NEWSLETTER
This is a fascinating read over at Baseball America, looking at the 30 MLB Farm Systems through a Statcast lens on the positional side. Since we don’t always have access to all the data, this is a particularly interesting exercise.
Among the things Baseball America reviewed, it created a weighted average of each farm system’s 90th percentile exit velocity. Basically, that’s talking about the hardest chunk of your hardest hit balls – it tends to be the stickiest predictor of future power, so it’s exactly what you’d want to look at when trying to predict which farm systems are going to generate the most productive power in the years ahead.
And wouldn’t you know … the Chicago Cubs show up at NUMBER ONE on the list of 90th percentile exit velocity, at 102.77 mph. When it comes to hitting the ball hard, no farm system in baseball hits it as hard as the Cubs do. (BA says they also rank in the top five among all of the exit velocity metrics.)
That’s heartening to hear, especially because all we’d had previously were anecdotal notes about how absurdly hard a number of their positional prospects can hit the ball (Owen Caissie, Kevin Alcántara, Haydn McGeary, Matt Mervis, Matt Shaw, etc.). It *FELT* like they would be high up in a ranking like this, but I am pleasantly surprised to see them at number one.
There are a couple important caveats here to keep in mind, though.
First, the spread among farm systems is reeeeally small. If the Cubs’ 90th percentile exit velocity dropped just ONE mile per hour, they would fall from first all the way to 10th. Even the very bottom organization, Cleveland, is still above 100 mph.
Second, your top-end exit velocity is not the only thing that matters when producing. You know this. Your ability to generate hits matters. Your ability to take walks matters. Your ability to not strike out matters. To account for these things, Baseball America also looked at chase rates and contact rates. There, the Cubs were slightly below league average in both. So in the final accounting, the Cubs’ weighted scoring (an attempt to account for everything) has them at 7th in the farm rankings.
That said … 7th overall for your positional prospects is really good! And that’s especially true when you consider that, in a similar evaluation of the pitching side of things, I have a pretty good idea of where the Cubs are going to show up (they have the top average velocity in the minors, and have generally been near the top of the various “stuff” lists I’ve seen). So if they’re in the top ten in BOTH hitting metrics and pitching metrics, that is yet another bit of confirmation that we’re talking about a top five overall system in baseball.
