My Draft Philosophy

Why Drafting the Best Player Available is Stupid

This blog will be broken into three segments. The first segment is the actual title, how I think teams should draft and how I judge if a pick is good or bad. The second part is a guide to some of what I look for in a prospect, and why I value things the way I do. The third section is a general overview of a lot of the stats you’ll see in the blogs I publish this week and after the draft as well.

The MLB Draft is the best opportunity teams have to add cheap impact players and every year, every last one of them squanders it. There are certainly teams better at drafting than others but every last one of them is not getting the most they can from the draft.

Drafting the best player available is a stupid strategy. Assuming you know who is the best player on the board better than anyone else is extremely arrogant and overstates the difference in talent between the #10 and #20 player in the draft (Or whatever, you get the gist) when the difference is usually very negligible.

Drafting to save money for later and take lesser talents now is a better strategy but still generally, not the best one. You should never want to leave potential stars on the table by taking a lesser talent. The goal should always be to maximize the number of future stars you are adding to the organization.

So if maximizing the chance of getting one star isn’t the right philosophy, and spreading the wealth to get multiple lower impact players isn’t the perfect strategy then what is? Maximizing your chances to get multiple high probably regulars and star level talents.

You’re focusing on the wrong things right now. I don’t think the money associated with the pick is the most important thing. You have to make the finances work but you could have an excellent draft by breaking the bank on Jackson Holliday in round one or cutting a deal with Cooper Hjerpe instead. The money isn’t what defines how good a draft is. What defines a good draft is the process behind the draft picks.

When we are evaluating an organization's competency we often look at scouting and player development as one unit. A team is good at scouting and player development or they are good at neither. The two have intermarried in the public eye and we have a hard time discerning which is which because they go hand in hand.

The two are meant to go hand in hand, and I think front offices trying to separate the two is one of their most detrimental mistakes. I have interviewed for multiple scouting jobs in the past and they all ask you to evaluate what a player projects to be, where their skills are now, what the tools are like, how they look, etc. None of them ask the most pivotal question of how can they become better?

The draft shouldn’t be about scouts finding underappreciated talents. That has a role to play obviously and is a pivotal step in the process but it is just that. A step. Not the conclusion. Player Development is the key to finding success in the draft.

Most people understand that a team won’t be successful without good player development. Player development is what creates value in the draft, you can find gems late, but the teams who consistently get the most production from their draft picks. The Astros, Dodgers, Rays, and Guardians namely are not the ones with the best initial draft grades. They are the ones who develop a good chunk of the players they draft into quality major leaguers, even if they maybe were not the best player in the draft.

Except, not every player can be developed just because you have good player development. There are loads of talented players on the Dodgers and Rays who don’t wind up turning into productive MLB players. That might be because those players don’t buy into what they preach but it also might be because they don’t have a good plan for the player.

Nathan Eovaldi is the best example that sometimes the player buys in but their plan just doesn’t work despite generally great player development. With the Dodgers, Eovaldi was FB/SL/SI 90% of the time with 45% fastballs. He was traded to Miami and brought his FB usage up to close to 70%. With the Yankees, he was back down to 45% fastballs and started to feature a splitter fairly regularly. The Rays further decreased the fastball usage and threw a lot more cutters. He finally went to Boston and swapped the slider for more curves while adding a half foot of extension that he finally became a front of the rotation starter. There were growing pains but they stuck with him and were rewarded.

Eovaldi ran the gauntlet of elite pitching development teams and while he was with probably the worst team at pitching development that he played for, he finally emerged as the Ace he is today. Sometimes it just doesn't work out, the player is willing to adjust but your plan is bad. When that is the case, even with your awesome player development, you get nothing out of them. There are countless other examples but Eovaldi is the easiest to illustrate that it wasn’t on the player for being rigid or stubborn.

In the draft, teams often draft the “best player available” without a plan in place for how they will develop them beforehand. The plan is typically- especially with early round picks to throw them in the minors and make adjustments once they become necessary. Sometimes, you’ll do something small beforehand, but you don’t see early round picks immediately rework their bat path the day they are drafted or ditch their fastball for a sinker on day one. I think this mistake is costing each team dozens of WAR every year and is perhaps the biggest market inefficiency in baseball.

