One prospect that worked for this idea was Heliot Ramos. After struggling for two MLB seasons, 2022-23, he broke out in 2024. Many fans had given up on him, but because he did well in A ball when he was 3-4 years younger than the league, I was waiting for the equivalent in the majors, and 2024 was that season, and he broke out.
But, obviously, that’s just one case, one example. So I thought I would go through Giants history and see how prior hot prospects did, using this rule, and how the theory fits reality. But first, I should go over what I did with Heliot Ramos. This post will review my thoughts as it related to Ramos when he was a prospect, and discuss my theory on prospect analysis.
ogc thoughts
To flesh out the process I took in keeping the faith that Ramos might make it. Below are his stats by year and league, plus age against the league:
- 2017 - Rookie: he hit 1.049 OPS (only 151 PA) while -2.8 years relative to the league,
- 2018 - A: he hit .709 (515 PA) while -3.4 years
- 2019 - A+: he hit .885 (335 PA) while -3.5 years
- 2019 - AA: he hit .742 (106 PA) while -5.1 years
- 2021 - AA: he hit .756 (266 PA) while -2.9 years
- 2021 - AAA: he hit .722 (229 PA) while -5.7 years
- 2022 - AAA: he hit .654 (475 PA) while -4.7 years
- 2022 - MLB: he hit .282 (22 PA) while -6.6 years
- 2023 - AAA: he hit .928 (263 PA) while -3.7 years
- 2023 - MLB: he hit .537 (60 PA) while -5.3 years
- 2024 - AAA: he hit .953 (134 PA) while -2.7 years
- 2024 - MLB: he hit .792 (518 PA) while -4.3 years
What Encouraged Me to Continue to Believe in Ramos
First off, there’s no one rule that means a prospect is a sure starting major leaguer. They might have everything going for them up the minors, but sometimes something in the majors prove too hard to overcome. All you can do is see how many factors appear to suggest this prospect could make it. Following are some signs that you should be watching a prospect.
Youngest HS Draftees
I will start first with a rule that Baseball Prospectus found when they analyzed the draft: the youngest HS position players drafted in the first 100 picks. Per their research, they found that the 5 youngest players drafted outperformed their expected value more so than the 5 oldest players, among the Top 100 HS position players.
Young high school hitters are simply much more likely to develop into stars, particularly players who weren’t elite picks.
Generally, they are the high school players whose birthdays are in the second half of the year. It’s no guarantee, but over the history of the draft that was studied, this group outperformed. And Ramos was born on September 7th and was one of the youngest players drafted that season. And was drafted 19th, not an elite pick. Incidentally, that's also true for Bryce Eldridge, born in October and drafted 16th overall.
Reaching AA by Age 22
Another rule I follow, from Baseball Forecaster’s toolkit is that prospects who make AA by age 22 are significant prospects. Ramos did, so did Eldridge, Harrison, Birdsong, and Whisenhunt, and further back,
Posey, Bumgarner, Lincecum and Cain. Sandoval, Crawford, and Belt as well. It’s no guarantee, and prospects have made it despite not reaching AA by 22, it is more that this is a significant achievement and thus keep an eye on them. This rule is more one of keeping the faith, hopefully other factors got you following him before.
League Outperformance Theory
So, what got me interested was him hitting .709 OPS in A ball, when he was only 19. He was much younger than the league average, and yet was above league average (.694 OPS).
Here’s how I thought about age relative to league. The average age in the majors is around 28 years old, so my thinking is that any prospect would have to have been about average for his league whenever he was the average age. That also means that this average player likely wouldn’t be average in the majors until he’s 28. So if you want a young star, the prospect has to be better than league average, and significantly at that, and he needs to be significantly younger than the league, in order to duplicate that when he reaches the majors.
Thus, if your prospect is to be average in the majors at 24, that would mean he needs to be at least league average in the minors at roughly 4 years younger, to duplicate in the majors. If he’s only league average when he’s the same age as the league, then he might not be MLB average until he’s 28 YO. At least that’s how my theory works.
