Archive for 2021

Recently I published my Peripheral Prospect hitters for 2021. In a perfect world I would have published my thoughts on a wider array of hitters periodically throughout the season. Alas, this is not a perfect world, so I settled for a year-end catch-all post.

Rinse and repeat for pitchers. The rules: (1) They pitched in the high minors (Double-A or Triple-A) but not the MLB level, and (2) they cannot be featured on any prominent top-100 list. Top-100 updates count (and all due respect to those updated lists, because revising your priors is not a bad thing!).

Brace yourselves: I’m kicking this off with three Cleveland farmhands with whom I implore you must familiarize yourself. Eight Peripheral Prospect pitchers for your fine Wednesday:

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In a former life, I had the time and energy to keep up with Peripheral Prospects on a semiweekly basis. That dream hibernated in 2020 when the pandemic killed the minor league season and died for good this year when I simply failed to uphold my end of the bargain.

But I love Peripheral Prospects and the inexact science/exact art of digging up breakout fringe and non-prospects with potential to make waves at the big-league level despite lacking the requisite hype. These breakouts make for feel-good stories, but for fantasy baseball purposes they’re market inefficiencies that can change the trajectories of dynasty (or even redraft) teams.

So, I want to spill at least a little bit of digital ink in honor of my favorite Peripheral Prospect hitters (and pitchers, coming in a separate post). A year-end catch-all post loses the dynamics of the ebb and flow of player performance; I benefit from these slash lines being etched in stone. But that hindsight should make the selections here a bit tighter than might have normally been picking five fresh names every other week for six months.

Anyway, here’s my list of top-8 Peripheral Prospect hitters from 2021 (because 10 was too many—this is rarefied air, y’all). The only rules: (1) They played in the high minors (Double-A or Triple-A) but not the MLB level, and (2) they cannot be featured on any prominent top-100 list. I’m going to rank them loosely from favorite to least-favorite. Let’s go!

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Back in 2019, Brad Johnson and I co-authored a weekly series called “Peripheral Prospects” that was extremely fun to write and (in my opinion) dropped some genuinely good nuggets on unloved fringe- and non-prospects. Because many of the players featured throughout the series did not debut in 2019 or even in 2020, I wanted to publish a post dedicated to keeping an eye on some of those circa-2019 peripheral prospects this past season.

That’s pretty much it. In the coming weeks, I’ll post lists of my favorite peripheral prospect hitters and pitchers for the 2021 season. Until then, let’s review how some of my favorite peripheral prospects from 2019 performed in 2021.

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It’s cliché to say “you know the drill,” but you do! You do, indeed, know the drill! The one thing about bold predictions that gets me up on my soapbox every year is what it means to be bold. There’s bold for shock value, bold to be bold. (Or, not bold enough—its own problem.) And then there’s sufficiently bold (per market sentiments) but readily achievable.

Much of this is qualitative, so “sufficiently bold” and “readily achievable” are eye-of-the-beholder types of descriptors. But we can at least measure sufficient boldness using average draft position (ADP) data. All fantasy baseball websites use them; I use National Fantasy Baseball Championship (NFBC) data because it involves high-stakes players. (Let it be known that high-stakes does not always equal high-talent, but that’s altogether another soapbox.) Moreover, we can filter NBFC ADP by date range, so I can leverage ADP specifically from the final week of spring training by which time ambiguous spring training storylines have solidified.

I’m proud of my success this year. I hope a few of these picks were worthwhile for you, if you happened to heed them exclusively because of this post. That’d be quite brave of you!

(“Year-end rank” courtesy of Razzball’s player rater.)

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Here is a disputed fact: MLB changed the ball. League brass, on the record, wanted to make the ball livelier but also raise the height of the seams, which would increase drag. The two changes — more bounce, but also more air resistance — would, more or less, offset each other.

The fact is disputed because some of the game’s most intelligent minds — namely, renowned baseball physicists, the very people most capable of determining if the ball is, indeed, different — doubt the ball has changed. It’s imperative I tell you this because they may be right, which would make me (and MLB, for the umpteenth time), well, wrong. Everything that follows assumes the ball has changed. Maybe this meshes with what you’ve witnessed, maybe it doesn’t. This is simply one stupid man’s interpretation of the data available to us thus far.

Early returns suggest MLB accomplished what it set out to accomplish. We can use weighted on-base average on contact (wOBAcon) to describe hitter production on balls in play, aka batted ball events (BBE). The average hitter is slightly less productive in 2021 than in past years, but not egregiously so, as shown below. Also, it’s only April; as the weather warms, so should be the bats. It’s reasonable to expect 2021’s league-wide wOBAcon value to climb a few ticks before year’s end.

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Ah, yes — that time of year already. If I had more time recently (which I hadn’t) and if I were more consideration (which I’m not), I would have published these bold predictions sooner so you, the reader, could act decisively on them in drafts as you saw fit. But, alas — draft season is over. I gotta squeak in these predictions before or, uh, on Opening Day.

I say something like this every year: a bold prediction is worthless if it is either too bold or not bold enough. In my opinion, the perfect bold prediction is very bold but also achievable. Often it is bold because it features someone who is, to some extent, an afterthought in fantasy drafts, and often it is achievable because of (what I perceive to be) a gross market inefficiency.

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