Teams should only draft players that their player development people have identified a plan to develop before they even join the organization. This is how smart teams operate in free agency and in the trade market. Why should the draft be any different?

The Yankees didn’t trade for Clay Holmes because his SIERA indicated he was underperforming, they traded for him because they knew exactly how they could make him better. We know this because Holmes made those adjustments the day he joined the Yankees. The Dodgers didn’t sign Andrew Heaney because they thought he had some vague mysterious potential. They signed him because they recognized that if he switched to a slider than from his arm slot, he would become a whole lot better.

So why do teams not practice the same in the draft? Why do they draft players without a plan on how to let them reach their 90th percentile outcome? Praying is not a viable plan in this case but that seems to be the plan for most draft picks. There are some teams who take players with desirable traits they can develop but very rarely do they have a specific plan for how they will do it.

Very rarely, do you see pitch mix changes or location changes pre-planned. Almost never, do you see a pre-planned course for how the shape of the slider needs to be altered to play at the next level. The plan is often to wait until it doesn’t work and then you’re years behind when you do finally make the change that was obviously needed from the beginning. Why not? Why do we insist on waiting to make changes?

I am proposing that teams involve their player development team directly in the draft process. The scout's job is to identify the players who are good enough to draft in whatever round but rather than put them in a specific order, you leave that to the player development guys. Have your coaches and PD department look over the data, and video, and try to see exactly how they could make those players better than they are.

Order the draft board within each tier set by the scouts based on your confidence that you can develop them to reach the potential the scouts foresaw. Any player you don’t have a plan in place for should be put on a do not draft list, (In that round/range; obviously, you still take a round one talent in round five even without a plan.) no matter how much the scouts love them. It’s not good for the player or team to let them flounder without a charted course.

You can also send out the scouts to talk to the players and get to know them. Be upfront with the players that you plan to tweak unspecified things in their mechanics or arsenal and ask if they will be willing to trust the coaching staff to know what they are doing even if it doesn’t immediately bring results. With the draft, you have the opportunity to find out who will buy in on the development plan you have for them, and adjust your rankings accordingly.

The goal of the draft should never be to take the best players right now or even the best prospects right now. The goal is not to win the draft every year in initial draft grades or have the most top 100 prospects. The goal should always be to get the most long-term productive major leaguers. The ones you have a coherent plan to develop will always be the safer bets to do so than the higher upside player you plan on just hoping will somehow make it one day.

I have Noah Schultz, Brock Porter, and Owen Murphy ranked higher than Brandon Barriera on my draft board by a pretty decent margin. However, if I am running an organization I’m taking Barriera over all of those three. I think they are the better prospects but I have an idea on how to turn Barriera into a productive major league arm. Give Barriera cutter primary with his wrist positioning, and I think he’ll take off. I have a basic idea of how exactly to do that so he is more attractive to me personally than a lot of the higher-ranked arms on my board.

I’m not expecting every draft pick to suddenly work out but if you are drafting every player with a plan on how to turn them into a star, you only need 10% of those plans to actually come to fruition and you have the best draft in the league most years. The goal is 100% success and you should never draft anyone expecting anything less than success but you should also understand that not every draft pick will work out. Players get hurt or sometimes your plan just sucks. A bad plan is better than no plan but it doesn’t always work and that’s perfectly fine. This is why you need twenty chances at it and fortunately, there are twenty rounds in the draft.

Every player drafted has a 90th percentile outcome as a star. That is something that Baseball Prospectus said years ago and it’s something I still very strongly believe today. If every player has a 90th percentile outcome where there is a star then no prospect should be ignored. Invest in developing every player and only draft players you have a plan to help them reach their 90th percentile. There should still be guys you have a plan for in the 20th round because every player has upside. Target upside and take risks with player development, you will likely be rewarded for it.

There was a tweet that I believe came from Kyle Boddy years ago but I can’t find it. The idea of it was that a year in which every single player in the organization gets exactly 5% every year is a failed year of development because no one has turned into a quality major leaguer.