So Ramos was roughly league average in A ball, but at 3-4 years younger, so he’s promising, but it’s just one season and he was basically average. You want someone significantly better than average, and that’s what he did the next season, in Advanced A, hitting .885 OPS.
Then he hit the bad patch of seasons where he wasn’t an above average hitter. It likely didn’t help that he didn’t get to play actual games in the pandemic 2020 season. It also didn’t help that he was much younger than 3-4 years in the leagues in that period too, especially when he was in the majors. Still, his prospect status took a big hit with analysts and fans. He fell from #6 prospect to start the 2022 season, down to #20 to start the 2023 season, per MLB.com.
That 2023 season was the season that gave me another puzzle piece for Ramos: he reached -3.7 years vs the league (AAA), and he dominated, hitting .928 OPS, though he struggled again in the majors. This was his second dominant season, and in 2024, he continued to dominate, showing that 2024 was not a fluke, and when he rejoined the majors for a third consecutive season, he was -4.3 years vs the majors, which is pretty close to -3.7 years, and he hit .792 OPS, which is very good, and was named to the All Star game.
Further Thoughts
Thinking through all this, the above was my thinking process for how I monitored Heliot Ramos’ prospect status, and how it helped me be hopeful in discussions when others were negative. Next, I thought about how I can use the above information, and get an even better take, good or bad, about any prospect. I plan on going through a number of Giants prospects from the past, see if I can refine my theory and make it better, because, for all I know, I just lucked out with Ramos.
One thought I had was to pull data from Fangraphs on Heliot’s relative performance in the minors, adding their wRC+ stat to my bullet list above, and reorder the stats by age relative to league, and see how that look. I knew what is good OPS, but it would be further helpful and informational to know what his production looks like based on a neutralized metric like wRC+, which is park and league adjusted.
First, wRC+ definition:
Weighted Runs Created Plus (wRC+) on FanGraphs is a comprehensive, park-and-league-adjusted statistic that measures a hitter's total offensive value per plate appearance, anchoring league average at 100.
Here is the data from above, but now in table form and including wRC+ data by league-year:
Below is the table in chart form:
As one can see, the blue data points line up clearly as to show that as Ramos is getting closer in age to the league, his performances improves (the blue data points for the oldest and youngest age points are covered by the red data point that correspond for that age). That suggested that as he caught up in age to the majors, he would have better performances as well. The idea being that if he is good among his minor league peers, and then progresses as much as other prospects do, as they gain experience, then he can take a similar growth path in the majors as well.
The red data points are the generated projected points from the line created by the linear regression of the blue data points. These confirms the visual relationship one sees for these datapoints, showing how wRC+ increases as Ramos' age relative to the league increases.
Of course, not all prospects progresses at the same rate, or with the same experiences. Some make the leap, once they get to a certain age, while others stall out, prospects progress at different rates. But my supposition here is that prospects generally progress relatively uniformly, within a standard bell curve of possibilities, which allows projection systems to estimate what a hitter might hit in the majors, after their performance in the minor leagues (which is generally called Major League Equivalency).
Future Posts
I don't have the know how to do this analysis across a huge database of prospects, but I can do this, one at a time for recent and past Giants prospects, both ones who show some potential, like Ramos and ones who never made the jump (at least so far), like Luciano, Matos, and Bart.
Especially Bart, since he's aging out, though perhaps he's not a good example/datapoint, because his stats at Pittsburgh are skewed because he's a very good hitter when he's in Pittsburgh (.289/.370/.458/.829) but not so much on the road (career road batting line: .211/.294/.314/.608). Which is why his career batting line is only .240/.319/.369/.688. If he didn't end up at Pittsburgh, would he even still be in the majors, given that poor road batting line? Not really, as he's been only an adequate defensive catcher.
Anyway, I will try to pick this up with other Giants players in the future, hopefully create a series of posts.
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