Before the famous economist/statistician/sabrmetrician Nate Silver was chosen as one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2009, he crunched baseball stats for BaseballProspectus.com. He found more success in the political arena by taking an old idea and adapting it to a new subject.
Specifically, Silver aggregated just about every pre-election poll he could find, giving each one more or less weight through a formula he devised, to come up with a reliably accurate “prediction model” for the major U.S. elections.
With a nod to Nate, I decided to aggregate four recently released lists ranking the Dodgers prospects — Baseball America, FanGraphs, Minor League Ball and Baseball Prospectus — into a composite ranking. There’s no weighting formula and this is no prediction model. (Besides, success in baseball can’t be defined objectively; if it were, there wouldn’t be so many damn stats). So while Yasiel Puig is listed first in the table you’re about to read, I can’t tell you what that actually means for his long-term baseball success. I can only promise he will not be elected president of the United States.
Rather, let’s think of this as pooling together the various statistics, opinions (of scouts and writers), and radar-gun readings that went into each poll to make a more informed top-prospects list. Nothing more, nothing less, but something I hope we can extrapolate to other teams and other polls in the future.
Name | BA | FG | Min | BP | C-RANK |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Yasiel Puig | 2 | 4 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
Corey Seager | 3 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 2 |
Hyun-Jin Ryu* | 1 | N/A | 5 | N/A | 3 |
Zach Lee | 5 | 1 | 4 | 2 | 4 |
Chris Reed | 6 | 2 | 8 | 4 | 5 |
Joc Pederson | 4 | 9 | 3 | 5 | 6 |
Onelki Garcia | 7 | 7 | 6 | 7 | 7 |
Matt Magill | 9 | – | 7 | 6 | 8 |
Garrett Gould | – | 6 | – | 9 | 9 |
Chris Withrow | – | 8 | 9 | 8 | 10 |
Also receiving votes: Jesmuel Valentin, Paco Rodriguez, Ross Stripling, Zachary Bird.
*FanGraphs and Baseball Prospectus didn’t include Ryu in their top 10 because he didn’t fit their operational definition of a “prospect,” not because he wasn’t good enough.