2/25/2010

Baseball America Releases 'BA Top 100 Prospects for 2010'

New Data for Scouting Book, and a Deeper Look at Why Rankings Disagree

Baseball America, granddaddy of all ranking systems, has released its new Top 100 Prospects for 2010 list, and as usual, we've added this data to our individual player, list, and grid displays today, so you can compare, contrast and get a much broader sense of opinion than any one list could ever deliver.   

BA's rankings form part of our Scouting Book Combine rankings, and are displayed alongside each top prospect for your consideration.

Baseball America is best known as the publisher of The Baseball Prospect Handbook, an annual treasure trove of prospect information. The arrival of this BA "Bible", which covers almost one thousand prospects, is a highlight of spring for every true baseball zealot. (What, you don't have yours yet? Click here to order a copy from Amazon right now, and then come back here and continue reading. Nobody who reads Scouting Book should be without the BA Bible.)

BA holds a special place in the prospecting industry. In addition to being one of the industry's first publishers, it also distributed one of the very first "Top 100" prospect lists, first by print and wire service and today over the Internet. In many ways, Baseball America is the reason you're reading these words here on our website today.

While BA has fallen into some disfavor among the fractured fans in the (tiresome) battle of scouts vs sabermatricians, and is sometimes criticized for its scheduling: both book and list are released very late, after most others have already released their data, and yet both omit many winter trades and late signings. But the BA 100, and the Prospect Handbook it promotes, are still important touchstones. Baseball America's Handbook might be the one, single prospect publication that should never, ever be ignored.

The Top 100 is a sort of summary of that book. As a late arrival each spring, BA's annual list tends to offer few surprises, and this is true again in 2010. The list closely mirrors the ever-evolving consensus rankings that our regular readers have already been following here at Scouting Book. But as with any list made by human beings, there are a few special darlings and surprising omissions, along with several players who are ranked quite a bit higher or lower than one might expect.

Which is the reason we're talking about it here on Scouting Book today. It's easy to document the differences between lists, and even easier to criticize those you disagree with. What takes a bit more effort, though, is unraveling the Why? of those differences.

With a bit of thought and a stack of old books to examine, many differences turn out to be quite easy to understand. In fact, understanding why lists differ can make those lists more useful. For starters, consider what Baseball America really is, and how their work unfolds.

Baseball America is a hard-nosed, old-school, one hundred percent 'real baseball' publisher that tasks itself with evaluating the minor league systems of today's MLB ballclubs. One side effect of this focus is that BA's official voice has very little to say about fantasy baseball. Because of this, a few predictable patterns recur in their rankings when compared to most other ranking systems, which do consider fantasy factors.

For example, BA will often seem to 'favor' catchers, shortstops and centerfielders more highly than some other publications. Why? Well, these are the three 'highest skill' positions on the defensive spectrum, so prospects who play these positions are generally better prospects... defensively. And that forms a large part of the evaluation criteria that's at work in BA's publications. (It also makes up two and a half of the classic 'five tools' used to describe prospects.)

But since defense plays little to no role in fantasy baseball, you will find that other lists tend to rank these same players lower than BA might, even though they describe the players in near-identical terms. This isn't an error, and neither approach is more correct; it's simply a matter of priority.

This difference is easy to see in our composites here at Scouting Book: a catcher who is highly regarded for his glove but who displays little stick or projectable power may receive a BA endorsement, along with a commensurate bump in his standings here, but he'll also be dragged down by our other inputs, since a catcher's defensive prowess plays only a very small role in his fantasy baseball utility: it may provide him with opportunities for advancement or an increase in his playing time, but little beyond that.

Of course, there are always exceptions. Matt Wieters in 2009 and Jesus Montero in 2010 were such exceptional hitters that even when judged purely for their offensive futures, both came out very highly-rated by both BA and the 'fantasy focused' publications. (Of course, the fact that catcher is traditionally a very shallow position in fantasy baseball also helped.)

