Welcome to Prospects Week 2021, the latest installment in FanGraphs’ annual pre-season spotlight on our sport’s future, and my annual opportunity to experience a dissociative fugue state.
While the NCAA baseball season starts this weekend, 2021 draft looks have already been going on for a few weeks as junior college ball began a couple weekends ago, and Division-I teams have been playing intrasquads to gear up for the season. As with last year, this year’s draft is going to be affected by COVID-19, though it’s likely going to be affected in different ways. Later this week, Kevin Goldstein and I will publish a conversational piece about how we think this year’s draft will be impacted by our current societal circumstances, and how it will be scouted.
But today is about the updated player rankings for the next three drafts, which are now available on The Board, both as individual classes and in one summary view, along with full player scouting summaries. There’s rarely a big, sweeping update of prospect rankings at this site. Like a sourdough starter, The Board is a living, breathing thing, and I often update it with notes in real-time while I’m at the field. For draft coverage, that water wheel of info begins this weekend. (For pro notes, the process will begin again after all of the org lists have been published.)
The 2021 Draft list has been expanded to about 80 ranked names (with a few players at the end who fall into more general buckets), and some players have moved since my Fall update due to conversations with industry sources and a handful of in-person looks. The 2022 list was arguably even more severely impacted by the shortened 2020 season since it made it impossible for freshman players to have the time to earn playing time, let alone become known to teams due their statistical performance after being given an extended opportunity, and this is especially true for hitters. You’ll notice the 2021 Draft list has largely been populated with pitching that generates easy-to-parse data for similar reasons. The 2023 list is almost entirely comprised of high schoolers who went unsigned in the 2020 Draft in the exact order I preferred them on 2020 Draft Day, with a few top-tier high schoolers sprinkled in.
Just How Complex Will Scouting This Draft Be?
The shortened 2020 season coupled with the way the pandemic altered the amateur baseball landscape throughout last year (and will continue to alter it this year), is going to have a major impact on the upcoming draft. I think scouting for this year’s draft will be much more complicated than last year’s. An abrupt 2020 season followed by a summer during which top collegiate talent was either inactive or spread throughout smaller leagues rather than concentrated in the Cape Cod League (which was cancelled) means decision-makers have had fewer looks at college prospects. Meanwhile, high school showcases unscrupulously carrying on like normal in the South/Southeast last summer could make it so teams have an unusual amount of comfortability with high school players this year. However, those showcases typically had fewer west coast high school prospects due to their lack of proximity to those tournaments, so teams have a little less feel for those guys right now.
Scouting restrictions at large programs will impact looks in 2021, and may inspire team personnel to leverage their interpersonal relationships with college staff members to circumvent them. Some schools are allowing fewer than 30 scouts per game, which means not every team can have a representative present. How programs will go about choosing who does (and does not) get into what game isn’t totally clear for all schools. Junior colleges are flush with talent because so much of it overflowed from rosters that couldn’t diffuse players to pro ball due to the 2020 Draft being so short. Restrictions in certain locales (like the Pacific Northwest and parts of California) have caused…