BA Top 100 Prospect Study

[dougdirt]

Scott McKinney over at Royals Review did a lot of legwork on the BA Top 100 list from 1990-2003. He looked at the success/failure rates of guys based on WAR as a Major Leaguer. Here is the link - http://www.royalsreview.com/2011/2/1...-mlb-prospects

One thing he also did was look at the Success/Failure rate of each team's Top 100 prospects in that time period. The Reds did NOT do well. Here is that chart:



Anyways, you should go read the entire article, there is some good stuff in there. I would caution though, that using this data to say something about prospects today wouldn't be wise, particularly when referencing pitchers given how dramatic the difference is between how minor leaguers were used in the 90's compared to today.

[medford]

I guess it shouldn't surprise any of us that the Reds faired poorly. Was Dunn a top 100 guy? I'm assuming Kearns is on the Fail list? Gruler, Howington I'm guessing were both on the top 100 at some point and of course the fail list now.

Interesting that the success rate appears to be about 25%. That is much lower than I think many would guess. I haven't read the article, so I don't know what they mean by fail/succeed, but you'd think a larger % of top prospects would go on to be top players in the show. Guess it shows how much of a crap shot baseball can be at times.

[dougdirt]

I guess it shouldn't surprise any of us that the Reds faired poorly. Was Dunn a top 100 guy? I'm assuming Kearns is on the Fail list? Gruler, Howington I'm guessing were both on the top 100 at some point and of course the fail list now.

Interesting that the success rate appears to be about 25%. That is much lower than I think many would guess. I haven't read the article, so I don't know what they mean by fail/succeed, but you'd think a larger % of top prospects would go on to be top players in the show. Guess it shows how much of a crap shot baseball can be at times.

Dunn was a Top 100 guy, as was Kearns. I imagine that Kearns was not a failure. He had 4 seasons with 2+ WAR, including 3 over 3 WAR and 2 over 4 WAR.

[krm1580]

I was really intrigued by this so I went back and looked at all the Reds top 100s from 1990 on and after seeing what was there, the results are not even a little surprising.


During the time frame of this study the Reds only had 3 top 20 prospects.

2002 Kearns #11,
2001 Henson #14,
1992 Sanders #11

They went a DECADE between top 20 prospects. In fact from 1993 to 1999 the only player that cracked the top 50 was Pokey Reese who was in the 40s a couple of times. I guess its pretty easy to figure out why we went a decade without a winning record when the best guy you can produce is Pokey Reese.

The good news is if they do a study for 2000 -2010 we will probably be at the top of the list.

Here is the list of all the guys that made top 100. I did not put the years because some of the guys were top 100 for multiple years.

Aroldis Chapman,
Todd Frazier,
Yonder Alonso,
Johnny Cueto,
Homer Bailey,
Jay Bruce,
Joey Votto,
Drew Stubbs,
Ryan Wagner
Edwin Encarnacion,
Richie Gardner,
Austin Kearns,
Ty Howington,
Wily Mo Pena,
Bobby Basham,
Chris Gruler,
Drew Henson,
Gookie Dawkins,
Ed Yarnall,
Rob Bell,
Jackson Melian,
Dane Sardinha,
David Espinosa,
Damian Jackson,
Scott Williamson,
Pokey Reese,
Steve Gibralter,
Aaron Boone,
Brett Tomko,
Chad Mottola,
Johnny Ruffin,
Pat Watkins,
Reggie Sanders,
Dan Wilson,
Willie Greene,
John Roper,
Calvin Reese,
Mo Sanford,
Reggie Sanders,
Reggie Jefferson,
Brian Lane,
Chris Hammond,