Exploring Top Prospect Lists: Pitchers and Hitters

So far in this series, we’ve introduced the data we’re using to examine top prospect lists and looked at how prospects perform by ranking position. Moving forward, there are a number of ways we could try subdividing these results. How old was the player at the time of the ranking? What level of leagues had he played in? What was his original draft position? Had he made a prior appearance in a top prospect list? How long ago was he drafted or signed? What was his scouting profile? How far away was his expected MLB debut?

Some of those things we may look at later; others will be beyond the scope of the resources available to me. But we’ll start with the most basic question: Was the prospect a hitter or a pitcher?

This is a more complicated topic than you might expect, partly because some prospects are considered to have the ability to either hit or pitch (you may have heard of at least one guy who’s recently performed pretty well in both roles at the MLB level), and partly because my data source for BA’s old lists (Baseball Cube) is a little wonky on positional listings. Most notably, they list Rick Ankiel as an outfielder; when Ankiel was the #1 prospect in baseball, nobody was expecting him to end up in the outfield. I have adjusted Ankiel’s listing (as well as that of Jason Lane, an outfield prospect who pulled a reverse Ankiel late in his career), but there may well be similar cases of which I am unaware. (As a side note, this issue also prevents a more detailed positional breakdown of prospects, such as catchers vs. infielders vs. outfielders.)

First question: How many pitchers are we dealing with? After correcting Ankiel and Lane, there are 1022 of our 2300 prospects with a position listed simply as “pitcher.” The only player from 1990-2012 listed with pitcher alongside another position is Brooks Kieschnick, who was an outfielder as a prospect and added pitching later in his career, so 1022 will be our working total. That’s a bit over 44% of the total players. But if you look only at the top 10, you get 84/230, 36.5%. Top 5, it’s 39/115, roughly a third. And for #1, it’s 6/23, just over a quarter.

Six is not a sustainable sample size when looking for a success rate among pitchers ranked #1 overall, so we’ll have to combine the top ranking with at least one other bucket. Even doing that, the samples mentioned above are significantly reduced from what we were considering before eliminating over half of the player set. With that in mind, let's look at the results. Going by percentiles as before, here are the performances of pitchers ranked in the following groups by BA from 1990-2012, by career bWAR:

Percentile	#1-5	#6-10	#11-15	#16-25	#26-50	#51-75	#76-100
90	35.7	49.1	46.2	28.5	20.1	20.2	15.8
80	27.6	23.8	29.3	16.8	14.4	12.5	8.9
70	20.4	17.4	20.4	11.3	10.0	6.1	5.2
60	15.2	13.0	16.6	5.9	6.1	3.1	2.0
50	9.4	10.9	10.0	4.6	2.7	0.9	0.7
40	8.4	7.4	7.2	1.2	1.1	0.1	0.0
30	4.9	4.7	3.9	0.0	0.0	0.0	0.0
20	0.2	0.2	0.8	-0.1	-0.2	-0.2	-0.2
10	0.0	0.0	-0.1	-1.3	-0.5	-0.8	-1.0
Players	39	45	42	102	242	273	279

The top three groups are essentially indistinguishable, and then there’s a fairly steady decline. The bust odds are also pretty striking, even in comparison to the overall table by ranking we looked at last time. This should come as very little surprise to anyone who’s followed baseball for any length of time: pitchers get hurt.

Also, the overall performances by these groups (both in median outcome and in higher percentiles) are down pretty sharply in comparison to the overall sample. My tentative suspicion is that BA failed to keep up with the changes in pitcher workload over this period; a young starting pitcher looks a lot more valuable if you’re expecting 220 innings per year than he does if you anticipate 180.

That being said, if you look at the sample size in each group, you’ll notice that the percentages of pitchers generally get higher as you move down the rankings, so BA did at least determine that pitchers often don’t match up well with the very best position players. This may have partly come from early experience, as the first three top-100 rankings (1990-92) had eight total pitchers among the 15 top-five spots; the 20 years following had only 31 of 100. Their first three #1 prospects were all pitchers; only three of the next 20 could say the same, and after 2007 (Daisuke Matsuzaka), they didn’t put another pitcher in the top spot until this year (Roki Sasaki).

Given that the numbers posted by the pitchers were almost uniformly lower than the ones from the combined sample, the table of non-pitcher results probably holds few surprises. But here are the results anyway:

Percentile	#1-5	#6-10	#11-15	#16-25	#26-50	#51-75	#76-100
90	85.3	58.4	57.1	33.7	41.8	32.2	28.1
80	55.2	43.4	41.0	27.2	28.1	20.1	15.5
70	44.4	30.2	28.5	18.3	15.8	11.9	10.1
60	35.0	23.3	26.0	12.9	10.0	6.6	5.6
50	26.3	14.0	19.9	8.3	6.5	3.2	1.7
40	18.1	11.3	13.0	3.0	2.8	0.3	0.1
30	11.2	6.0	7.5	1.2	0.4	0.0	-0.1
20	6.3	3.2	3.7	0.0	-0.2	-0.4	-0.6
10	3.1	-0.2	-0.1	-1.2	-1.2	-1.3	-1.3

Yeah. Not to put too fine a point on it, but over this sample at least, you’d have been better off with a position player ranked from 11-15 than with a pitcher from any of the groups, including 1-5. As far as players in the same bucket go, the position players had better results in every single group, often by a hefty margin.

In fact, this result is extreme enough that I think BA themselves may have noticed. As noted above, over 44% of BA’s top-100 prospects from 1990-2012 were pitchers. Over the last 5 years, BA has placed the following totals of pitchers in their top 100 lists: 35, 32, 28, 31, 31. The adjustment that they made early on in the highest echelons of the top prospect list seems to have percolated all the way down at this point.

Our original caveat to this analysis was that if BA adjusts how they do their rankings (which it seems they have), these results may not apply to the current data. That being said, the original results were sufficiently decisive that I suspect they will still serve as a good indicator. Given the continued decrease in pitcher workloads and the persistent preponderance of pitcher injuries, I would expect position player prospects to remain the better bet moving forward.

Up next, we’ll look at something a bit more involved than a simple yes-or-no question, and a factor that prospect evaluators discuss non-stop: How do the results vary for players of different ages?