My old friend John Sickels has just published the latest edition of his annual (and indispensable) prospect book, and I thought I’d ask him a few questions about prospecting ...
Rob: I probably say this every spring, but this year’s book is your best ever. I know it’s an immense amount of work—what, more than a thousand prospect comments?—but I particularly imagined you agonizing over the letter grades. Is there any obvious difference between a Grade C prospect and a C+? (That’s a rhetorical question that you’re free to ignore.) Anyway, what struck me about the grades this year is that there are many, many more B+‘s than A-‘s ... and that there are more A hitters than A- hitters. My question is this ... Have you ever given, or been tempted to give, an A+ grade to a hitting prospect?
John: There were 1170 comments in the book this year, and I wrote about 50 more that got cut for space. Yes, I do agonize over grades frequently. One of the hardest “breaks” is the one between a C+ and a B- ... Sometimes I’ll think about those grades for days. It may seem like a small thing, but I take it very seriously.The only player I can think of that I was tempted to give an A+ to was Joe Mauer, but I decided not to do it because I’m a Twins fan and wasn’t sure I was being objective about him.
To me, an A+ would be an absolutely perfect prospect ... someone with no flaws at all. And I’ve never seen a prospect who didn’t have a flaw of some kind or some question they still needed to answer. Jason Heyward, for example, is a pure Grade A prospect but I can’t give him an A+ because he looks like he might be injury-prone, plus I’m not sure if he’s going to be a 20-homer guy or a 40-homer guy. Strasburg would be close to an A+ pitcher ... except some scouts think he might have some injury risk.
Reader Comments and Retorts
Go to end of page
Statements posted here are those of our readers and do not represent the BaseballThinkFactory. Names are provided by the poster and are not verified. We ask that posters follow our submission policy. Please report any inappropriate comments.
But definitely not 3 doors down.
What makes you think that we have seen a prospect who is "as far above average as you can get" in the time that Sickels has been handing out grades?
Normalized to average, sure, but that doesn't mean uniform distribution, nor would such a thing be appropriate (if we take the grades as some sort of value projection).
In my mind A+ is a grade that exists outside the curve and only applies to special cases.
If you define A+ as perfect you would want ... a guy that was hitting .350, guaranteed 40+ HR power, more walks than strikeouts, 18 years old, and off the charts defensive/athletic projection. Ken Griffey Jr is probably the closest thing to that that I remember, but, not quite.
I agree with that, but he'd have to drop everyone else down for it to work. Soon you'd only have to best 1% of prospects getting higher than a B, which isn't right.
I don't know... Think about pitchers, how many of those prospects grow into guys who contribute 40+ WAR (which shouldn't be that hard over a 15 year career, 3 WAR per season would more than get you there and a high level pitcher should have a few 5+ years) over the course of their career? If you start talking about the best in the game, then 1% sounds about right, it just seems to me that guys with that kind of potential (Heward and Strasburg) should be distinguished in some way. If you gave them A+ status then your assigning that status to 2% of a top 100 list. If we use the BA model and look at 30 spects per team then those players would acount for .22% of all ranked spects, or in Sickles book .17% of the players he commented on. That seems like a pretty select group to me.
But that's just opinion, and its mostly an moot argument since anybody who reads Sickles' book knows Heward and Strasburg are better than the other A spects. It just damages my perception of his integrety that he jumbles the elite spects in the typical well above average, especially in the case of Strasburg where he justifies it by saying that some scouts have injury concerns. Every pitching prospect ever is an injury risk and there will always be some scouts ready to say so, he's basically saying there will never be an A+ pitching prospect.
What does integrity have to do with any of this?
That's certainly an A+ Sickels wouldn't regret.
#1 overall draft pick. At 18 shot through A, AA, and AAA putting up a .988 OPS, including a .948 OPS at AAA.
Edit: Coke to DKDC
Griffey reached his peak. I don't think you can call him disappointing. I mean, he could have done more, but most of that is because his health fell apart in his 30s. He cannot be called disappointing from the perspective of his debut scouting reports. You would never predict 630 HRs and 10 GGs for any prospect.
You must be Registered and Logged In to post comments.
<< Back to main