Sure, individually they may have all gotten better but no one improved significantly so your system is going backwards. It’s better to have 5% improve by 100% than 100% by 5%. Even if the other 95% get 100% worse. You have to take risks to be successful and as long as you hit big on a few of them, you come out ahead. The big hits are what define MLB success, not the marginal roster filler.

I genuinely believe this is the largest market inefficiency in the sport. Even with the advances in scouting, and the widespread use of trackman technology to provide data on most draft picks, the draft is still largely viewed as a crapshoot. The draft really shouldn’t be one though. It’s the chance to cherry-pick only the players you really want and know how to develop from a pool of thousands. You should have higher success rates with draft picks than with prospects from trades and that isn’t at all the case.

A team like the Brewers who can’t develop hitters to save their life and have the best pitching development in the league should only draft pitchers in the first ten rounds. If those pitchers work out you can flip them for already developed major league hitters. Having a deep system without any positional weaknesses is a stupid dream, what matters is getting the most major league talent.

Talent can be traded just as easily as it can provide value for you. Who cares if you have no catching prospects when you have the prospect capital in pitching to trade for Sean Murphy or something? Don’t ever draft for need or draft something you can’t develop. Draft players you know you can help reach their ceiling and have a plan on how exactly to do that. Those are the picks that will bear fruit.

My shift in draft philosophy quite frankly makes grading draft picks off rip completely impossible. The only bad draft pick is the one that you don’t have a plan for. Unless someone in the Mariners front office DMs me saying that they took Thomas Harrington because they thought he was perfect as is and doesn’t need any adjustments to pitch in the majors; I can’t call it a bad draft pick. For all, I know they have a plan to add velocity or improve the shape of his stuff.

I’m not going to grade any draft picks this year. I’ll analyze who the players are and who they are expected to be in a neutral environment with competent player development. I’ll break down why I think they might be a fit and how I think the team might approach developing them but I won’t call a pick good or bad. That is impossible to know out of the draft. Drafting someone highly ranked on my board doesn’t mean it’s a good pick and drafting someone I have low doesn’t mean it’s bad. The only thing that matters is your plan for developing said draft pick.

When I’m scouting prospects for a general rankings list, I’m obviously not just ranking the players I know how to develop at the top. I am generally looking for the highest average outcome more than anything else like most scouts do. I prefer to assume good player development rather than average player development because anything else is depressing and I hate thinking the worst of players.

The blurbs tend to focus more on the positives than the realistic outcome. I’ll highlight flaws but in general, I focus on the players upside more than anything else. I think prospects are infinitely more interesting and more valuable when you focus on what they can be and how they can get there. There are a zillion 35 FVs that are maybe a useful bench piece. If I focused on what they will be it would read as “good stuff but probably just a low leverage reliever” a billion times.

That doesn’t make for enjoyable content nor does it help you understand why they should be of interest. I focus on what they can be because it helps flesh out why a team wants/should want them in their organization. It also helps get fans genuinely excited about the talent they have coming up, even in weaker systems. The future is meant to be exciting. It’s important to be realistic but it’s also important to recognize that every player has greatness in them and you should never write anyone off entirely.

I don’t know everything. There are times I will be wrong. I focus on the wrong things oftentimes or overvalue things that don’t matter. I can get caught up in flashy numbers and miss the obvious visual cues of failure. I’m as guilty as anyone of writing off players in the past for what traditionally feels like poor pitch shape but is actually exemplary. I like to think I’ve gotten better at checking every angle but when I do this again next year, there will almost certainly be another dozen angles I look at players through.

That is the nature of this business. Player evaluation is meant to evolve. I’m not going to evaluate players the same way every time- especially not across multiple years. My methods change every year to try to be more and more precise. That will always be the case until I am 100% right about every player.

I’m perfectly fine with admitting I was wrong. I prefer to be right, obviously, and I always strive for perfection but when a skill changes, I’m not going to dig my feet in and say they aren’t good still. Player development is non-linear and far from predictable. Skill levels change all of the time and you have to adapt or die.

I don’t believe in judging players from different demographics differently. Circumstances should not influence how you scout. I get why people look for more physical traits and tools over skills in prep bats but for the most part, I disagree with that logic.

