Mixing Fantasy and Reality: Introduction, Hitting Prospect Comps, and Velocity Changes

by
August 8, 2016

Introduction

I plan for this new series, Mixing Fantasy and Reality, to examine in detail how real happenings in baseball affect fantasy valuations. I had several projects I have worked on like xBABIP values and velocity differences in which I plan on including. The MASH Report took up quite a bit of my time compiling and tracking all the injuries and I didn’t have time for other outlets. Today marks a new beginning where I have an opportunity to make additional information available. This series will run on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday

I am not going to completely ignore injuries. If a major injury happens or I think one will happen, I will include the information. Additionally, every Thursday I will write a detailed article exclusively on a few in-depth injury topics like my HURT and PAIN reports.

As for future articles, the format will likely be two to four main areas of discussion and maybe some interesting tidbit not found elsewhere. I am not sure if I will have a set topic rotation or if I will just follow the news. For a few articles, I will need to set some ground work to reference in future articles, so don’t expect all the articles to be full of background information like the first few. I hope you enjoy the change and let me know if you have any suggestions.

Hitter Prospect Comparables

In the world of scouting, hitters are given a grade from 20 to 80 on five traits: hitting, power, speed, defense, and arm. Former FanGraphs writer, Kiley McDaniel, explained the scouting scale in detail in this article.

For years, the public had little access to scouting grades, but this deficiency started to change in 2011 when Baseball America gave each team’s top prospect a future grade for all five tools in their Prospect Handbook. They have continued this tradition and have expanded the number of players graded. In 2013, MLB got into the mix and began adding grades to their prospect reports. I have not gone through and compiled all the MLB.com grades (mainly missing team level grades) since some have to be done by hand since no one has found a good way to compile them automatically. Also, I have not had the time to add the grades for the just-drafted prospects yet, but I have quite a few. Additionally, 2080 baseball has reports in which they continuously update (and I am a little behind adding some of these). Finally, I was have been able to get some historic reports from the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

With this list, I am able to find able to find some comparable players by using the sum of the squared differences for all five values. For example, here is a list of players comparable to recently called up Andrew Benintendi using his Baseball America (BA) grades.

Comps to Andrew Benintendi’s BA’s Prospect Grades
Name Year Report Publication Batting Power Speed Defense Arm
Andrew Benintendi 2016 BA 70 55 50 50 50
Rougned Odor 2014 BA 70 50 50 50 50
Garin Cechini 2014 MLB 65 50 50 50 50
Stephen Drew 2004 MLB Scouting Reports 70 60 50 50 55
Oscar Taveras 2013 BA 75 60 50 55 55
Jake Bauers 2016 BA 65 50 55 50 45
Hector Olivera 2016 BA 60 55 50 50 55
Kyle Tucker 2016 MLB 60 55 50 55 50
Nick Williams 2016 MLB 60 55 55 50 50
Christian Yelich 2012 BA 65 60 55 55 45
Kyle Tucker 2016 BA 60 60 50 50 50
Max Kepler 2016 MLB 60 55 50 45 50
Lonnie Chisenhall 2011 BA 70 55 40 50 55
Nick Castellanos 2013 BA 70 55 40 50 55

Normally I compare the player using just one of Baseball America’s or MLB’s most recent grades as the values are similar and the other one will show up in the other’s comps. If the two comps are too far apart, I will go ahead and run two sets.  Usually, there is more of an overlap of players, but three grades, batting, speed, and arm, were off significantly in this case. For example, here are the players with comparable comps to Andrew Benintendi’s MLB’s grades.

