Welcome to another season of the Prospect Stock Watch — a series I’ve been writing for six years now.

Anthony Alford, CF, Toronto Blue Jays
MLB ETA: 2018
Ceiling: Lead-off hitter/All-star center-fielder

Selected out of high school in 2012, Alford signed a unique deal with the Jays that allowed him to dabble in baseball during the summers while play college football. He appeared in just 25 games over the first three years of his pro career before turning to the sport full-time in 2015 after his college football career went sideways.

Alford showed a lot of potential that year and posted an .820 OPS while splitting the season between two A-ball levels and he looked poised for a huge breakout in 2016. Unfortunately, he hurt himself in the first game of the year and missed about a month. A concussion clouded the remainder of his season.

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Our Dark Overlord, David Appelman, finally acquired a minor league pitch-by-pitch database as seen by the new minor league stats available like Contact and Groundball rates. I hoped it would help to better understand the disconnect between a prospect’s Hit tool grades and major league results.  I made some progress but created more questions than answers.

When I examined the database, I was hoping to find some batted ball information as Eli Ben-Porat used at the Hardball Times. No such luck. But there was some x,y data … for every pitch.

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The Chicago Cubs have a pretty good, young third baseman named Kris Bryant. You may have heard of him. He has two MLB seasons under his belt and his awards shelf already has both a Rookie of the Year and a MVP award.

The club also has one of the top third base prospects in the game in Jeimer Candelario, who is beginning his second year in triple-A. Last season, he hit .333/.417/.542 in 76 games. So far this year, he’s hitting .308/.410/.692 in his first 15 games. And he’s not a recent pop-up prospect, either. He’s been on prospect radars since 2012 when he hit well as a teenager during his North American debut. Inconsistencies, though, plagued Candelario throughout much of his career and as recently as 2016 when he opened the year by hitting just .219 with a .690 OPS in double-A before earning a challenge-promotion to triple-A where he hit much better and saw his OPS jump almost .300 points.

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 Note: Do to a calculation error involving popups, the values initially report were off by a small bit. Everything is corrected now.

Our Dark Overlord continues to install enhancements to FanGraphs. One item which he has sneaked in over the weekend in Swinging Strike (must add to custom dashboard) and Groundball Rates for minor league pitchers (example). With the data now available to query, it’s time to find the league specific baselines and compare some highly touted prospects. Today, I will just concentrate just on the batted ball data.

Anytime new data becomes available, the baselines values are the starting point for an analysis so comparisons can be made. First, here are the overall league ground ball rates from 2016.

There is some funkiness going on in Rookie Ball and the Majors but the general trend is for ground ball rates to drop as the level approached the majors. Generally, the numbers are steady. With the league averages out of the way, I will move onto pitchers.

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Just before the season started, the FanGraphs staff (including RotoGraphs contributors) was asked to make its official predictions for the upcoming season. We took our best shot at predicting the playoff teams, MVP and Cy Young Award winners, and Rookies of the Year for 2017. Perhaps in the coming weeks we will check in with the top picks for MVP and Cy Young, but in this article, we’re going to look at the top rookies.

Our staff picks on the American League side had Andrew Benintendi (40 votes) as the overwhelming favorite to be named the league’s top rookie, with Jharel Cotton (4) and Mitch Haniger (4) rounding out the top three.

Over in the National League, Dansby Swanson (27 votes) was the favorite by a wide margin, followed by Robert Gsellman (12), Manuel Margot (5), and Hunter Renfroe (4).

While it’s extremely early and still much too soon to make any concrete statements about who will win this year’s awards, let’s take a look at the wide-ranging early season performances of the players we expect to be the game’s top newcomers: Read the rest of this entry »

If you follow great hair in sports as closely as I do, you already know about Taylor Motter. In Spring Training, he unleashed a hair flip so fantastic that it spawned the Mariners’ new between-innings “Hair Flip Cam.” Sadly, when I looked for footage of the Hair Flip Cam, I only found a handful of Twitter mentions. Trust me when I say that it exists and is awesome.

