Driveline tried to analyze effectiveness of each org's player dev, guess how sox did

[bmags]

This article is really dense and hard to read. Curious to see how others think about this rubric for grading player development:

https://www.drivelinebaseball.com/2019/04/finding-star-nothing-luck-quantifying-effectiveness-mlb-player-development/

Scroll to the bottom if you voted to see where sox landed.

My short summary on how they graded it, I believe, is they looked at the players Future Value (FV) prospect grade when acquired and their signing total, and then if that player's FV increased over subsequent years, the team is credited with creating additional surplus value over the signing amount.

I believe because of so many of the white sox successes being first round picks, they started off with good FVs and higher signing bonuses, and thus get less credit. But the biggest hit is undoubtedly our lack of international pipeline developing at all.

I couldn't tell you this is the best way to evaluate this, but it's certainly a difficult thing to do and this is where the sox ended up.

[OmarComing25]

Oof. Surprised to see the Cubs so low though I guess all their hits have been picks in the top ten and those are probably the hardest to raise the FV.

[SoxAce]

Ha.. voted dead last before even opening the link. Wasn't shocked. 

[bmags]

4 minutes ago, OmarComing25 said:

Oof. Surprised to see the Cubs so low though I guess all their hits have been picks in the top ten and those are probably the hardest to raise the FV.

Theirs did surprise me. Also, despite me not viewing ours as particularly good I would have guessed we outdid baltimore or the reds in this model.

[OmarComing25]

This is why I think player development is a way bigger issue than an eye for talent (not saying that we couldn’t use big improvement there too). In that 2019 Fangraphs update about our prospects Kiley wrote that many of them had taken a step back and/or the future outlook isn’t as good as once hoped but he noted that he didn’t think it was because the White Sox picked the wrong guys because Kiley’s team were all in on them too. 

Edited April 22, 2019 by OmarComing25

[bmags]

3 minutes ago, OmarComing25 said:

This is why I think player development is a way bigger issue than an eye for talent (not saying that we couldn’t use big improvement there too). In that 2019 Fangraphs update about our prospects Kiley wrote that many of them had taken a step back and/or the future outlook isn’t as good as once hoped but he noted that he didn’t think it was because the White Sox picked the wrong guys because Kiley’s team were all in on them too. 

Yeah this is where I would lean. A big tell for me is paddy seemed to do pretty damn well in Toronto yet his signings have mostly struggled to hit past low A. That to me is player dev.

[PolishPrince34]

Very sad. That’s what happens when you only produced 1 player internationally during that period-Yolmer Sanchez and he won’t even be with the team next year. I agee with Kiley how many of our top prospects took a step backwards (Fulmer, Burdi, Rutherford, Hansen, Collins, etc) and how we can’t hit on one signing internationally other than throwing $30+ Million on Roberts. Really need to look at other top organizations at developing and stealing some of their player development talent (Astros, Dodgers, Yankees, Atlanta). On a good note I’m very happy with the improvements of Moncada and Anderson this year. 

Edited April 23, 2019 by PolishPrince34

[Jack Parkman]

The Sox are the worst team in baseball in player development? Least surprising news ever. In other news, water is wet and bears shit in the woods. 

Edited April 23, 2019 by Jack Parkman

[Chicago White Sox]

I’m not going to jump to any conclusions just yet, but the Chris Getz hire was highly suspect at the time given his limited experience and connection to the organization (and U of M).

[kitekrazy]

 I didn't read any of that to know.  When the owner believes in loyalty over accountability its the surest way to have a losing organization.

[Jake]

While I don't doubt that the Sox are truly at or near the worst in the league, I'm not very convinced by their analysis. If Baseball America and/or FanGraphs have biased analyses of players from an organization, then it makes it very hard to interpret the surplus value you're getting. If every guy you trade to the Dodgers see his value increase, is that because he's really getting better or because Dodgers prospects get overrated? It can be hard to tell from what they're doing. The ultimate equalizer would be to only use MLB performance as an indicator but they don't have prospect grades going back far enough in time to track players from minors to a decently long sample in the majors.

[Jose Abreu]

I'm confused as to how an R^2 value of 0.57 is somehow a good thing for their analysis, unless I'm misinterpreting why that figure was included 

[zisk]

2 years from now they'll say we're the best. When you suck for 5-6 years straight, this is self evident

[Dominikk85]

11 hours ago, OmarComing25 said:

Oof. Surprised to see the Cubs so low though I guess all their hits have been picks in the top ten and those are probably the hardest to raise the FV.