A guy like Tyler Gough falls completely under the radar because he has very little projection. The appeal here is that he has elite stuff. You typically don’t prioritize already advanced pitch shapes in a prep arm but you can’t ignore them either. If Gough was coming out of college, after two years of solid performance where would he rank with the exact same pitch data? I’m betting he would fall in the first two rounds and closer to the first than the second. He’s not your conventional prep target but he’s still really good. You miss that if you only scout the delivery, body, feel, and physical attributes like people often do.

There is also the inverse that exists. College arms who are just lacking in physical projection or missing a changeup often get disrespected too. Just because they are older now doesn’t mean they can’t get stronger or find a new pitch. If they were a prep that wouldn’t be a major concern at all. Should being two years older make that much of a difference? Development is non-linear, and in general, I lean towards it not mattering.

We’re often willing to overlook poor hit tools from prep bats but not from college ones. Jud Fabian has plus tools across the board but major whiff and general hit tool issues beyond that. Henry Bolte has very comparable raw tools and strikes out more in high school than Fabian does in college. Can you guess which one is ranked higher on all of MLB Pipeline, Prospects Live, and Baseball America? It’s not the one who has objectively the best swing decisions in the country.

This isn’t me knocking on Henry Bolte, this is me pointing out how silly it is that Fabian gets beat into the ground for whiff issues but we don’t do the same to Bolte because he’s younger, even if those issues are worse. Does Fabian being three years older make him suddenly unsalvageable? The youth should grant some extra leeway but not that much. Hit tool concerns need to be relevant for all players or none.

There is a difference in confidence though between the two levels. I totally understand that it’s a lot harder to be confident that a prep has good control than a college arm with a sub 5% walk rate in 200 career innings. In general, I do change my methodology slightly for preps and college players when scouting control/hit tool.

Production is king for college guys and still matters for preps but good production doesn’t mean much at all for preps. For preps, I’ll lean more on how the delivery/swing looks and look for visual signs on if they will whiff. There are players I’ll miss on because of that but it is generally more accurate than relying on walk rates against high schoolers- literal children. For college players, I trust the track record and the results- more specifically I trust the trackman data that lets me see how good their locations are and what pitches they struggle to locate.

I’m never going to put a prep over 60 control and very rarely above a 60 grade hit tool. College arms/bats have a much easier time getting there because I can be confident in my assessments when I have both the data and the eye test. I don’t neglect to evaluate the mechanics and swing entirely for college guy but it matters less for them than the numbers. Preps are the inverse scenario.

You have to be flexible in how you evaluate players and look at them from all angles to really make sure that people don’t fall through the cracks. There is no one mold of player, but a quadrillion ways to be successful. They don’t have to look conventional and they don’t deserve to be dismissed for looking unconventional.

I value the shape of a fastball much higher than I do the shape of secondary pitches, regardless of the level they are at. The fastball is still the most thrown pitch in the majors by a pretty wide margin even as fastball usage decreases league-wide every year. More than that, it’s the hardest pitch to develop a good one out of nowhere. I could easily name a half dozen pitchers with brand new plus sweepers this year. The amount with a new plus fastball (That used to be average or worse) is like Matt Bush and uh…

It’s really hard to just stumble upon a new fastball. If the feel for pronation/supination is there then I am more comfortable projecting on them finding a secondary. I would still value them much higher if they had one now but it’s not a death sentence if they don’t have it yet because regardless, of age we know you can always add a new pitch. I won’t rely on them doing so but I will account for the possibility.

There is more than one path to having a good pitch. Elite VAA four-seamers are the most common variant of elite fastballs but they aren’t the only variant. There are elite sinkers too. There are elite fastballs from a high release point ala Clayton Kershaw. There are elite fastballs with bland movement and there are elite fastballs without impact velocity (Joe Ryan fits both). Just because it doesn’t look conventionally great or grade out perfectly on your model, doesn’t mean it isn’t a great pitch. Every model has blind spots. Obviously, the inverse is also true and fastballs that check a lot of boxes sometimes suck.

