
P.S. I noticed former Baseball America writer Kevin Goldstein is now writing about prospects for Baseball Prospectus. How many people use BP for prospect information?
ukjohn wrote:baseball america is where I get most/all of my info
as far as looking at certain players and predicting if they can be a good MLB player I look at K/BB ratio the most
This is probably going to generate a whole tangent away from my originial topic, but oh well. Can't both free swingers and patient hitters who control the strike zone be successful through the minors and into the majors leagues? Or do top prospects who don't draw a lot of walks also not strike out much in the minors?
How many people see more sense in using K/BB vs. OPS? Do you think those are two good stats to assess a hitter's potential?
P.S. I noticed former Baseball America writer Kevin Goldstein is now writing about prospects for Baseball Prospectus. How many people use BP for prospect information?
sorry if I read the question wrong...my bad
I don't only use K/BB ratio as a tell for minor leaguers, I just use it more than most stats. If a player strikes out a ton in the minors it will only get worse when they see better pitchers. I could have told you Dallas McPherson would be a complete bust of a prospect even though he was killing AA pitchers because of his K/BB ratio. I picked him up in my league just because he was hot, and quickly traded him at the top of his value because I didn't want him on my team anymore.
Sure there are players that are free swingers in the minors and still have plenty of success in the majors. You can say that about all stats...this is just what I go by.
Other important stats I go by in the minors: OBP, OPS, SLG, 2B, and HR
I use a collaboration of minor league sites, such as BA, firstinning.com and minorleagueball.com. Important statistics to me are OBP, OPS, HR, and K/BB for hitters. WHIP, K, and K/BB for pitchers.
What kind of K/BB ratio do you guys consider as the indicator that a player should be able to handle major league pitching (like the maximum allowable ratio)?
It doesn't matter. Too many Ks are a bad thing, too little walks are a bad thing. More important is contact rate, which is how many times a guy Ks per at-bat. If a guy Ks 40 times in 160 ABs, which is 25%, that's not very good. When you get above that, it's pretty tough to project to be very good in the Bigs. Unless you have other ridiculous tools, like 50 homer power.
Walks are more important to me for lower average guys who don't make as much solid contact as others. Take Delmon Young, for example. Walks very little, but he's hitting .320 at AAA as a 20 year old. I'm not worried about his walk numbers in any way. A guy hitting .250 who walks rarely is a different story.
C: Pierzynski 1B: Pujols 2B: Altuve 3B: Miggy SS: HanRam OF (x3): CarGo, M. Bourn, D. Jennings UTIL (x2): E. Encarnacion, C. Hart BN: Cuddyer, C. Ross, J. Montero
rmande09 wrote:More important is contact rate, which is how many times a guy Ks per at-bat. If a guy Ks 40 times in 160 ABs, which is 25%, that's not very good. When you get above that, it's pretty tough to project to be very good in the Bigs. Unless you have other ridiculous tools, like 50 homer power.
So, this would be players like Adam Dunn and Brandon Wood? They get exceptions?
Do you weigh contact rate most heavily in your rankings?
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by shortsavage » Wed Aug 23, 2006 10:55 pm 
