Your 2020 Giants: Revised Top Prospect Timetable Thoughts

Obviously, with the MLB season unlikely to begin until June or July, that throws all my prospect timetables out of whack, since they won't be playing, something I should have realized when I posted them (honestly, as you can tell by the length of each, I just wanted to get them out).  I probably should have thought about that before publishing, realizing that things have been moving so fast on Coronavirus Time.

So I thought I would take a stab at initial thoughts on how the top prospects might be affected, based on the current thinking that the MLB won't start until mid-year.  CDC guidelines is restricting meetings of 50+ for the next 8 weeks, which lasts to mid-May, but even if that works and people can somehow start to congregate again, the players will need spring training again, which pushes the start to, at best, early June; and some GM's are thinking July, because many players come into spring training having already gotten ready, but with this order, nobody is staying in shape.  Plus, some counties, like in the SF Bay Area, has a shelter order in effect, restricting people to stay at home for the three weeks, except for essential business (of which, entertainment is not).  Who knows how long that will take?  Still, thought I would tackle the scenario where the season starts up around June/July.

Your 2020 Giants: Top Giants Prospects Lists

I compiled some Top Giants Prospects lists, some only had 10, others had a lot more:

• Baseball America Top 10 Giants Prospects
• MLB Pipeline Top 30 Giants Prospects
• Baseball Prospectus Top 10 Giants Prospects
• FG:  Top 36 Giants Prospects
• The Athletic:  Keith Law Top 20 Giants Prospects
• Minor League Baseball Analyst (MiLBA)

Also interesting are rankings of the Giants farm system in the majors:

• Baseball America: #14
• MLB Pipeline:  #10
• Baseball Prospectus:  Has not been released yet
• Fangraphs:  Has not been released yet
• Keith Law:  #10
• Minor League Baseball Analyst:  #6 (A- in hitters, C+ for pitching, A for Top-End Talent)

I know I said this for my last post, but this one (plus the last one, combined) is probably going to be in lieu of my usual Big Six prospect post (so refer to my post on Top 100 for further info on the top prospects) that I've been doing in the spring most seasons.  :^)

Of course, with the coronavirus delay to the season, who knows how much of the 2020 season will be played.  Stay safe and healthy out there!

Your 2020 Giants: Top 100 Prospects Lists

Many of the major Top 100 Prospects analysts have put out their rankings and I thought I would use this as an opportunity to post the rankings and talk about my thoughts about the Giants prospects ranked.

The rankings I'm utilizing are:

• Baseball America (subscription)
• MLB Pipeline
• Baseball Prospectus
• Fangraphs:  Eric Longenhagen
• ZiPS:  Dan Szymborski
• The Athletic:  Keith Law (subscription)
• The Athletic:  John Sickels (subscription)
• ESPN:  Kiley McDaniels

And not being ranked does not mean that there aren't other potentially good players in the farm system, these rankings are not the final word.  For example, Pablo Sandoval wasn't even ranked on the Giants Top 30, let alone Top 100 the season he reached the majors, and Brandon Crawford never made any Top 100 lists either.

On the other hand, being ranked isn't an automatic ticket for MLB stardom either:  Gary Brown was ranked #18 by Baseball Prospectus and #38 by Baseball America after the 2011 season.  Or how about Jesse Foppert, #5 overall per Baseball America after the 2003 season?  And Angel Villalona was ranked in the Top 100 three seasons in a row, hitting a peak of 33 (BA) and 29 (BP) for the 2008 season.

This is probably going to be in lieu of my usual Big Six prospect post I've been doing in the spring most seasons.  I'm not really up for a big research project, though maybe I'll just post a list and quick thoughts on some, sometime near Opening Day, if I feel up for it (sorry, just down right now, wife's aunt passed a couple of weeks ago, then lost out on a job that I thought I was very qualified for and was even told that coming in person interview would be the next step, before I got the decline e-mail 10 days later. Then I just got rear-ended the other day... and my insurance company hasn't bothered to call me, except once, since, it's basically two weeks since...).

Giants Draft Analysis: The Sabean Era Drafts Overall (fourth and last in a series)

In this series, I broke up the Sabean era into three distinct periods - basically pre-Dynasty, Dynasty Building, and post-Dynasty - and analyzed each one based on the probabilities for finding Good and Great players, that I came up with in my recent study of the first 50 years of the draft.  It examined the odds of ending up with nothing in any particular draft and the cumulative probabilities of how many good and great players a baseball operations leader would have in a random draft (that is, if the leader has an average clue, as good as the average GM, as to which player is good, and thus is randomly choosing these prospects in the draft, based on this average expertise, randomly based on past history).

In this final blog post in this series, I look at the entirety of the Sabean era, see what the odds are of where the results are now, and where he could be if some of the current top prospects end up being good players.  As I've noted, it could take a decade or more for players to retire before we know the final results of any GM's draft results, if there are any players still playing and look like they could reach Good status.

And while this is the last of this series, I'm probably going to be updating this particular post after every season or two, see where he is, based on progress or decline of the remaining remnants of his drafts.  Obviously, there will be declines where we can say that a player won't be making it most probably, and there will be breakout seasons where he puts himself back into play.