Comps to Andrew Benintendi’s MLB’s Prospect Grades
Name Year Report Publication Batting Power Speed Defense Arm
Andrew Benintendi 2016 MLB 60 55 60 50 60
Franklin Barreto 2015 BA 60 50 60 50 55
Addison Russell 2014 MLB 60 60 55 55 60
Addison Russel 2013 BA 60 60 60 55 55
Nick Gordon 2015 BA 55 50 55 50 60
Daz Cameron 2016 MLB 55 50 55 50 60
David Dahl 2016 MLB 55 50 60 55 60
Lewis Brinson 2016 MLB 55 60 60 55 60
Trent Clark 2016 MLB 60 50 55 45 55
Joc Pederson 2014 MLB 55 55 55 55 55
Joc Pederson 2014 BA 55 60 55 50 55
Bradley Zimmer 2016 MLB 55 50 55 55 60
Bradley Zimmer 2014 MLB 55 50 55 55 60
Austin Meadows 2016 MLB 60 55 60 40 60
Hector Olivera 2016 BA 60 55 50 50 55

These lists give an owner an idea of current and past players who may be comparable and owners can dream on the future. These lists show the one huge issue with the system, a lack of older historical comps. I could remove the most recent comps, but then the players will not really be similar. In addition to the lack of historic data, the player comps are mainly of good players, no organization fillers (except maybe Angels’ prospects). If some AAA-filler is taking off, the comps may be off.

To help get some more comparable players, I created a second system. I took the player’s grades and looked at players who were supposed to perform at that grades level. For the player’s performance, I took players who had at least 1000 total PA in their first three seasons and then pro-rated their production to 600 PA. The final value was the player’s performance. For hitting (batting average) and power (home runs) projections, I used the range of values listed here in Kiley’s article.

The other three values were a little harder to calculate. For speed, I took a called-up player’s speed grade and compared it to the Speed Score in their first full season. With these matched values, I was able to create a range of Speed Scores comparable to the speed grade. For the defense grade, I compared it to the player’s Defense plus Position WAR values and created a range of values. For the arm grade, I found no decent solution. I tried to use the WAR arm value but ran into issues with the position played. Most first basemen had a near zero value (they don’t throw much) which is higher than half the outfielders who all probably have better arms. Even with some position adjustments, I really could not get the values to work. So for now, arm scores are not included.

So using the two sets of grades, here are the players who produced similarly to how Andrew Benintendi’s prospects grades say he will.

Baseball America’s comparables: Nick Markakis, David Wright, Joe Mauer, Matt Murton, Pablo Sandoval, Junior Spivey, Carlos Gonzalez, Chad Tracy, Robinson Cano, Marcus Giles

MLB.com’s comparables: Andrew McCutchen, Carlos Gonzalez, Bryce Harper, Jason Kipnis, Angel Berroa, Ian Kinsler, Grady Sizemore, Matt Kemp, Starling Marte, David Wright

A few of the names are the same, Wright and Gonzalez, but the rest give a unique perspective with even Bryce Harper and Angel Berroa being compared. With the lists, a person has an idea on what the expected talent range is for the prospect’s tools.

In the future, I will likely go into more detail on the player being promoted, but right now I wanted to go over how I came up with the comparable players.

Velocity Changes

If anyone has followed me on Twitter knows I look at daily pitcher velocity changes. I will begin to include these reports here and look at some player with more detail than 140 characters allow. For the days I have run the velocity report, the data can be found on this spreadsheet. I look at how a pitcher’s velocity changes from the previous season and from earlier in the current season. I am going to try to be more regular in updating the spreadsheet, but a lot of the time my life just gets too busy and the data become quickly stale.

In the list of pitcher’s who threw yesterday, one name stood out, Masahiro Tanaka. Tanaka was considered to be a major injury risk coming into the season by many people including myself. He has basically made all his starts and recently his velocity has been trending up.

He has not been lights-out but has been a consistent performer with 7.4 K/9 and a 3.38 ERA. The recent velocity increase shows that he is not wearing down and should be able to pitch the rest of the season.





 

Jeff, one of the authors of the fantasy baseball guide,The Process, writes for RotoGraphs, The Hardball Times, Rotowire, Baseball America, and BaseballHQ. He has been nominated for two SABR Analytics Research Award for Contemporary Analysis and won it in 2013 in tandem with Bill Petti. He has won four FSWA Awards including on for his Mining the News series. He's won Tout Wars three times, LABR twice, and got his first NFBC Main Event win in 2021. Follow him on Twitter @jeffwzimmerman.

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