Acquired in a relatively minor trade with Tampa in November, Motter is a 27-year-old without a whole lot of prospect pedigree. Here at FanGraphs, Motter slotted in as the No. 11 Rays prospect pre-2016, and Seattle’s No. 18 guy this year. In short, he’s not the type of player you’d expect to be the subject of a fantasy column in April.

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Today, we wrap up our look at the Top 10 prospects for 2017 in each of the six leagues. The lists were created by blending potential playing time, MLB-readiness and overall skill to take a stab at predicting the most valuable rookies for the coming season.

NL East
NL West
NL Central
AL West
AL East

Top 10 Prospects for 2017: AL Central

1. Lucas Giolito, RHP, Chicago: Giolito’s value is down right now – along with his velocity — but he’s still one of the most promising near-MLB-ready arms in the minors. I will admit, though, that I doubt the White Sox’s ability to develop prospects and I’d feel a lot better if the right-hander was still in the Nationals system. When he’s going well, Giolito has both a plus fastball and a plus curveball. His changeup, when it’s on, can also be an above-average offering, meaning he has more than enough weapons to dominate big league hitters. With a pretty thin starting rotation at the big league level, the wheels will really have to fall off of Giolito’s bandwagon for him to not see a big league mound by the summer.

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Like many ottoneu owners (and baseball fans in general), I’m a bit of a prospect hound, always looking for the next Mike Trout or even the next Kole Calhoun. Unlike many of our writers, I have absolutely no scouting chops, so I prefer to take a more analytic approach to prospect evaluation. That includes looking at prospect reports from John Sickels and our own Eric Longenhagen, as well as reviewing projections from Steamer/ZiPS and KATOH. That’s only part of the story though, and with minor league games well under way we have some actual performances to add to our evaluations. Using the fantastic website MLBfarm.com, I put together a list of the top ten hitting performances in the minor leagues so far (using ottoneu FanGraphs points scoring, and filtering on prospects in the organizational Top 10s).

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Today, we continue our look at the Top 10 prospects for 2017 in each of the six leagues. The lists have been created by blending potential playing time, MLB-readiness and overall skill to take a stab at predicting the most valuable rookies for the coming season. Recently, we reviewed the NL East, the NL West, the NL Central, and the AL West.

Top 10 Prospects for 2017: AL East
 
1. Andrew Benintendi, OF, Boston: Benintendi has already received a lot of press and is easily the favorite for AL Rookie of the Year. He already has 34 games of big league experience under his belt and has yet to look fazed. He’s hit well and shown promise in the field. Benintendi is not a huge guy but he’s shown extra base pop and could eventually threaten 20 homers to go along with his 30-40 doubles in a full season. He should also regularly come close to producing a .400 on-base percentage with his ability to hit for average and tendency to walk more than he strikes out. He’s going to be a beast and reminds me of Mike Greenwell in his prime.

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Today, we continue our look at the Top 10 prospects for 2017 in each of the six leagues. The lists have been created by blending potential playing time, MLB-readiness and overall skill to take a stab at predicting the most valuable rookies for the coming season. Recently, we reviewed the NL East, the NL West and the NL Central.

Top 10 Prospects for 2017: AL West

1. Jharel Cotton, RHP, Oakland: Acquired from the Dodgers last year as part of the return for Josh Reddick, Cotton has made huge development leaps since the beginning of 2016. After bouncing between the bullpen and starting rotation in the Dodgers system, Cotton has settled into the rotation with the A’s and looks like a steal. He has a low-to-mid-90s fastball and backs it up with a plus changeup. If he can improve his breaking ball and continue to show good control, he has a chance to really thrive in his big home ballpark (He got tagged for 24 homers in ’16). After throwing 165 innings last year, he could be good for 180+ although the club will want to be cautious with the modestly-built pitcher.

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