Prospects vs. veterans: a snapshot

[gregmag]

This time every year, people who want to make aggressive deadline trades recite a mantra: “Prospects are just that – prospects.“ Which, first of all, is meaningless, because a thing is always what it is. But I take the point to be that you can never count on prospects to develop into anything. The unstated premise seems to be that you can always or usually count on veterans to keep doing whatever good things they did before.

Yesterday I was looking for something or other and ended up seeing the MLB pipeline top 100 for 2022. It got me thinking, so I did a quick snapshot; people who know how to work with data could do a bigger, vastly better version of it. The question is, what value can you rely on getting from veterans as opposed to prospects? My snapshot was to look at the 2022 top 10 prospects and the 2022 top 10 MVP finishers in each league to see how much value each group provided between 2023 and 2026 (prior to yesterday’s games). I used bWAR because it was the easiest thing to access. Here’s what I found, assuming my math is right:

Top ten 2022 AL MVP: 154

Top ten 2022 NL MVP: 121

Top ten 2022 prospects: 110

In this snapshot, the prospects were indeed the least reliable group — but not by nearly as much as the “just that” mantra implies. The prospects were also a more volatile group — higher standard deviation. But overall, the prospect group was right there with the cream of the NL and within shouting distance of the (Ohtani and Judge led) cream of the AL.

Does this pattern hold for other years? I don’t know. You could also play around with the window; to me, a 3.5 year window starting right after the MVP seasons and a year after top prospect rankings seemed pretty sensible, but I could be wrong. My biggest question is what happens when you get down to, say, the 75th to 100th best prospects and veterans. Anyway, this is a quick pass at starting a somewhat informed discussion.

[LouisEly]

For a team with an unlimited budget (cough... Dodgers... cough), it's about WAR.

For a team like the Brewers, it's about salary/WAR.  

That's what prospects do - they provide a low salary/WAR, freeing up payroll to acquire/extend veterans.