It is also very important to consider how a pitcher’s stuff interacts with the rest of their arsenal. Peyton Pallette is one arm with an amazing curve with specs comparable to Ryan Pressley and above-average ride with velo on the fastball. His problem is that the FB/CB don’t actually tunnel at all because their movement profiles mesh so poorly. As such, Pallette has terrible chase rates with his elite spec breaking ball.

Connor Prielipp is the inverted version. He has generic movement on his not all that hard fastball from a high release. He throws a low eighties gyro ball that looks good but is still somewhat generic. Yet, the fastball/slider tunnel so incredibly well that he has some of the best in-zone whiff rates with both pitches- individually, and overall, in the entire draft.

Even when a fastball has terrible specs, and terrible results, that does not mean that it doesn’t have an important role to play and should be replaced. Patrick Sandoval is a prominent example of this in the majors. He has a terrible four-seamer but it’s a needed pitch for the changeup to dominate like it does.

The changeup and sinker don’t work together because the horizontal and vertical elements are so comparable. Sandoval has one of the best changeups in baseball because he uses the bad four-seamer against right handed hitters. There is optimization potential but scrapping the four-seam is not how you do it. That would only wreck the changeup. You can’t just look at one pitch, see that it’s bad and say get rid of it. A lot of bad pitches are integral to that pitcher's success. You have to be careful when tweaking a pitcher’s arsenal or else you’ll ruin what made them good in the first place.

How the arsenal blends is an important piece of the puzzle that must be considered when evaluating a pitching prospect. You can’t just isolate the elements and expect things to work out eventually. If they are not performing up to their stuff then there is always a reason for it. The job of scouts is to find that reason and the job of player development is to fix it.

I value raw power higher than any other tool for position players. More specifically, the capacity to get to above-average raw power eventually. That might sound strange since players live or die by their hit tool. Almost every top prospect who busts is because they can’t hit. So why put the most value on power?

I’m not interested in developing bench pieces and having power is what gets you off of the bench. A 107.6 MPH Max EV was the 50th percentile of major leaguers last year. Guess how many qualified players with a Max EV that low had a wRC+ above 105 last year? That would be zero. (It’s one in Josh Rojas at <100)Let’s lower our PA minimum to 300 to be more reasonable. Just Tony Kemp, Kolten Wong, Alex Bregman, and Luis Arraez. Bregman doesn’t count because he still has above-average game power. It is really hard to be successful in the major leagues without some semblance of raw power.

Raw power can be developed but there’s a limit to reason. I’m not going to expect someone like Chandler Simpson with a Max EV of 97 MPH and a 6.8% Hard-Hit rate to develop into a productive major leaguer. Only like 5% of above-average major league hitters have below-average raw power and never anything close to that low. If you don’t have useable raw power, your upside is probably realistically capped at a bench piece.

I also prefer to chase upside so the player with plus raw power and whiff issues, due to a hitch in their swing is more appealing to me than the one who will never be able to make impactful contact. I understand why people disagree but I’m not interested in adding players you can always pick up in free agency for the league minimum. I want players who can help a franchise actually win games. If that is the goal, some raw power is an absolute must.

My goal in my rankings is primarily to predict who has the highest average outcome in the majors but it’s not just that. I want real impact players who can make a difference. A player who is guaranteed to be worth 2 career WAR in ten years at the major league level with no variance in that projection at all, wouldn’t make my top 500 at all.

I’m not interested in players who are only going to fill space on the roster, no matter how high their average WAR projection might wind up being. If they don't have the upside to play an important role, it’s not worth wasting valuable resources on acquiring them. Let the upside plays that bust fill in the margins of the roster or get MiLB free agents who are journeymen always available for nothing to fill holes. Homegrown AAA depth is no better than a waiver claim who is AAA depth.

I was given access to more resources than I could have ever imagined this year. I was given access to the entirety of the Trackman Database for College Baseball. That means for any game played in a stadium with Trackman, I have access to basically all of their statcast data and some more stuff as well- including batted ball spin rate.

Usually, when I am referring to a player's whiff or groundball rates, or whatever, it is only in games with Trackman data. I will specify if it is not. This is a limited sample size and sometimes paints an inaccurate picture but it’s more often than not correct because you don’t completely fluke into anything in what is typically a 50+ BBE sample size.