Some of BA's other 'biases' (or impact considerations) are less obvious, but the patterns of influence can still be seen across the pages and over the years. In the same way Scouting Book solicits and factors in the opinions of various front office staffers and 'behind the scenes' experts in collecting our data, Baseball America gleans much of its information from personal conversations with MLB organizational scouts. This is golden information, of course, but it comes with a tangled string attached. Put simply, players who receive more scouting attention are more likely to have accurate and positive reviews from Baseball America. That means, effectively, that those who play in the USA, and especially in larger high school, college and minor league markets, tend to get more attention, and this 'buzz' can lead to higher rankings. This same problem impacts other sources, as well, but for an organization that's very focused on in-person scouting reports, it can be especially impactful.

The shortcoming is more obvious overseas. Where some publications will also go outside the box in an attempt to evaluate and discuss significant Japanese, Cuban, or independent league players who may impact MLB in the future, Baseball America tends  to 'short shift' players from outside the usual process in their publications, treating them more as interesting footnotes than regular entries. Indeed, BA does not even consider most of these players eligible for inclusion until they are signed by a Major League ballclub. This is not a failure on BA's part: this is what they do, evaluate the minor league systems of today's MLB ballclubs. They are not, after all, called Baseball World.

Other characteristics of a Baseball America ranking can be seen by looking back at the thousands of players they have ranked over the years. While the data to date is a bit loose and quite shallow, BA seems to favor everyday players over pitchers on almost every close call: witness the 2007 rankings of Alex Gordon, Delmon Young, Evan Longoria, Brandon Wood, and Justin Upton, all of whom appeared on the BA list before some kid named Lincecum, even though BA endorsed Lincecum as an exceptional prospect.

This year, the same effect means that pitcher Stephen Strasburg, despite being known as 'the best prospect of the decade' in most circles, still slides in at number two for 2010, as outfielder Jason Heyward somehow beats him out for the top spot on BA's board. There's a logical disconnect here, but it's the kind of conscientious disconnect that BA has been consistent and reliable in applying over the years. That makes it something to note, something to consider, and something to weigh when perusing BA's listings, rather than something to scorn. It's not as if they're making fun of Strasburg's hair, after all.

(Yes, we here at Scouting Book tend to believe an elite pitcher means at least as much to a ballclub than an elite hitter, because they're a whole lot more difficult to find, and so we try to accomodate BA's recurring 'hitter bias' in our composites. Of course, that itself is an example of our own 'bias' imparting a force in the other direction. Somewhere in the middle, there may be a perfect truth, but it's much more likely that it's just a difference in philosophy at work.)

And that's an important point that made this blog posting such a long one: opinions can get flamingly hot in these days of internet message-boarding and instant Twitter snark, but sometimes easy dismissals do a disservice to an underlying truth that's dangling right there, waiting for someone to take a deeper look at why two opinions may differ so sharply on the same player: it's quite possible that they're both correct, from different points of view.

Baseball America is as professional and respectable an organization as exists in the baseball world, and this highlighting of some apparent biases in prospect evaluation should not be read a condemnation of a flaw in their work. All lists will always have these sorts of biases in play, because the notion of a 'best' prospect will never, ever be a black and white one to begin with. No two lists are playing by the same rules. Best at what? For whom? In what way? How certainly? How soon?

These biases should be recognized but not discarded, we feel, because if they can be identified, they can be understood, making it possible to adjust various lists and individual rankings to increase their particular value to a particular reader. Knowing the biases of any list, in other words, makes that list more valuable.

This is one of the reasons we always display the rankings of other publications here on Scouting Book. When others agree with our own opinions or the community consensus, that means something. When they disagree, that also means something. Either way, the difference itself contains complex information, and this should not be discarded. We feel that hiding this information (and showing only the resulting calculated values, for example, or just our own opinions) would provide information of less value.

All of which goes to say that the preceding monograph was inspired by the arrival of an old friend at Scouting Book, the new Top 100 Prospects for 2010 list from Baseball America.

The BA list is available free on their website, while the Book itself (which goes into much more detail about almost 1000 players) is for sale at Amazon. Both are highly recommended by all of us here at Scouting Book.

We've also added the BA data to our individual player pages and our comparison machine, Scouting Book's Prospect Matrix.

Read. Enjoy. And most of all, consider the differences.

   

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