Last week I started a walk-thru entitled Baseball meets Technology. I indicated I’d follow up with more on that topic this week, but here we are. The follow-up tech article I’ve started really isn’t cohesive enough for publication. I think it needs more research and some threads to tie it together better. So I will back-burner until it is better. In the meantime…Did you hear that Nolan Arenado got traded? That is so yesterday’s new, that trade is not the topic of this article. But I do note that the returning prospect in that trade would not be expected to impact any of this content (at least not this year).
Baseball America recently published their updated Prospect Rankings, and the Top-30 list for the Cardinals has some telling rankings and commentary I wanted to get to. Besides, prospects are more fun than tech, right? The BA ranking contrasts with a recently analyzed Fangraphs rankings (seen here).
BA provides a prospect ranking on the scouting scale of 20-80, similar to FG. From there, they diverge a bit. BA overtly assigns a risk factor to each players’ “upside” and then downgrades the original scouting grade with an associated “risk premium”. As an example, they give young Rainel Rodriguez a scouting grade of 60, with an “Average” risk rating and adjust the prospect rating to 50 (major league average). FG merely gives the same “50” scouting grade and assigned a “High” risk to his development potential. What does one make of that? Blend them, and you get a player who falls between 50 and 60 on the scouting grade scale and between “average” and “high” on the risk scale. Reasonable? I am curious if risk is context sensitive. Like, is the risk seen as average given he is just 19 years old and in Single-A ball, or average relative to an across-the-board, peanut butter type evaluation? I guess if it were league- and age- adjusted, that would make it a Risk+ score. Board contributor cdb has a neat little tool that finds minor league comps based on the mathmatically closest stat lines. The most similar players to RR so far have mostly washed out of baseball. A few have been quite successful. I suspect his tool quantifies the “high” risk premium FG places on him. To not get into the weeds too far, let’s zoom out and take the summary view.
In total, you might recall from the earlier work that Fangraphs has the Cardinals with two 55 FV players (Wetherholt, Doyle) plus five 50 FV players (Bernal, Rodriguez, Crooks, Mathews, Hence). Seven players projected to average or better MLB players seems a fairly strong upper-end of the system, if a little lopsided in catching.
From the BA perspective, they provide a bit more at the top end. In the BA list, I count one 65 FV (Wetherholt), four 60 FV (Rodriguez, Doyle, Clarke, Roby), five 55 FV (Mathews, Franklin, Padilla, Mitchell, Hence) and five 50 FV (Baez, Baez, Bernal, Fajardo, Hjerpe). If you are keeping score at home, that is fifteen (15!) players who could project to average or better MLB players. Wow! That is before the risk premium is applied, of course.
What I like about the FG system is their system approach, where they take an entire system and establish a future value in dollars based on the normal experience of value provided by a cohort of players at each FV grade. Example: a single 40 FV position player might be worth $2m ($1m for pitchers). That isn’t a projection of the value THAT player will deliver, but an average for all 40 FV players who break out (not many, but some do). If a team has ten 40 FV players, the projection of value for the group is $20m. FG doesn’t really try to project which one or two of those guys will deliver that value, they basically just do the math and propose that out of 10 guys, a team should expect to see $20m in value. Which ones? Pick ‘em.
BA tries to handicap each individual players’ future contribution. I can see it, but I’m sure I totally buy it. Wetherholt has a 65 FV, with a “mild” risk, which adjusts his scouting grade to 60. I think it is reasonable to view him as 65 FV prospect, but he may not produce in the MLB to the level expected of a 65 FV player. It could just as well be 40 or 50 or 70 level performance, and most likely will NOT be the risk-adjusted value of 60 (just going with the odds). But I appreciate the range, which I find more satisfying than a single number. I don’t think prospects are easily quantified into a single number. I can take the FG score for Wetherholt (55, low risk) and blend it with the BA score (65, mild risk) and find a range (55-65) and recognize that his MiLB performance has narrowed the expected range but hasn’t eliminated the risk factor entirely. Here is a table showing the top prospects in the Cardinal system by range of FV (risk is not shown, but generally the wider the range, the greater the risk projection):
A couple of observations:
- There is wide divergence around the risk Joshua Baez presents. BA says “mild”. FG says “high”. Perhaps just a timing difference (BA’s info is more current than FG).
- BA has the risk on Mathews as “high”. FG has risk as “low”. Interesting.
- BA has the risk on Roby listed as “extreme” and FG has it as “med”. I expect the extreme is driven by his inability to remain on the field.
- BA has Hjerpe risk at “high” while FG has it as “low”. Injury-driven, also?
Beyond this top-end list, Baseball America has a handful of prospects rated at 45. What caught my eye is how many of them are younger, farther away players that some expect to see take a step forward in the next year or two, not so much organizational soldiers advancing as time passes that are finding a spot in the Top-30 ranks more because of proximity than anything else. This BA list of young up-and-comers includes names such as: Crossland, Ortiz, Mautz, Davis (Braden), Gurevitch, Davis (Chase) and Aita.
Something I’ve noticed but not quite sure how to process. The acquisitions from the 2023 trade deadline, by and large, were perceived to improve the depth of the minor league system. The 2024 draft was perceived the same way. I don’t remember any super relevant 2024 trade deadline acquisitions. The 2025 draft was, again, hailed as good value for the Cardinal system. The 2025 trade deadline? Yet again a relative bonanza for the system. I can look at the BA Top-30 list and find almost half of that 30 are from the trade deadline 2023 or later. Some head scratchers in there:
- By and large, the more recent acquisitions have pushed down all the 2023 trade deadline acquirees. Is it turning out that trade deadline was not quite so lucrative, or is the system really just getting that much better?
- At a glance, the 2021-2022 drafts appear to be under-represented in the Top-30. Bad drafts? The impact of lost draft picks? Poor development?
- Is this just a natural phenomenon where the new appears better than the old (ie. prospect fatigue), and the some of these drafts will return players to the Top-30 over the next couple years as they step forward?
As I wrap, I’ll note that last year, a couple of DSL prospects jumped into the rankings. R. Rodriguez and Y. Padilla. RR has gotten lot of press with his three levels of 2025 exploits, so I thought I’d wander to the other aisle and see what they had to say about young Padilla.
There’s plenty to like with Yairo Padilla, though his Florida Complex League debut in 2025 revealed some areas of refinement and he now ranks 12th in St. Louis’ system. One of those areas is simply learning to pull the trigger on mistakes. From the scouting report: “Padilla shows plus bat-to-ball skills and rarely swings outside the zone. He’s often far too passive on pitches over the heart of the plate, and that’s an area that could likely be exploited by more advanced pitchers.”
