That's more an indication that their farm was thin than anything else. Him jumping over Margot isn't shocking either. Margot's season up to the mid season update where he was ranked 24th was pretty solid with a .755 OPS (.328 OBP), stellar defense and 25 steals in 61 games (.409 per game). After that update he had a .730 OPS and 15 stolen bases over 49 games (.29 per game). He then posted a .639 OPS with 1 steal over 15 Dominican Winter League games. His star is currently dimming.
Sort of. He had a .741 OPS in 46 games with 20 SB in Salem, then a .745 in AA over 64 games with 19 SB. I think we're more likely looking at a reaction to his performance after the mid season rankings came out than his performance in AA specifically. Regardless, AA catchers (and pitchers getting the ball to them) seemed to have a little less trouble keeping him from swiping bags so maybe the opinion on how much of a base stealing threat he'll be at the major league level has soured a little. If so, that takes a chunk out of his ceiling as he was never going to be a really good bat at the major league level. Defense and base running/stealing were the tent poles in his projections. That his bat suffered in the second half and then looked poor in the DWL doesn't help, either.
Something that can...no...*should* be said about every trade ever. Especially when prospects are involved, grading a trade is great at the moment serves a purpose and it's fun and it's obvious to do. But just like grading an NFL draft, it's really best to check back in a few years later before claiming victory or utter defeat.
I don't know, I don't think people put too much stock in DWL stats. Margot held his own in AA, and while his SB/G was down a bit, it's still comparable to Ellbury's first exposure to AA, when he was two years older than Margot. That may just be a matter of adjustment. I'm going to say I'm a little surprised Guerra leapfrogged Margot. We all have our own definitions of surprise or shock or whatever (maybe you saw some shit in 'Nam and nothing really shocks you, I don't know), but the idea that a guy who was not even an honorable mention on the midseason list is now a Top 50 guy (or like a 55 FV guy, I liked how Kiley McDonald did his prospecty quantifications) is at least worthy of an eyebrow raise for me. Statistically I can see the case and it makes sense, but apparently those extra two months proved a lot of stuff to some people.
Was he on Law's lost? Damn those paywalls! I was going by BA's, since they're the only mid-season lost a poor grad student like me can afford. Seems like there's generally a fair amount of concordance on those lists, but yeah, there's certainly variation on those things too. Sometimes the #40 and #80 guys are practically interchangable, sometimes they're worlds apart, and obviously every organization has its own different opinions of guys. I guess I wouldn't have been shocked to not see Guerra in a Top 100 prospects lost at all, although it's possible I've just been too busy lately and missed out on the big wave of pre-trade Guerra hype.
Hey, you have no idea what I think! Most of the time I don't even know what I think!
How can it not? The Sox have 8 minor-league affiliates. Each team has 40-50 players. There are 30 major-league teams. That works out to close to 10,000 players, not counting independent leagues. That's obviously too high, because of double-counting, but certainly there are thousands of prospects.
Even if every team only has 100 prospects, that's 3,000 overall, which means the difference is that the 40th ranked prospect is in the 98.666th percentile and the 80th is in the 97.333rd.
I guess I just have a stricter definition of what a prospect is. I wouldn't include "all minor leaguers" as prospects, as many are too old (the average age in Pawtucket is like 27) and the overwhelming majority are just roster filler. Not to pick on anyone or be mean, but let's take Greenville Drive player David Sopilka, 22 year-old Greenville Drive catcher who's been in the Red Sox system for 6 years with a career 203/276/258 line. I mean, I'm gonna assume Sopilka is probably a solid dude, but I think it's pretty safe to say that his chances of making to the big leagues are extremely low. He'll have to be content with merely being one of the top couple thousand guys in the world at what he does (and probably among the best ever from his town or state or whatever), which is an amazing personal achievement, but I wouldn't really consider him a prospect. On the other end, the guys who made up most of the AAA roster are either AAAA type replacement-level depth (Weeks, Bianchi) or post-prospects (Bradley, Peguero). Looking at position players, there are only like a handful of guys who I'd say were actually "prospects." And that's on a team with a fairly strong farm.
