Author Archive

Prospect Scouting & Stats — Hitter Hit Tool

For the last week and a half, I have looked at prospect scouting power grades and stats. Today, we move along to prospect scouting hit tool grades. While power grades are pretty clearly meant to forecast a prospect’s Major League ISO and/or HR/FB rates, it’s not entirely obvious to me what a Hit grade is meant to tell us.

Is it indicative of underlying skills relating to hitting ability, such as walk/strikeout rates, along with BABIP, or is it more of the ultimate result of those skills, such as batting average and/or on base percentage? From perusing through Kiley McDaniel’s old articles back in 2014 explaining the scouting grades, it seems like OBP is the intent, but I’m not 100% sure. Either way, let’s dive into the correlations between the present and future hit grades with the various underlying hitting talent skills and results.

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Prospect Scouting & Stats — Hitter Raw Power – Future

Today I finish our look at the hitter power grade leaderboards, ending with raw power in the future (RPF). Let’s identify and discuss the 26 hitters with an RPF grade of at least 70. As usual, I will only discuss those missing from previous leaderboards.

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Prospect Scouting & Stats — Hitter Raw Power – Present

Today I continue the Prospect Scouting & Stats series, sticking with hitter power, but moving to raw power grades. We’ll start with raw power in the present (RPP) and then tomorrow will look at raw power in the future. Let’s discuss the 17 hitters that earned an RPP grade of at least 70. As a reminder, the table is sorted by RPP and then FV.

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Prospect Scouting & Stats — Hitter Game Power – Future

Yesterday, I listed and discussed the 20 prospects who earned a Game Power – Present (GPP) grade of at least 50. Today, I shift the future and will list and discuss 19 prospects who earned a Game Power – Future (GPF) grade of at least 60 and earned an FV of at least 50. Since the number of 60+ GPF players was 39, I wanted to narrow down the least to make it a similar size as the GPP list.

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Prospect Scouting & Stats — Hitter Game Power – Present

This week I continue my series on prospect scouting and stats. Today, let’s look at present hitter game power grades. While my High bucket encompassed present game power grades of at least 40, that was nearly a quarter of THE BOARD. So let’s only discuss the top of the top in the power department.

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Prospect Scouting & Stats — Hitter Power Part 2

Yesterday, I introduced you to my newest series, Prospect Scouting & Stats, and began by sharing correlations between the various scouting power grades and average exit velocity with minor league HR/FB rate and ISO. I generally found better correlations with HR/FB rate, and average exit velocity (EV), which is completely objective, actually correlated best. During my analysis, I wondered aloud whether we might find better correlations if the scouting grades and EV all agreed. So, I dove back into the data to find out. I decided to only look at HR/FB rate this time since we care more about it as fantasy players and the metrics correlated better with it.

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Prospect Scouting & Stats — Hitter Power

First of all, thanks to everyone who commented and suggested an idea or multiple ideas for myself and my fellow RotoGraphers to write about as we sit here impatiently hoping and waiting for baseball to begin. Unfortunately, the vast majority either required data that would be impossible for me to collect or would require the type of analysis that’s way above my abilities. However, I did come away with one idea that I’m going to run with at some point in the future. Before I do that, a comment actually led me to checking out our THE BOARD: Scouting + Stats!, which reminded me how freakin’ awesome it is.

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Building a $245 NFBC Pitching Staff

Sadly, the NFBC team building fun comes to a close. To go along with my splendid $14 offense, I attempted to assemble a $246 pitching staff using NFBC average auction values from March 15 and on. Just as I failed to spend all my money when buying a dominant offense, I left a buck on the table here as well, only spending $245. Let’s see what such an insane staff looks like.

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Building a $249 NFBC Offense

As we continue to maintain hope that there will be a baseball season this year, last week I decided to have a bit of fun and build a $9 pitching staff using NFBC average auction values calculated from March 15. While that was a joy, commenter runningfrog demanded that I share what a $251 offense would look like. If I were to save all those auction dollars by buying such cheap pitching, how incredible might my offense look?! I decided to find out.

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The NFBC Unauctioned — Building a Pitching Staff

Yesterday, I assembled a 14-player offense from the hitters who weren’t bought in NFBC auctions since March 15. Today, let’s flip over to the pitching side.

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