The new guy over at FanGraphs, Dan Farnsworth, is causing a stir with his controversial prospect rankings. He has a pretty different POV on it - especially that he values upside less highly relative to likely results, and is more skeptical about "gamble" players making it. The Braves Top Prospects list went up today and the comment section is a hilarious swarm of angry Braves fans who are super offended.
I understand the outrage, to be honest. I loved Kiley McDaniel's work on Fangraphs, and was more than a little concerned that they were replacing him, essentially, with a community blog contributor who had done some swing breakdown pieces.
http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/an-announcement-regarding-our-prospect-coverage/I have no idea if they just couldn't get a "real" prospect guy or it wasn't in their budget, or what.
I mean, ostensibly they understood that they were hiring a nobody who had few ties to people in the industry, and thus was going to be unable to gauge his own interpretations against those of other professionals and ask hard questions like "am I really so sure of myself that I should rank a guy the Braves got for a couple mid-30s salary dumps above a guy everyone else thinks is a top-25 SP prospect?"
In any case, I guess if Fangraphs wanted to move in a more "clickbait" direction, then mission accomplished because people are certainly discussing the list. But no one should be looking for "rogue" prospect analysis. Prospects are like stocks - I'm less interested in finding a guy who thinks a penny stock is TEH BEST STOCK EVERRRR than in knowing whether 8 of 10 analysts think a company has a solid foundation and is a good long-term stock to buy.
Maybe he'll be right about individual players turning out better, who knows? But the majority of "top prospects" don't turn out anyways so who really cares who's "right" or "wrong" about a prospect 5 years ago? It's more valuable to be able to get the market consensus of how prospects are being valued at a given point in time. And rogue analysis is worthless for that.
If not a single team in baseball would choose your #2 Braves prospect over your #3 Braves prospect, if given the option of either in a trade when both players are SP, that's a worthless list.
