Rather Unnecessarily Juxtaposing Two Rangers Prospect Lists

Baseball fans love to speculate on their teams’ top prospects. It is a way to embrace (or perhaps more often, disparage) front office decisions (all from the comfort of your couch!) as well as to theorize about bright futures ahead. Correspondingly, the appetite for prospect knowledge has seeped past the inner circles of front offices and media members into increasingly lay spaces. I myself, one of those lay people, hugely enjoy the work that prospect analysts do and the light they shed on prospects, otherwise obscured within the complex network of professional as well as amateur baseball.

Given all this, the releases of top prospect lists are highly anticipated. Over the last couple months, Jamey Newberg of The Athletic incrementally released a four-part series (subscription required) of his own Texas Rangers prospect rankings. Last week, Eric Longenhagen of FanGraphs released, in a bulk upload, his Top Prospects list for the Rangers. In what is a strictly Not-To-Be-Taken-Seriously exercise, I have juxtaposed those lists below.

Before jumping to that juxtaposition though, there are a couple important factors to note. Foremost, this exercise is not intended to (nor does it have the ability to) suggest one list being “better”, or more predictive, than the other. Longenhagen and Newberg have varying backgrounds, methods, and perspectives. Longenhagen covers comprehensive minor league ranks for FanGraphs and contextualizes/ranks prospects based on their potential future value. Newberg, meanwhile, focuses pretty exclusively on the Rangers and with their best interests in mind. In his second installment, Newberg writes the following about his rankings:

Left without a reliable objective metric to lean on (at least one that’s not proprietary and closely guarded), I try to imagine whom Texas might trade first. Say the Rangers can close a deal but have to give up either 27-year-old Andy Ibañez (who could compete for a big-league role this year) or 17-year-old pitcher Jose Corniell (who will make his pro debut this summer). Who goes? He gets ranked lower.

Jamey Newberg

So, to make things very clear, what follows is an apples to oranges comparison, to put it lightly. It really shouldn’t be taken very seriously; despite that, it is at least an entertaining exercise and required just very minor data wrangling to put together.

A bit more on those lists. Newberg’s includes 72 players while Longenhagen’s includes 65. A common theme being that the Rangers have a generally deep system with widespread potential. That being said, the very top of the system doesn’t feature too many household names among prospects. Another key difference: Newberg excludes players that have not yet burned through their rookie eligibility while Longenhagen has included them. Altogether, 91 distinct players were named across the two lists, 46 of which were named in both and 45 of which were named exclusively in either one of the lists.

The following five tables include:

• Prospects that Longenhagen is bullish on relative to Newberg
• Vice Versa: Prospects that Newberg ranks disproportionately high relative to Longenhagen
• Prospects that were ranked most similarly between the two
• Prospects ranked by Longenhagen, but not Newberg
• Vice Versa: Prospects ranked by Newberg, but not Longenhagen

Save for the third of these five charts, the visualizations above have generally emphasized the differences between the two analysts’ rankings. That is at least partially misleading though, given that in general there is a decent relationship between lists despite their varied nature. Correlation, an informative yet sometimes misleading statistic, indicates 0.59 correlation between those rankings for players who were featured on both lists. Below is a scatterplot of those players.

To recap, while this exercise compares two prospect lists, it isn’t intended (nor qualified) to suggest one’s value relative to the other. Still, it represents (I think, at least) an interesting cross-section of rankings between analysts.