I was also given access to all of the data from high school and college baseball games played in MLB stadiums. Those games have Hawkeye installed and active so I have just about all of the usual data available on statcast. I have pitch data for 170 different prep arms as well as more accurate statcast data (Relative to Trackman) for 542 college arms. Also, some batted ball data but given the small sample nature, only Max EV has significant value. That data for high schoolers is oftentimes up to a full year out of date so it can’t be the end all be all but it does help a lot in evaluating players.

I’ve also made a lot of friends since last year, and even just since the Compendium was published. I’ve had conversations will fellow analysts, scouts, and team employees about players. I’ve even had a few players reach out to me, giving me their data themselves and asking me to write a detailed scouting report on them. I’ve bounced my ideas off of a number of connected people and am getting direct feedback on what players are like as humans from people who know them.

I do not deem it morally acceptable to talk down a player- high schoolers, especially for their personality. Most of these players were children when the incidents I’ve been told of took place. I don’t find it polite to slander who people are. If a player has positive makeup, I’ll mention it but if it’s negative, I will not comment on it. I’ll reflect on the makeup concerns I have in their ranking but not in their reports.

This is a warning to take prep pitch data with a grain of salt. The baseball used for high school games has higher seams than the MLB one. I’ve been told when I’ve asked around and based on how the averages line up with the MLB, that you generally want to subtract two inches from what it says the IVB is (Absolute value) and about that (depends on pitch type and shape, not really a uniform rule) from horizontal movement.

In a similar vein, trackman pitch data is not everything. There are probably at least ten pitches in college baseball I could argue are the best pitch in the MLB today based on the data readings trackman gives. They obviously are not that. The trackman baseball also has slightly higher seams which inflates movement some (Less than for preps) but it’s more to do with how many trackman units are miscalibrated in general, and just track differently from Hawkeye especially.

I do my best to filter out the really bad trackman units and will often just use a player's road pitch data if it’s evident that their trackman is broken but it’s far from a perfect measurement. Treat trackman pitch data as a range rather than a fixed number. The difference between movement is never as big as it might look and that is doubly true for release points.

I am one of like five different people in the public sphere with access to an actually scaled properly Barrel% for college baseball players. Most places when they refer to Barrel% for college or minor league players are counting all batted balls with a launch angles between 10–35° and an exit velocity above 95 MPH. Thanks to the wizardry of @ydouright, my version of barrel% I will refer to is the MLB version with an expanding range of launch angles based on the exit velocity.

The strike zone I’ll often refer to for calculating chase%, Z-swing%, and in-zone contact% have changed shape throughout the process of scouting for this list. At first, I was using 1.5 feet for the bottom and 3.5 feet for the top of the zone, thanks to a Baseball Prospectus article years ago that said that was the size of the average strike zone called in the MLB.

I then experimented with the AAA strike zone they are testing before remembering that I am an idiot. They tested a zone in Low A southeast last year, as well as the AFL that was meant to resemble the shape of the MLB strike zone. The top of the zone is 56% of the batter's height and the bottom edge is 28% of the height of the batter. For pitchers, I just set every batter to default at 6'1" since trackman doesn’t automatically store batter height.

In the blogs this week, that will be the zone I am referring to unless I either got data sourced or they appeared in a game with hawkeye. If they appeared in a game with Hawkeye, statcast actually records the exact coordinates of the top and bottom edge of the zone for that player to give me perfect accuracy. Sourced data obviously uses a more accurate player-specific zone as well.

For the players at a 40 FV and below on my top 500, they will use one of three zones at random and it probably won’t say which one. Treat the plate discipline numbers in those sections with a grain of salt. I don’t have the time or desire to update that data for nearly 400 players. Apologies.

I will talk about batted ball spin data quite a bit this week. Justin Choi has written two interesting blogs on the value of it already. Batted ball spin helps flyballs carry and is something I’ve speculated about the impact of for a while. It won’t carry a player's stock but it is something I watch because it’s an unseen element that we know can lead to success and it’s data you won’t see anywhere else since Hawkeye doesn’t even track it. There are inaccuracies in trackman data, as always so grain of salt but it’s a mildly interesting data point most people aren’t familiar with.

