April, 2006

Youth is Served

"The whole 'farm' analysis implies who's got the best young talent. But as soon as a guy is good enough to get a few months in the majors he's off that list. Dropping your farm rating. No longer a prospect. Even if he's two years younger than someone in the minors at the top of the list. Too many arbitrary distinctions. Too much subjectivity. Too stupidly volatile."
-- Brian Potraka, 2/26

Coincidentally enough, I ran across almost the exact same quote while devouring the new 2006 Baseball Prospectus recently:

"One problem in using top prospect lists to evaluate farm systems is that it punishes teams for having developed players successfully and seeing them graduate to the major league level.  The Dodgers, for example, have a highly regarded list of prospects, but virtually no worthwhile young talent in the majors.  Chad Billingsley might be a good prospect, but the Dodgers would trade him in a heartbeat for Harden, Swisher, Street, Joe Blanton or Danny Haren-- none of whom is older than 25, and all but one of whom has spent his entire career in the A's system.  Along the same lines, while the A's present top prospect list consists mostly of hitting talent-- Dallas Braden and Jairo Garcia are the only pitchers that would crack the organization's Top 10 --this is only because of the successful matriculations of the top-flight arms."

Great minds think alike, eh?

The Baseball Prospectus article continued by summing the projected 2006 VORPs of all 25-and-under players on every MLB team to show that the Oakland A's have some of the best young talent in the game, even though their farm system currently doesn't rank very highly.

Every study has its purpose, and the purpose of the BDBL farm report is to measure the strength of a team's farm club relative to the other teams in the league.  But I can also appreciate Brian's (and BBP's) perspective that our farm report doesn't truly reflect a team's "young" talent.

So, with that in mind, I thought it would interesting and/or fun to go through the same exercise with our teams as BBP did with the big boys.  Of course, there are issues with every study, and one of the issues with this one is that we're looking at projected 2006 VORP-- the keyword there being "projected."  If you don't value PECOTA's projections, chances are you're not going to value this study.

BBP gave PECOTA a major facelift this past year in an effort to make their projections of minor leaguers more meaningful.  I won't get into all the details here.  (If you want the details, buy the book!)  But suffice it to say, I'm comfortable using these projections, and you should be, too.  No projection system is flawless, but PECOTA provides a reasonable-enough picture of the future, given all the statistics and history available to us today.

All 2006 VORP projections are Major League Equivalents.  So, for example, when they project that Lastings Milledge will post a 9.3 VORP in 502 PA's in 2006, they don't mean that's what he will do in a full season of Triple-A this season; they mean that's what he would do if all 502 PA's came in the big leagues this year.  So if we measure only 2006 VORP, we're only getting a picture of how valuable our young players are right now-- not how valuable they may be down the road.

Obviously, this method isn't all that fair to high-upside prospects in the lower levels of the minor leagues.  That's why I'm also including in my study a new Prospectus stat (yep, just what we all need: a new stat) called "Upside."  Again, I'm not going to go into detail about what Upside means or how it is calculated.  You can get that here.

Unfortunately, PECOTA can't forecast VORP or Upside for players with very little or no professional experience, so guys like Justin Upton, Alex Gordon, Mike Pelfrey, Luke Hochevar, Ian Kennedy, etc., aren't included in this study.  But hey, no study is perfect, right?

Everyone understand the ground rules?  Okay, enough of the preamble (or pre-ramble.)  Let's begin.