2022 Minor League Baseball Analyst

By Rob Gordon, Jeremy Deloney and Brent Hershey

The best resource for projecting future performance of minor league athletes—essential for fantasy league baseball players

The first book of its kind to fully integrate sabermetrics and scouting, the 2022 Minor League Baseball Analyst provides a distinctive brand of analysis for more than 1,000 minor league baseball players.

Features include scouting reports for all players, batter skills ratings, pitch repertoires, performance trends, major league equivalents, and expected major league debuts. A complete sabermetric glossary is also included.

This one-of-a-kind reference is ideally suited for baseball analysts and those who play in fantasy leagues with farm systems.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Mar 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781637270554

Rob Gordon

I live in central New Jersey. I have a B.S., spent over six years in the US military, and have used observations and experience, conversations with others, much reading, and a bit of imagination in developing this story.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Player Development in a COVID World

by Brent Hershey

Welcome back.

Boy, how times have changed since the last time this ink met these pages. It’s only been 24 months since the last time I sat down to write this introduction. But since that time, the world as we know it has drastically changed.

Of course, the minor leagues have not escaped unfazed. When the entire MiLB season was cancelled at the end of June in 2020, we knew that as baseball watchers and prospect fiends, we were entering our little sub-set of uncharted territory. And yes, the disruption of professional baseball players’ development cycle couldn’t hold a candle to what the globe as a whole was facing in 2020. On the other hand, the baseball industry, just like every other workplace ecoystem, had to adjust expectations for moving forward in this COVIDworld.

Player development—that catch-all phrase that encompasses the task of taking young players and honing their skills to become professional athletes at the game’s highest level—is a cog of every Major League Baseball organization. It’s likely why you’re reading this book—to get the Minor League Baseball Analyst (MLBA) staff’s sense of how likely each of these players are to reach the majors, and what kind of statistical impact they will have.

But what happens with the primary, formalized method of training these players (minor league baseball instruction and games) shuts down for a period with no warning? What happens when world-class athletes, many in their prime physical stage of life, are forced to take a year off from their routines? We know that each baseball player under a club’s wing combines a unique set of physical, mental and emotional tools and skills each needing to be pushed, challenged and maximized for the future; each at a different place on the road to the majors. So it follows that an unplanned disruption would manifest itself differently in different players—there’s no One Size Fits All answer. But what is the best way to take that into account?

As you begin to read through all of the content produced in this volume—the essays, the player boxes, the lists—keep the above questions in mind. The Lost Season was such a jarring, out-of-the-blue event, that we have no concrete way of knowing its long-term effects on player development.

•

We sit here at the beginning of 2022 still attempting to reconcile all of it, even as we return to our familiar way of evaluating prospects — for most of you, through the lens of fantasy baseball. Like all baseball fans, we were thrilled to have the minor leagues return in 2021. Sure, the season started a bit later, and there were some other short-term adjustments, but the games, the players, the evaluators returned. But how do we account for the Lost Season—and how long will with the shadow of 2020 linger over the player-development cycle?

The easy answer: Probably longer than you think.

What follows are some thoughts on second-level consequences to consider as you dive into this book, as well as all the other great resources on prospects available today. While MLB’s tweaking of the structure of the minors that began in 2021—reducing the number of affiliates and players—also added insult to the injury of the Lost Season, we’re going to keep our examination focused on one level—the individual players.

Of course, the shutdown touched every minor league ballplayer’s development in some fashion. Look at it this way: The success of the job of any prospect is measured by a goal that is years away: standing on an MLB field and helping your club win baseball games. The payoff (not only measured financially but also in proximity to affecting MLB games) can be years in the future. The here-and-now is part of the necessary journey to achieve the goal.

To have that opportunity stripped away can be devastating. Think of the climb to the majors as a long staircase between the first and second floor of a building. To get from the first floor (signing one’s first pro contact) to the second floor (suiting up in an MLB game), players have to work and take each step, one at a time. Sure, there are leaps forward—as well as steps back. But with enough talent, skills coaching and perseverance, many get to the top and reach their goal.

In 2020, though—partway during the ascent—it was like the treads on the stairs just disappeared without notice. The steps to the goal no longer exist. Some players might be closer to the bottom of the stairs; with a long way to get to the top. Others are within the last few feet, but still have no way to make that final adjustment to propel them to the big leagues. It’s not of any player’s own doing, yet the reality is clear. Achieving the goal just took a short-term hit.

