First, I am proud to announce that there is a new list in the left hand column of Razzball called, Top 50 Fantasy Baseball Prospects. That’s right, I labored intensely for hours on end, poured my heart out, and now it finally begins a new aspect of Razzball. Ignoring the semi-quasi emo lyrics, the main goal of the Top 50 Fantasy Baseball Prospects can be found at the link, or just read them in the next sentence. Goal: Provide an expert prospect list solely for fantasy baseball purposes. Due to fantasy baseball’s immediacy of statistical production, players are not necessarily ranked based on tools or projections far into the future, but instead, current production with true expert analysis (Baseball America, Keith Law, and John Sickels) along with the level of play in the minors (i.e. Class level). Aspects taken into consideration are fantasy baseball’s positional scarcity, Razzball philosophies, scouting reports and personal biases. To be part of the list, a player must be playing in the minors, and have no major league experience (excluding Jeremy Hellickson, Peter Bourjos, Ryan Kalish, J.P. Arencibia and Brett Wallace for the first posting). This is to eliminate the Alex Gordon’s and Kila Ka’aihue’s of the world who should be in the majors anyway.
Secondly, this is the first installment of this list. As the year(s) progress(es), there will be updates, changes, and maybe some omissions along the way. It’s hard enough keeping track of all 30 MLB teams, let alone their four main affiliates. With that said, I attempted to congregate all the top prospects that are worth more than the pine tar on their bats. There might be some prospects that I missed on accident and please point this out for I want to include them if they’re deemed worthy.
The July 31st trading deadline screwed a little beyond the expected. The early call ups of Domonic Brown and Logan Morrison hindered the top ten players (had Brown number one and Morrison number seven). Pitchers are easier to project value into the majors leagues for they control more of their output, but hitters on the other hand are harder to project value into the majors leagues because one mini hot streak early on skews their value for fantasy. Nevertheless, there aren’t many pitchers in the twenty, but a lot in the top 30. This, I believe, is due to a pitcher’s ability to wreak havoc upon a team’s pitching ratios in a short amount of time, while a hitter holds value for a couple of oh-fer games (plus, one solid game makes his numbers digestible). That and power/speed or extreme power hitters are exponentially more valuable than a mid-tier pitcher, even if they are young (i.e. Matt Kemp, Ian Kinsler, and Justin Upton to name a few recent players).
Finally, I’m also biased.
Feel free to make recommendations, object to my rationale and critique my list.
A mini-breakdown:
- 2 Pitchers in the Top 10 (Hellickson and Teheran)
- 5 Pitchers in the Top 20 (the above and Chapman, Britton, Castro, Minor)
- 13 Pitchers in the Top 30
- 2 Middle Infielders (Ackley at 16 and Dee Gordon at 28)
- 5.5 Catchers (Montero counts as half)
