One of the things I believe in is age in context to the league the prospect is playing in. Like many of my truisms, I learned it from Shandler's Baseball Forecaster Annual, though he says nothing explicitly to that point in his toolbox, but it is a clear underpinning because his team when calculating MLE for AA and AAA players (they feel that any level lower, the prospects still have to much to learn to properly adjust to the majors), they modify the MLE according to age, meaning if they are old versus the league, their MLE is lowered, and if younger, raised. And I have felt that I've absorbed this from all the Leader Lists for all the minors leagues that the Giants have teams in that I've looked at over the years. It just makes total sense to me.
But like some things that makes total sense to you, there are others who disagree, and it is their right to do so. In particular, prospects who are older than the league seem to get some prospect hounds hearts a-pounding, when all I'm doing is trying to inject some sense of realism into the discussion, else the discussion degenerates into a talk about what we are going to do with our Mega-Millions lottery winnings. So they have the right to think that, but so do I have a right to my opinion. So who is right?
And that's where data comes in, to try to provide an answer. That was my first step to becoming a defender of Sabean over the years, I was like others, complaining about his drafting skills, but unlike others, I pulled the draft data and found that finding a good player, who is a starter and one likely to reach and become a wealthy free agent, is one of the hardest things to do, worse than trying to hit a baseball for a base hit, if you have a draft pick after the Top 5 picks or so, on average. Then, as the saying goes, it gets a lot worse from there.
So in this study, I'm going to look at the South Atlantic League (or SALLY to aficionados) over a period of years (2000-2005) to see what the data says about that, whether much older or much younger than the league. I pulled the Top 100 leaders in OPS and K/BB for each season, then sorted them by age to group them. Baseball-Reference.com kindly bolds the ones that have made the majors, then I separated out the ones that I recognized as a good player.
I was hoping to also show quality by breaking out the good major leaguers by eyeballing them. Unfortunately, my eyeballs aren't up to what they were before, so I'm delaying that portion of my study until I have time to go through all the major leaguers and put them into two categories, good major leaguer or other. This post will just cover the percentage of these top prospects making the majors.
What I wanted to do was put in a qualitative view by separating out the ones who actually were productive, and not just contributors. For example, I don't count Gregor Blanco as a recognized good player. He has been clearly been valuable, but has not really made a name for himself in the league yet. Plus some of these data points might still go up some if anyone breaks out late, but generally, the success rate is so low already in terms of just making the majors, that it won't really won't make that much difference, in my opinion, had I finished up that part of the study. But I decided to be more precise in my categorization.
However, I still think that showing just the percentage of these leaders who made the majors, broken up by age, shows good information for prospect hounds to consider when they are looking at prospects in the minors.
