MLB Prospect Lists: How To Tell Them Apart

Baseball America

Baseball America is the longest standing prospect coverage publication. Originally begun as a magazine that covered the game at all levels (high school, college, minors, foreign, and majors) in 1980, and it is located in Durham, North Carolina.

The heart of Baseball America is an editorial staff of ten people. They source work through a host of scouts throughout the country on high school, college, and minor league prospects, and their team lists are typically done by someone outside of their editorial staff.

One of the biggest draws for Baseball America has been their international coverage, and specifically the work of Ben Badler is tremendous in the work he does in Latin America and especially Cuba.

Baseball America tends to rate players highly based on upside and the views of the guys that sourced their opinions to the BA editors, who then make up the list. Frequently, BA editors are working off of these reports when creating the lists they make.

That isn’t to say they don’t ever attend games, but J.J. Cooper has admitted in recent years that he spends much more time editing articles that come in than actually attending baseball, something that he does lament, but it is something to BA’s content.

Baseball Prospectus

Baseball Prospectus is most well known for being a key cog in the sabermetric “revolution” in baseball analysis, as they’ve put forth what were considered wild and crazy ideas at the time, like VORP (value over replacement player), which has now become widely accepted as WAR as calculated on other sites.

All along in their history since being formed in 1996, however, BP has placed an emphasis on scouting, employing some of the biggest names in the online scouting game with Kevin Goldstein, Jason Parks, and now Mauricio Rubio former BP scouting writers who are with major league teams.

One of the interesting connections with BP and other lists is that current ESPN prospect guru Keith Law really got his start writing for BP before going to the Toronto Blue Jays as a scout.

As far as boots on the ground, the content on BP’s site is possibly some of the best on the internet. Their scouts that contribute for their site are some of the absolute best in the business. However, those are not always the same guys who are working at putting together lists.

Much of Baseball Prospectus’ best work is subscriber-only, but the work is absolutely worth the subscription to read the scouting reports if you are truly into prospects.

BP’s annual “Top 101” is something that began with Goldstein and Parks adding one extra player to a more traditional top 100 list.

Next: Fangraphs and Law