Image credit:Ronald Acuna Jr. (Photo by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)

Question: I am a new subscriber, and I am trying to understand the content. I have found a lot of different articles that seem to contradict each other, and they are from the same writers. An example would be the Top 100 prospects vs. Top 150 Fantasy Baseball Rankings. I get the fact that one is for fantasy, but when I drill down on each player the scores don’t seem to line up with the recommendation. (Sometimes) the recommendations don’t seem to align with the scoring (Hit, Power, etc.)?

Keith George

Thanks for subscribing. I’m happy to try to help explain this seeming discrepancy.

You are correct in that fantasy rankings and the Top 100 will often disagree. There are players in the fantasy rankings who would not be in the Top 100 (largely because of defensive concerns) and vice versa (largely good gloves with more modest bats).

But in a few emails back and forth with Mr. George, I came to realize that the question also revolves around why a player with a lesser hit/power grade will rank ahead of someone at the same position with better hit/power grades. The example he asked about was why Luisangel Acuña ranked ahead of George Lombard Jr., even though Acuña has a lesser hit grade and the same power grade.

To help explain this for others who may have similar questions, here’s how I answered him.

Our tools grades are all projected tools grades. None of them are present grades, so sometimes we may have a 50 hit tool on a player who may have a 20 present hit tool (or worse). So we may be saying that someone will eventually be a .250 hitter in the major leagues, even if they would hit .110 if they were asked to play in the majors right now.

These tools grades are our projections of a likely result for how a player will produce at their MLB peak (think 2-4 years at the best part of their career). But that tools grade alone does not incorporate the risk of how likely they are to reach that projection. We include BA Grades for that reason, as we have a player’s likely role and their risk factor of reaching that role tied into the BA Grade.

In Acuña’s case, we have him graded as a 50/Medium. That means we project him as a future MLB regular, and he’s a medium risk to achieve that role. In these terms, medium risk is actually one of the lowest risk grades we hand out, because in a way, all prospects carry a still considerable amount of risk of reaching their projected role grade.

In Lombard’s case, his BA grade is a 55/Extreme. So we are saying we project him as an above-average MLB regular, which would be a better player than Acuna. But we also are saying he has a lower chance to reach that role than Acuna does. 

So yes, we do think that Lombard has a solid chance to be a better player long-term than Acuna, but that’s only one factor in how we rank the players, and also in how teams evaluate and value players. 

To take a recent example, the Padres traded Victor Acosta to the Reds for Brandon Drury at the 2022 trade deadline. If you grade out Acosta, he has a chance to be a better player than Drury. He could play the same positions defensively at a similar level and could end up as a better bat. And the Padres were giving up at least six years of team control of Acosta in exchange for three months of Drury. 

But the Padres were willing to do so because Drury helped them right away and they felt like they knew what they were getting. Acosta, meanwhile, was likely four years and five levels from the majors when he was traded. He carries significant risk.

You can think of the risk grade in some ways as the error bars on the projections. If you asked me to project what Braves outfielder Ronald Acuña is going to do in 2024 if healthy, I feel like the error bars would be relatively small. A healthy Acuña is going to hit for average and power and steal bases. His defense is going to be hit or miss, but he also will make up for some of that with his excellent arm. I feel confident in saying that Juan Soto is going to draw a ton of walks if healthy in 2024. These are players who have established who they are in many ways.

If you ask me to do the same type of projections with high school draftees from the 2023 class, or international signees from 2022/2023, all of those projections carry much larger error bars, because there are many ways a player’s promising tools and skills may be found lacking as they play against more advanced competition. There is also the factor of maturation and physical development, which is always difficult to project.

The tools grades themselves incorporate risk, but only to a small extent. As a player climbs the ladder and gets closer and closer to the majors, their tools grades often reduce, because what seemed possible when a player was 18 will sometimes disappear as a player matures. That power projection as a skinny 18-year-old with a fast bat may be a 60, but if the player hits 23 or 24 years old and has yet to put on good weight and add power, that projection will be revised. Similarly, an athletic 18-year-old may be a defensive whiz who looks like a future 60 defender at shortstop. But if they get heavier and less athletic over the next five years, that 60 defense projection could turn into a 50, or they could end up at 2B or 3B instead of SS. But while those tools’ grades may drop, the error bars are also getting smaller.

It does go the other way as well. When Elly De La Cruz signed with the Reds, he was a 55 runner. But as he matured, he managed to have a growth spurt that made him bigger and stronger, but did so while also getting faster. He’s an 80 runner now, something that we couldn’t have projected without a time machine when he was a 17-year-old. Even with the run tool, a 17-year-old has a much bigger error bar on that projection than a 25-year-old.

In summary, tools grades are only a part of how we rank players. A solid regular at Triple-A is often more valuable than a toolsier player who is just beginning their MiLB career. The 18-year-old will have louder tools grades, but the 24-year-old with a lengthy MiLB resume of hitting at a solid level while playing solid defense is a much safer bet than the higher risk/higher ceiling teenager. And it’s fair to say that those projected grades for an 18-year-old as a rule have bigger error bars than they do for a 25-year-old in Triple-A.

That’s why we include both a projected role and a risk grade in our BA grades. If you want to take risks, those are the players with 55s and 60s on their role grades. If you want to reduce your risk, you can focus on the players with lower risk grades, which will sometimes include lower role grades as well.