The Dynasty Guru updates its peak performance leaderboards weekly. View the latest update here, updated as of 8/23/2019.

As a reminder, the wOBA metric is designed to be a single variable that can inform how good a player’s overall hitting/plate approach quality is.  Our wOBA calculations are meant to help you conclude who the best hitters in the minor leagues are.  Over the course of the year, we have applied these calculations to current minor leaguers to create a leaderboard of the best minor league hitters.  Our hope is that this leaderboard can be used by you and dynasty players everywhere to find diamonds in the rough or players to target in your dynasty leagues, so that you can dominate your leagues for years to come.

For this edition of “Scouting the Stat Line”, we thought it would be interesting to look at how the projected peak wOBA calculations also apply to past minor leaguers.

For this exercise, we applied peak wOBA calculations to every player that played minor league baseball over the past 10 years.  Applying our calculations to past performers reveals two useful bits of insight for your player analysis:

1. Since we know how good many of these players have become as Major Leaguers, this exercise helps validate how accurately our calculations can predict future performances.
2. These results can be used as a semi-comparative measure for current minor leaguers, giving us a possible glimpse of how good of a hitter your top prospects may turn out to be.

There are a couple notable caveats to our exercise that I would be remiss not to mention before I share the results.

First, Major League Baseball (including the minor leagues) is constantly evolving, meaning that conditions of leagues and ballparks change, and that hitting and pitching regularly follow new trends.  Our current wOBA projections include past data, but they are weighted towards 2018 conditions.  Some of these conditions may have altered slightly over the past 10 years, so we would anticipate there being slight variance with our results than what they would look like if they were weighted towards each season’s related and unique set of data (for example, if 2015 conditions data was applied to minor leaguers playing in 2015).

As an aside, we recently began using Jordan Rosenblum’s newly released 2019 conditions in our latest leaderboard update (8/23/2019).  In testing these results, we have found that Triple-A and the lowest levels of the minor leagues are most impacted by new conditions.  In Triple-A, this can likely be attributed to the “juiced ball” or hitting-friendly conditions of 2019. 

Second, in general we have found that players in the low minors often perform well on our leaderboards (as mentioned above, our new model may help rectify some of these results).  While this can be a strength in helping you identify top talent before others, there is a much higher degree of risk associated with these players. If you have been following the leaderboard, you may have noticed that these players often move quickly up and/or down the leaderboards.  In general, my personal approach to speculating on talent from the low minors is to assume a higher degree of bust and anticipate a larger amount of turnover.  In leagues where you cannot add or drop minor leaguers and can only acquire them via draft or trade, it is probably a better idea to focus on talent closer to the Major Leagues (Single-A, at least, or above).

While poring over our findings, we noticed that some of this year’s low minors talents made it on our list of the top 101 performers from the past 10 years of minor league performances.  However, the top performers from 2010-2018 was made up with players that had seen more than a full season of plate appearances in the minor leagues and have worked their way up through multiple levels.  What we found while looking at the results is that the reliability increases significantly after a player has seen over 500 plate appearances and played at levels above rookie levels.  For the sake of accuracy, we have filtered out players with less than 500 career minor league plate appearances.  At the bottom of the article, we highlight these players along with where they would have ranked for those dynasty owners who are looking for more speculative options.

Without further ado, below is our list of the top minor league hitters from the past 10 years!

The Top 101 Minor League Hitters of the Past 10 Years

Observations of the Top 101

• The .400+ wOBA is an exclusive bunch. Of those that have been in the Major Leagues for more than a couple years, only Kyle Schwarber has failed to become a star in the league, despite sporting a respectable resume with three seasons of 25+ home runs.  Gallo’s real breakout was this year, though injury has cut it short. Both are still valuable sluggers, but the lesson here may be that players with swing-and-miss tendencies (high K rates) don’t translate as quickly to the Major League level.  Seeing Wander Franco as part of this exclusive club validates my assertions from the preseason, that Wander Franco could turn out to be a perennial MVP candidate.
• The only player on the list that I see that has not tasted Major League success (or is still too young to make any calls about) is Oswaldo Arcia. I’ll settle for a 99%+ success rate. The numbers don’t lie! (Note: Subsequent to posting the article, some Reddit users rightly pointed out the presence of Jon Singleton, Greg Bird, and Dayan Viciedo on the list as well — special mention to u/wolverine55 and u/goundhongnight for pointing it out.  Viciedo did have a 25 homer season and Greg Bird still has a chance to contribute to his team, but neither can be considered much fantasy help to this point, so it’s worth toning down that 99% to something like ~95% to be on the safe side)
• Mike Trout’s projected peak wOBA from his minor league numbers turned out to be .444.  Mike Trout’s current wOBA is .438, this coming after a 1 for 13 stretch in his last three games.  Before those games, his wOBA was…you guessed it, .444!
• This list is yet another reason why I am so obsessed with Juan Soto.