But those guys on the reserve lists are just playing for lower-level teams, right? Ie, it's not like there are 39 guys hanging out in the Pawtucket clubhouse. The other 14 guys are likely playing in AA or are injured or something. The active roster is the number of guys actually on the team.
I like how Kiley McDaniel separated players into tiers by their general grades, it gave a good indication of what you're talking about:
Oh, I got what you were trying to say several comments ago, and agree that the differences between prospects are not linear. I do enjoy a good pedantic discussion from time to time, although I find "debate" not really my thing - I don't really care about scoring internet debate points, plus I think debating tends to close you off to interesting new ways of thinking about things in order to defend a position. Also, I think a lot of internet "debate" is often people who actually agree more than they disagree but are misunderstanding each other because they're being too vague and not defining their terms. Anyway, I was thinking that sometimes the difference between #40 and #80 may be big enough to be more categorical than linear depending on the players, but I can be comfortable saying in most cases it may be close enough not to really matter.
Officially 35 at a time, but more than that over the year; but the double counting I talked about balances it out. PawSox lists 64 players for 2015, Portland lists 58, Salem 49, etc. As I said, "that's obviously too high, because of double-counting", but still many thousands.
To get pedantic, I think it's 25 active for AAA, AA, A+, and A; 35 for A- and the various rookie leagues.
There may be an approximate answer in the SABR dataset, but they don't make that downloadable because they don't feel it's accurate enough, which should tell you everything you need to know. Baseball-reference.com has minor-league data that I think is fueled by the SABR dataset, and of course that could be scraped from their site, but it's not something I would do (even if it was in their terms of use, which I'm not sure about); the answer would be so fuzzy that it wouldn't tell you any more than our estimates. For example, look at the PawSox roster. It shows 62 players (I said 64 earlier, because I just added batters+pitchers). Rick Porcello is one of those 62. I don't think you'd call him a minor-leaguer or a prospect. What about Jonathon Aro? Minor-leaguer or not? Eduardo Rodriguez? On the Portland roster (56 names) we see Mookie Betts, as well as Aro, Hanigan, etc. So even at the AA/AAA level, where there's at least decent documentation (ask Brandon about getting information about the DSL players) it's already hard to say how many minor-league players there were last year.
I highly doubt that this study could have been done utilizing 2013 as the data set.
On their way to winning a World Series championship, The Sox led all of baseball in runs scored, were second in hits, first in doubles, sixth in HR, first in RBI, fourth in SB, third in BB, second in BA, first in OBP, first in SLG as well as first in OPS, OPS+ and total bases. I'll give you the fact that the pitching stats aren't as overwhelming as the hitting stats, but if you're talking about fielding a "TEAM of players" from those traded or allowed to leave I'd like to know who might be on this team of outcasts.
I like how Dombrowski built his tradable assets into a single package. Planning that the Red Sox would splurge on Price as a free agent, even at the cost of setting the market, he threw his disposable high-ranked prospects at one target for the best reliever on the trade market (NDA division).
The minor league fair play lawsuit states the following: "It is estimated that, at any given time, the Defendants collectively employ around 6,000 minor leaguers total". I suspect this does not include players that are paid but are injured. http://s3.amazonaws.com/cdn.orrick.com/files/Senne-v-MLB.pdf
SSS (130 batters faced) but unless his 2nd half is much better than the 1st, it'll be 5 years in a row with the SIERA (2012-2016 inclusive: 0.76, 1.67, 1.94, 2.21, 2.58). K% and BB% aren't too much worse than they have been the last few years, but hard-hit contact % is at a career high and his GB% is way down (he always was a fly ball pitcher, but in 2016 his BIP are hit in the air 70% of the time). FIP/xFIP/ERA would also all be career worsts.
We didn't really have anywhere to play Margot I suppose. Wow, he's still 21!
