Prospect variance and block catchers

Winter meetings always involve trade, but last week two were above the fray. First, the Guardians traded Andrés Giménez to the Blue Jays in a two-part transaction that briefly left Cleveland with three left-handed first basemen. Then the White Sox traded Garrett Crochet to the Red Sox for four prospects. The best of that group, Kyle Teel, appears to play catcher, the same position as Chicago’s top prospect Edgar Quero. They also have the same future value of 50, which is the limit for the first 100 prospects.

The Guardians made an extra trade to avoid doubling up on similar archetypes, sending Spencer Horwitz to the Pirates for three young pitchers, but the White Sox kept both catchers. I heard many murmurs questioning that decision as I walked through the Dallas hotel that briefly housed the center of the baseball universe. But I think both teams acted rationally, and that worrying about Teel and Quero overlapping is foolish. I can’t prove it to you, but I have provided some data that I hope will influence your opinion.

Cleveland’s case was simple. Steamer projects Horwitz as a 2.5 WAR/600 PA player. He projects Kyle Manzardo as a 1.8 WAR/600 PA player. Josh Naylor? Steamer defeated him for 2.4 WAR/600 PA. Three players for two positions: first and DH. (Yes, Horwitz also played second base, but he really shouldn’t be a second baseman, and I don’t think the Guardians would have used him there.) One of them would be sitting on the bench despite being an upper-middle contributor, a decision wrong for a team that is trying to maximize its resources. Something had to give.

On the other hand, there are the White Sox. They also traded a young star, and the best player they got back plays a position where they already had a similar option. Teel was our No. 42 prospect on our updated Top 100 list in 2024, a polished all-around catcher who we expect to reach the majors at some point in the next two years. Quero was our 40th ranked prospect, and you’ll never believe it, but he’s a polished all-around catcher who we expect to reach the majors at some point in the next couple of years.

What makes these two situations different? Time. Those three first basemen who won twice? This is who I am now. However, all three cannot play in the majors at the same time, meaning one is locking in the current value of the other. Since the Guardians are focused on the playoffs in 2025, it doesn’t really work. On the other hand, Teel and Quero aren’t valuable to the White Sox because of what they’ll do in 2025; for them, it’s more a question of the future.

When you hear “Top 100 Prospects,” don’t take it as a final announcement about what a player will be. For example, our 2019 Top 100 list had a delightfully varied middle section:

Your future value is no guarantee of where you will end up. There’s tons of uncertainty. You can think of a 50-FV outlook more as a distribution of possible future outcomes:

You can quibble about what exactly that means. Are our estimates imperfect? Decidedly. Do players get better or worse in unpredictable ways? Absolutely. Is this random? Destiny? Unpredictable hard work and confidence? Something deterministic that we simply don’t have the tools to detect yet? I don’t have an answer for you. The point is that while the label we’re putting on both White Sox catchers now is the same, what they’ll actually grow into as major league players is far from certain.

It’s all pretty obvious, but size matters. If the spread of results is narrow, if most prospects similar to Teel and Quero develop into broadly similar major league players, perhaps it’s reasonable to worry about them blocking each other. If the spread is wide, or if the most likely outcome is bankruptcy, this is less clear. Estimating the distribution of outcomes is not easy, but it is certainly doable.

I made some assumptions to get a rough idea of ​​what it looks like in real life. First, I assumed that the White Sox will try to compete in three years: I had to pick a number, and that seemed like a reasonable average estimate. Next, I decided to take the WAR projection for 600 plate appearances as an estimate. Ultimately, I had to choose a sample of real-life players to use as a comparison. I used every role player with 50-FV grades on our top 100 prospects list in a given year.

I wanted to avoid having the data overly corrupted by the lack of a 2020 minor league season, so I decided to use three years: prospects from 2019 projected for 2022, prospects from 2021 projected for 2024, and prospects from 2022 projected for next season . . Simply put, I took our prospect lists and looked at how the players assigned an FV of 50 developed over the next three years. I used projections rather than results because not all of these players got full playing time, so otherwise the variance of a small sample would swamp the results. Likewise, I decided not to limit my sample to receivers with a 50-FV rating because there simply weren’t enough of them.

I chose to exclude pitchers from this study. I’d have to make some guesses about how many innings equals 600 plate appearances, and they obviously don’t seem comparable to prospects, so I’ll keep the two separate. This still gave me 158 observations, enough for my purposes here.

My first observation: There is a real possibility of failure; Three years later, 33 of the 158 hitters with an FV of 50 would be destined for 0.5 or less WAR per 600 plate appearances. Some of those guys never made it to the majors. Some have done so and underperformed. In other words, about 20% of the time your solid prospect never materializes into someone you can count on.

Another 20% of prospects (34 of 158) were projected to have between 0.5 and 1.5 WAR per 600 plate appearances three years later. He’s a nice rotation player, more or less; 2.0 WAR per 600 AP is league average. By the way, another 40% (64 of 158) expect a WAR of between 1.5 and 3.0 three years down the road. This is the largest population and also the central result. Many solid prospects become solid players, nothing more and nothing less.

The upper end is more diffuse. There are 21 players between 3.0 and 4.0 WAR, five in the 4.0-5.0 range, and then Gunnar Henderson at the very top, projected for nearly 6.5 WAR per 600 PA in 2025. Here’s the data I used, very narrowly : down version, if you feel like playing at home.

Let’s try that chart again, this time with some odds:

Now that we have a distribution, we can think about what the White Sox are doing a little more clearly. Every single 50-FV prospect has a 17% chance (at least in this data set) of finishing as a player projected for more than 3.0 WAR three years later. But if there are two prospects playing the same position, there is a one in three (31%) chance of developing an All-Star level option, assuming their development is, by and large, independent.

Put that way, what the White Sox are doing makes more sense. Having a 31% chance of developing a receiver who is borderline All-Star or better seems a lot better than a 17% chance. Even better, the risk of ruin decreases substantially when you have two receivers instead of one. Consider the Padres and the Rays. They are good teams, frequent playoff contenders with many star-level performers. Yet, over the last three years, they have been 23rd and 24th in catcher WAR.

This undoubtedly hurts their ability to compete in the playoffs: each basically plays a lower roster spot than their opponents. And what should they do about it? Good receivers are hard to acquire. You can’t just move someone from a defensive position like that. The best ones mostly don’t make it to free agency. If you start out in a bad situation and can’t somehow convince the Braves and A’s to send you William Contreras for next to nothing (hello Milwaukee!), you’re out of luck.

In a very interesting twist, the data suggests the White Sox would face a negative outcome – a backup or complete failure – about 43% of the time. Imagine coming out of a rebuild that took you half a decade and resulted in absolutely miserable teams, only to see your new contender hampered by a lack of options at receiver. The chances of this happening drop to 18% if you have two 50 FV receivers to develop instead. So let’s take one last look at our graph, this time with the result of two 50-FV outlook at the same location:

Nobody wants to plan for failure. It would be great if every prospect was successful. But this cannot happen, it is not even mathematically possible. There are only so many wins to go around. Hoping your kids succeed is not a good team building strategy; It is important to have backup and redundancy plans. Volatile players in times gone by are risky, and I see nothing wrong with managing that risk by targeting an exciting prospect like Teel.

Maybe I’m preaching to the choir on this one. Seems pretty simple to me: Prospects fail, so there’s nothing wrong with having extras if you’re not trying to get them on your major league roster right now. But the concept of blocking is overused among potential customers. Getting good players is a great idea. Where they play matters less than how good they are, and doubling up can be invaluable if you’re trying to avoid leaving a hole in your roster. Variance is real: good teams take it into account in their decision making.