MLB Prospect Lists: How To Tell Them Apart

Keith Law

Law has been around the game for many years now, begining with his time with BP, before working in the Toronto Blue Jays front office doing player evaluations and actually attending MLB scout school.

Many view Law as brash on Twitter and in his chats, but one of the things that cannot be denied is that Law is one of the guys who really makes seeing guys in person the priority of his work.

He is the primary host of ESPN’s college baseball coverage and while on trips for that coverage seems to always find time to visit a team or two (or more) to watch a minor league prospect of interest or a draft prospect of interest.

When he speaks in his rankings on how a guy’s swing or delivery looks, he has a good idea as he’s seen it in person, which I’ll give him all the credit for in the industry.

That can also be a curse as well, as while Law does source plenty of opinions as there’s simply no way he could see every minor leaguer every year, he does have a habit of holding hard onto an opinion from the viewing he had in person, so if he happened to catch a guy on a bad day, it can shade his opinion on a player – not completely, mind you, but enough to alter his ranking of the player somewhat.

In a recent conference call regarding his top prospect list, Law did mention that when he gets into the razor-thin margin at the top of a prospect list, he frequently goes with the “known”, so in other words, a guy who has shown the ability to do it at the highest level, whether that’s already at the major leagues or at such a level in the upper minors that it’s simply a matter of the next season for him to be in the major leagues.

Fangraphs

Fangraphs has seen its fair share of prospect writers work through as well. While a similar format and emphasis as Baseball Prospectus, Fangraphs has been a free site for most of its creation, and thus many of the statistical advances that they have pushed are more common nomenclature in the typical baseball forum or subreddit than BP’s.

Fangraphs has been around since 2005, and in that time, they’ve gone through a lot of prospect evaluators, but the most well known, Kiley McDaniel, left Fangraphs to become part of the Atlanta Braves front office.

I placed Fangraphs with Law and his work with ESPN as Law’s protege at ESPN, Eric Longenhagen is now the primary prospect guy with Fangraphs, and he, like Law, does a lot of the eyes-on on his own, which is something very difficult to put together. He’s also put together extensively detailed lists on players, which is some of the best reading online if you take the time to read your favorite teams’ list.

Fangraphs also has another aspect of their prospect coverage in Chris Mitchell and his KATOH projections for prospects. These are highly statistical in analysis, sometimes criticized for removing the scouting from the analysis of a prospect, but the defenders of KATOH will say that’s part of why often teams will fall in love with a prospect that has no hope of succeeding is that he shows well to the eye but his stats never show it.

Next: MLB and ZIPs