Thankfully, the treads were replaced in 2021 and the climb re-started. As we noted, everyone around the world was affected as varying areas grappled with restrictions, shutdowns, general stumbling around these weird new circumstances. But professional athletes have their own specific risk—their age in relation to physical condition is such an integral part of the arc of their career.

Bearing the Brunt of the Missed Time

Bringing this back to baseball: As we examine the potential effects of the Lost Season one year removed, there are a couple types of players we’d like to examine in a bit more detail. These are players we feel could have the most to lose from missing an entire year. It’s one of many lenses to consider as you flip through this book and attempt to project what each of these players’ path to the major and their MLB careers might look like.

One way to think about the categories that follow is to give the players who meet one or both of these stipulations extra grace in the evaluation process—especially if their 2021 season fell short of expectations. (Extending extra grace for us all during this confusing new experience is encouraged … but I digress.) That might mean some wiggle room for conclusions depending on one’s specific fantasy baseball situation—how deep your rosters are, how this affects keeper and trade decisions, for instance. But the over-riding point is that the circumstances of 2020 would seem to be especially tough on these players, so their 2021 may not be as sharp of a picture of who these players are, or can become.

The Class of 2019 Players

The first group of players are those who entered pro ball in 2019, the year before the pandemic season. Given our analogy above, these players are at the very bottom of the stairs. For them, 2020 was going to be the first full professional season, where they would have full-time access to all the benefits of professional instruction, training and lifestyle. Whether players were signed on the international market in 2019, or were selected in the 2019 MLB First Year Player Draft, the shutdown stripped them of the chance to get their pro career started, in the normal, March spring training/regular season/fall instructional league routine.

For the International players, most likely inked (formally, but that’s another story) on or after the July 2, 2019 opening of that signing period, the life change especially for the 16- and 17-year-olds is extraordinary. In most cases players report to their MLB training complexes in the Dominican Republic, and the Dominican Summer League is played. This group would have done that in 2019, with the possibility of being invited to minor league spring training in the U.S. the following March. They would traditionally partake in extended spring training before another short-season assignment in 2020, either in the U.S. or back in Latin America.

For those selected in the MLB Draft, many of the college and high school players would have been sent out to short-season ball for a few months of games right after they signed in 2019. Whether in short-season A ball or complex leagues, they got their feet wet, became a bit acclimated to the process of pro instruction in the U.S. Again, like their international counterparts, the expectation would be to attend minor-league camp the next March, and then get assigned to extended spring training and eventually an affiliate.

For both, this half-season of 2019 served as the getting-to-know you period between the player and organization, and their teams’ player development staff became more familiar with these new players and begun to form a plan of how to turn them into MLB players.

With the pandemic shutting down things in early March 2020, these 2019 organizational rookies never got the chance to take that next step of going through their first full spring training. And when the entire 2020 minor league season was cancelled, most had to resort to their own training methods, except for the rare case of a 2019 rookie who was invited to attend an alternate training site.

Though we are now in 2022 and had a pretty normal 2021 (no interruptions of play, at least) don’t forget while flipping through this book that any player whose biographical information (right under their name in the player box) indicates he was signed as an international free agent or was drafted in 2019, has not had a normal progression up through this point. Yes, it’s been two and half years since their entry into this new career, but the nature of the journey so far has been nothing short of fractured. So if these players have not lived up to expectations, remember that there’s a very good reason for that.

The Need-Reps Players

The second type of individual player who we surmise was especially hurt by the shutdown are those that, for whatever reason, are deemed especially in need of extra repetitions or development. Raw vs. polished are terms we and other evaluators use to represent two ends of the development spectrum; in this instance, we’re thinking of the raw players. There could be some overlap with the previous section, too—by definition, rookies have very little experience, of course—but we’re meaning to use this in especially a baseball sense.

Furthermore, we’re going to define this even more tightly. It could be argued that in a broad comparison of pitchers vs. batters, batters got the shorter end of the stick in terms of the lost season. Of course there are exceptions, but in general, a batter’s development (let’s say, for example, working on swing mechanics) should be more difficult to replicate (for testing and improvement) outside of game environment.

Pitchers can throw—go to pitching labs, work on their deliveries, see results via velocity, movement and biomechanics. Yes, there is value in working through a game against live batters, where they don’t