I can hear you thinking on the other side of your screen – you’re thinking “it would be really nice just to see the current minor leaguers grouped together”.  But of course!  Below is the current minor leaguers in the top 101 along with what their rank is.

Current Minor League Hitters in the Top 101

Observations of Current Minor Leaguers in the Top 101

• In the top 100, 28 players are currently in the minor leagues. These are players you will want to take a look at and keep an eye on their progress as they move through levels.  If you’ve been following the “Scouting the Stat Line” player highlights, you may recall reading about several of these players.  Some will drop out of the top 101 when they encounter more advanced pitching, others will rise to the occasion and maybe even improve their standing.
• I know I have have already said my piece about Wander Franco. But…did you know he currently sports a 5:3 walk-to-strikeout ratio as a 18 year-old in Single-A and High-A?  That ratio has actually improved since his promotion.  I cannot recall a time I have seen that in a prospect with this much pedigree and who hits for average and power. Get him, if you can, he is going to be really, really good!
• Luis Robert, Gavin Lux, and Carter Kieboom have really seen their projections rise this year. Breakouts or juiced ball?  Maybe a bit of both?
• Tyler Freeman, Heliot Ramos, Drew Waters, and Alek Thomas have also seen their projections rise dramatically. We can’t blame these on the juiced ball.
• Is Bobby Bradley in the same vein as Joey Gallo and Kyle Schwarber with his swing-and-miss tendencies? If so, considering the minor league results are not as elite, I probably wouldn’t invest in him expecting the same kind of return.

So you say you’re in a deep dynasty league where most of the good players are taken, and you’re looking to speculate on some players in the low levels of the minors?  We’ve got you covered there too!  Below is the list of the players that did not meet the 500 plate appearance threshold, along with where they would have ranked in the top 101 (these are players with between 150-500 career plate appearances. More speculative, but not ridiculous).

Low-Level Minor Leaguers & Where They Would Rank if Included

Observations of the Low Minors/Small Sample Size List

• It’s worth mentioning that not all levels in the low minors are equal.  Our experience tells us that results in Low-A are going to much more reliable than results in the Dominican Summer League.  Not even each Rookie-level league is of equal difficulty.  In general, in terms of reliability, from more to least, consider the numbers from Low-A (New York-Pennsylvania League, Northwest League) to be the most reliable of the levels below Single-A, followed by the Appalachian and Pioneer leagues, then the Gulf Coast and Arizona leagues, with the Dominican Summer League being the least reliable.
• I have to admit, I am a speculator in my dynasty leagues. I’m always looking for the next best thing.  I don’t want a roster full of decent players, I want a roster full of superstars.  Finding those players before others do takes extra work.  These are the players from this list that I am buying up shares of: Mojica, Luciano, Abrams, Valera, Matos, Ball, Herman, Robinson, Jimenez, Vaughn, and Carroll.
• There are some others that I think it is a little early to start getting too aggressive with. I am waiting to see on these players: Hernandez, Santana, Escotto, Palacios, Toribio, Ovalles, and Collins.
• Malcom Nunez is a good example of why it is always a good idea to have a healthy skepticism of numbers from the lowest levels of the minor leagues.  In 2018 he put together a statistically historic season in the Dominican Summer League.  While he has shown some flashes of that former glory, on the whole his 2019 campaign has to be considered a disappointment after the gaudy numbers he posted last season.

My recommendation with these types of players is to see how well these names match up with the opinion of scouts and pundits.  I have leaned on Jesse Roche to find out his opinion on players and have found him to always be “in the know”.  If you haven’t already looked, I recommend that you start your cross-referencing by looking at Jesse Roche’s August top prospect update. It is an incredibly informative piece!