I used top 8th EV instead of 90th percentile EV when examining a players actually impactful raw power. Driveline found that top 8th EV was the best number to work with for accurately gauging effective raw power and was the most consistent year to year. So, I opted to use that over the somewhat less meaningful 90th percentile EV… or at least, I thought I did. Turns out I’m an idiot who can’t read and Top 8th EV doesn’t mean top 8% but top 1/8. It’s too late to fix it right now but on the post-draft/during the draft content, it’ll correctly refer to the top 12.5% of EVs. Sorry about that.

I want to take another moment to express my utmost gratitude to @Nojay31 for designing the thumbnails for this week’s blogs. This week’s content would also be nowhere near the same quality without the assistance of @ydouright who is pretty much the only reason a lot of the trackman data is interpretable. Any graph you see charting how college players compare is probably from him and all of the percentile rankings of how a hitter measures up to the league come from him.

Thanks for reading! Tune back in tomorrow to read about some of the top under slot targets on day two of the draft. If you missed it, I also wrote about the top players who haven’t performed but are still good prospects yesterday.

Other Stats Glossary:

GB% — The percentage of batted balls hit by the player that was hit on the ground.
OFFB% — The percentage of batted balls that were ruled as an outfield flyball. This does not include popups.
LD% — The percentage of batted balls resulting in a linedrive.
PU% — The percentage of batted balls resulting in a popup.
Pull% — The percentage of batted balls hit with a spray direction >=15° (This is inverted for RHB)
Center% — The percentage of batted balls hit with a spray direction <=15° and >=-15°
Oppo% — The percentage of batted balls hit with a spray direction <=-15° (This is inverted for RHB)
HH% — The percentage of batted balls that were hit in excess of 95 MPH.
SH% — The percentage of batted balls hit with an exit velocity below 80 MPH.
Average EV — The Average Exit Velocity of all a player’s batted balls.
Air EV — The Average exit velocity of a players batted balls that were not defined as groundballs.
90th EV — The average EV of the top 10% of a players batted balls. This does include foul balls. Usually when I use this one it’s from a source.
92nd EV — The average EV of the top 8% of a players batted balls. This does include foul balls. Was supposed to be Top 8th but I’m an idiot.
Max EV — The hardest hit batted ball by a player in a game with Trackman.
Sweet-Spot% — The percentage of batted balls hit with a launch angle between 8° and 32°.
Barrel% — As defined by Baseball Savant. The percentage of fair balls hit 98+ with an expanding range of launch angles based on exit velocity.
sdLA — The standard deviation between the launch angles of a player’s batted balls. This has a high correlation to BABIP.
Batted Ball Spin — The average spin rate of a players batted balls.
Backspin% — Percentage of batted balls hit by the player on an axis between 135° and 225°.
Zone Swing% — Percentage of pitches seen in the zone that the player swung at. The zone is defined as within -.83 — .83 plateX and height is defined as it was during the initial MLB ABS testing at 56% of a batters height for the top edge and 28% for the lower edge.
In-Zone Whiff% — Percentage of in-zone swings resulting in a swing and miss. The zone is defined as within -.83 — .83 plateX and height is defined as it was during the initial MLB ABS testing at 56% of a batters height for the top edge and 28% for the lower edge.
Chase% — Percentage of Out of Zone Pitches swung at. The zone is defined as within -.83 — .83 plateX and height is defined as it was during the initial MLB ABS testing at 56% of a batters height for the top edge and 28% for the lower edge. IVB — Induced vertical break. The amount that a pitch moves independently of gravity.
Drop/Statcast Drop/Movement with Gravity — How much a pitch moves without factoring out gravity. This is the vertical movement you see on statcast.
HB — How much a pitch moves horizontally. I typically refer to it as an absolute value like it is listed on Statcast.
VAA — Vertical Approach Angle. The vertical angle at which a pitch crosses the plate. Flatter is typically better for fastballs and steeper is preferred for secondary pitches.
HAA — Horizontal Approach Angle. The horizontal angle at which a pitch crosses the plate. Steeper (Absolute value higher number) typically results in more swinging strikes but these rules are not hard-set by any means.