The 9 Rookie Trajectories

Last month at ESPN.com, I wrote a piece about how difficult it is to project young players when they are first promoted to the majors. As much as we’d like to draw conclusions based on minor league performance or scouting reports, they are faulty indicators for future success. BABS essentially throws her hands up, shakes her head and walks out of the room.

I dunno. Maybe she just needs to work harder at it. Still, when I received this recent tweet…

I’m sitting on both Andrew Benintendi and Alex Bregman in a keeper. Who should I be more excited about?

…the best I could do was answer with:

You should be excited that you have a wealth of riches. Either could do well.

We can try to draw conclusions from available information, but we really don’t know who will do well immediately, eventually or ever. There are too many variables that come into play. On p. 41 of the current Baseball Forecaster, I go into detail on 11 considerations. Quick hits on the highlights:

• The poor track record of even the highest drafted prospects.
• Hype has no correlation to success.
• Quick starters can fade. Slow starters can surge.
• The psychological impact
• The effect of how quickly a player advances through the system.
• A player’s age versus the level of competition.
• Team context and management style.

A scan of the career trajectories of some of baseball’s top hitting prospects over the past few years is instructive:

1. Player has a big rookie year, and keeps going and going: This is what we all hope for but not everyone is Mike Trout. The problem is that players like Kris Bryant and Corey Seager spoil us. They inflate our expectations and bump up the subsequent season’s draft prices. That puts us at risk of picking a player who falls into the second group.

2. Player has a big rookie year, but disappoints in year #2: Many players fit this profile, perhaps most notably Carlos Correa (pictured) this year. He’s not been horrible by any means (though a sub-.260 BA over the past month might be concerning), but he certainly is not justifying his #6 ADP. Michael Conforto is on this list as well.

3. Player starts off strong in his rookie year, but it’s uncertain whether he can sustain it all season. Trevor Story and Nomar Mazara were solid, mid-level prospects coming into the season, though their path to playing time depressed their draft price. Here at mid-season, they look like profitable commodities, but nobody knows whether they can keep it up. Note that Mazara’s OPS has dropped all three months since his strong April.

Then there is also Byung Ho Park and Tyler White who started out well and have played themselves down to the minors.

4. Player starts off poorly in his rookie year and it’s uncertain whether he can bounce back this season. It is not at all unusual for players to struggle out of the gate. In fact, 10 years ago, this was probably the default expectation. Max Kepler seems to be proving himself after some early struggles, and even a brief demotion. But where is Peter O’Brien? And isn’t A.J. Reed doing an underwhelming job of replacing Tyler White? So far.

5. Player holds his own in his rookie year and gradually improves each season. When we think of the default career path for prospects, group #5 is what makes the most logical sense. But it is no more likely to occur than any other group. These players might get overbid early on, but earn our trust fairly quickly. Xander Bogaerts comes to mind here, as does Anthony Rizzo and Starling Marte.

6. Player struggles for several seasons before finally breaking out. From my ESPN piece: “Gregory Polanco was a Top 10 prospect coming into 2014, with just as much draft day hype as this year’s early round talent. But his rookie year was mediocre and last year’s follow-up was not much better. He came into 2016 ranked No. 81 but is currently earning Top 25 value. For many rising stars, patience is a virtue.” Jackie Bradley and Nick Castellanos are other third year players finally finding their footing this year. Odds are Polanco, Bradley and Castellanos were not drafted anywhere near their current performance nor anywhere near their rookie season expectation.

The poster boy for group #6? Alex Rodriguez.

7. Player struggles for several seasons and we’re still waiting. How long should we reasonably wait? “Addison Russell was a top ranked prospect in 2013 (No. 69), 2014 (No. 11) and 2015 (No. 4). So far, two years in, he’s still looking up at a .250 BA. Byron Buxton was the overall top ranked prospect in 2014, and No. 2 in 2015. You can have excruciating patience or you can cut your losses. I don’t have an answer to this.

8. Player comes out of nowhere. Adam Duvall’s ADP coming into the season was #476. That means he was a consideration no earlier than the 20th round of NL-only leagues and perhaps in a 21-team mixed league. There are always a few of these Bull Durham guys every year. That’s why we have to look beyond the standard prospect evaluation measures. Sometimes 27 is not too old.

9. Player fails. Some just do. Brandon Wood. Brett Jackson. Sean Burroughs. Jesus Montero was ranked among baseball’s top five prospects overall for three straight years – 2010, 2011 and 2012. He had a solid debut season with Seattle in 2012, but has managed just 230 AB and a .217 average in the four years since. Fail.

The worst part of the above is that we get so focused on the results of individual players that we forget that we’re still looking at tiny sample sizes. How many people will insist on correlating hype with group #1 results? How many people will look at the players in group #6 and start scouting for once-solid prospects who have struggled for two years? It doesn’t work that way.

We also forget that we are looking at multiple possible career paths. If a player fails at group #1 and drops into group #2, we expect that he will end up in group #6. We forget that there are occasional Chris Coghlans who may win the Rookie of the Year Award, but then fall into group #7. Or Eric Hosmer, who had a solid rookie campaign, then disappointed for three full years before finally returning to form. Or Delmon Young, who was baseball’s #1 overall prospect in 2005, 2006 and 2007, was supposed to have a Trout-like career, but essentially crashed and burned after several decent-but-not-overwhelming seasons. He ends up in group #9.

I suppose everyone ends up in group #9 eventually.

Of course, injuries wreak havoc with everything. Who knows what group Juricksen Profar, Travis D’Arnaud or maybe even Mat Gamel might have fallen into if not for their health issues. So all bets are off after that first DL stint.

And pitchers? Well, they are even more difficult to slot into these nine groups. I’m not even going to try.

There is no standard career trajectory. There is only speculation, which is right in BABS’s wheelhouse. So if you ask me which one of Benintendi or Bregman should we get more excited about, I will almost always answer, “Either.”