Cubs were quite solid with hitters (albeit their real success stories were mostly high picks) but absolutely dismal with pitchers. 

Cubs pitcher dev in the last 5 years was right up there with the red sox and orioles in badness.

[bmags]

7 hours ago, Jose Abreu said:

I'm confused as to how an R^2 value of 0.57 is somehow a good thing for their analysis, unless I'm misinterpreting why that figure was included 

BA which had the most available prospect grades does not use a straight forward FV, so they had to make adjustments to BAs scores to get a singular FV value, then they judged that against fangraphs FV value to validate if that has significantly altered, but you would not expect two separate scouting sites to have a perfect correlation in scores.

[mqr]

Having dead last as it's own choice was a dead giveaway btw

[Balta1701]

10 hours ago, Jose Abreu said:

I'm confused as to how an R^2 value of 0.57 is somehow a good thing for their analysis, unless I'm misinterpreting why that figure was included 

 

2 hours ago, bmags said:

BA which had the most available prospect grades does not use a straight forward FV, so they had to make adjustments to BAs scores to get a singular FV value, then they judged that against fangraphs FV value to validate if that has significantly altered, but you would not expect two separate scouting sites to have a perfect correlation in scores.

Worth noting that because the numbers can't be different by units of "1", they can only be different by units of "5", the R^2 is going to be artificially increased. If one site had a guy scouted at a "63" and the other site had a guy scouted as a "61", those would round to 65 and 60 and that would artificially increase the variance. At the very least, whatever your number is for a "good amount of variance in a regression" has to be adjusted in this case. It would be interesting to see what happened to that number if you divided everything by 10, such that you can have one page give a guy a 6 and another page give a guy a 5. I assume that would propagate through. 

[OmarComing25]

16 hours ago, bmags said:

Yeah this is where I would lean. A big tell for me is paddy seemed to do pretty damn well in Toronto yet his signings have mostly struggled to hit past low A. That to me is player dev.

It also can't be a coincidence that so many players have their career worst years here and then go on to other teams and still be useful players.

[bmags]

2 minutes ago, Balta1701 said:

 

Worth noting that because the numbers can't be different by units of "1", they can only be different by units of "5", the R^2 is going to be artificially increased. If one site had a guy scouted at a "63" and the other site had a guy scouted as a "61", those would round to 65 and 60 and that would artificially increase the variance. At the very least, whatever your number is for a "good amount of variance in a regression" has to be adjusted in this case. It would be interesting to see what happened to that number if you divided everything by 10, such that you can have one page give a guy a 6 and another page give a guy a 5. I assume that would propagate through. 

I believe FVs for BA are only in increments of 5, same as fangraphs. In the paragraph tehy handchecked the numbers and found only discrepancies of 5 or 10, which they chalked up to difference of opinion.

This was important mainly as a check to make sure their adjustment of the BA numbers - which equated to more of a range figure (ceiling FV) than what they wanted which was the more traditional FV fangraphs uses. I think they wanted to avoid having artificially created outliers.

But BA had many more grades than fangraphs to check, so what I don't know is if what they chalked up here as acceptable with the r2 check with fangraphs, is enough of a sample to say "yeah, our adjustments are good across the board", because fangraphs only has grades on usually top prospects, their adjustments on the lower bound may be worse.

[bmags]

6 minutes ago, OmarComing25 said:

It also can't be a coincidence that so many players have their career worst years here and then go on to other teams and still be useful players.

The other thing I want to mention is when I think about player dev, it's not just about creating stars - it's the getting the most out of every player, turning a few more 40 guys into 45s. That's where I see orgs like LA and HOU and STL being especially good, constantly creating depth and acceptable performances.

I think people get too caught up in the performance of our top draft picks, but this really focuses on the best value actually being in turning more international and round 3-10 guys into either ML pieces or acceptable tradebait. That's where the big value wins are.

[GreenSox]

Not only are the Sox dead last, they are nearly twice as bad as the #28 team.

[chitownsportsfan]

3 hours ago, GreenSox said:

Not only are the Sox dead last, they are nearly twice as bad as the #28 team.

wow.  with a bullet.

[Hatchetman]

this isn't even the frustrating part. The frustrating part is that they don't even care!

[bmags]

https://www.drivelinebaseball.com/2019/05/developing-less-efficiency-player-development-lead-success/

Here is part 2. Pretty interesting series.

[Baker]

I’ve often wondered, do any of the posters here think anyone in the Sox FO scans these pages occasionally?  Lots of good stuff and commentary on here.