Top Prospects, part 4: The positional prospects

In a word, no. Not a rookie.

What gets me most excited about Brantley is what he’s doing at his age. Just thinking about his future development has me drooling.

If you look closely, you’ll notice that based simply on Progress Score, LaPorta is actually the #6 offensive prospect, behind Santana, Brantley, Weglarz, Marson and Chisenhall. Santana is the total package. Brantley has youth and to a lesser degree defense on his side. Weglarz has youth. Marson gets a big boost because he’s a catcher and a year and a half younger than LaPorta. Chisenhall also has a little youth and a little defense on his side. Strictly based on the offensive performance side, LaPorta is only beaten by Santana.

I think he gets his own list.

It’s my short acronym for Progress Score. For offensive players it reflects a combination of age, level, performance and defensive position. A higher number is better. For pitchers it is a considerably more complicated formula, but it is basically based on age, level, underlying positive indicators (K%, BB%, GB%), performance (luck/park adjusted FIP and ERA) and health (GS and IP). Again, higher numbers are better.

Jay first developed it a few years ago and we have tweeked it some since, so he might be able to speak better about it than I can. But the basic idea of it as a metric is to identify who is worth paying attention to based on their performance and their likelihood of their value based on their development status and defensive ceiling. My rankings throughout this series are based heavily, though not exclusively, on Progress Score. I think it does a pretty good job of separating the wheat from the chaff in most cases.

I’ve never done a big hairy definitive post about Progress Score, along with Adam, and I’ve been procrastinating it for about a year. Partly, I’m still thinking about tinkering with it. Adam has already tinkered with the pitching formula, and I’d like to give a closer look at what he did and the changes do.

I also think generally, for hitters and pitchers, that the formula doesn’t penalize an older player enough for being in the low minors, so a guy like Niuman Romero starts to look legit. If a guy is 24 at Lake County, it doesn’t matter much if his OPS is 925 or 1150, but the current formula thinks it matters. The problem with using only basic arithmetic in a formula is that all relationships end up being strictly linear, and of course not everything really is linear.

I also had toyed with the idea of making it more like a plus/minus system, where an okay prospect is zero, whereas now it’s more like zero-to-ten. (Those are not hard limits, but almost every prospect is within zero to ten.)

For those who haven’t seen this before, the basic conceptual formula is:

Progress Score = Production (pitching or hitting) + Positional Value + Level + (constant) – Age

The specific formulas set the constant so that the range and center end up around where we want them to be, and so that various inter-variable relationships are established where we think they should be. For example, two years of age is equated to one level of advancement and (for hitters) also to 120 points of (neutral) OPS (which arguably is not enough). And as Adam said, it gets even more complicated for pitchers.

Yep.