What is With the Different Baseball Prospect Ranking Services?

Back in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, when I was going to Dodgertown in Vero Beach, Florida, I made friends with an old, white-haired baseball writer for Baseball America, named Bill. He was in his mid-70’s, retired, and was there with his wife. Before the games, we would talk about Dodger Prospects. Suddenly, I stopped seeing him, and I assumed that he had moved on to be with the Big Dodger in the Sky. Baseball America was founded in 1981 by Allan Simpson and Gary Gillette. I discovered it sometime in the late 80’s.

The origin story is wonderfully scrappy. It began as a small, black-and-white newspaper produced in North Carolina, aimed at something the mainstream sports press barely touched at the time: amateur baseball, the draft, and prospects. Simpson and Gillette treated high school kids and college arms like tomorrow’s big leaguers, not footnotes. That focus became Baseball America’s “secret sauce”. They were early, meticulous, and unembarrassed about caring deeply. Over time, MLB front offices started reading it quietly… then openly… then religiously.

In the 1990’s, BA became the ‘baseball authority,” and its Annual Top 100 Prospects lists became required reading. BA relied heavily on scout interviews, not stat sheets. They were the first outlet to treat tools, makeup, and projection as structured concepts. A prospect wasn’t just good. He had: “present tools, future projection, risk, and development path. This made an immediate impact on baseball. While front offices didn’t agree with BA, they respected it. That matters more.

In 2001, they came out with the “Baseball America Prospect Handbook” – I still have mine and every one subsequent. This is still one of the things I await with baited breath… although it’s now also available online to BA subscribers. I drop a couple of hundred dollars a year in my Baseball America Subscription and the three baseball books they publish, including the Prospect Handbook. To me, it’s well worth it.

By the 2000’s, Baseball America was the “Bible for Baseball.” Teams subscribed in bulk, agents quoted it, fans argued over it, and draft rooms referenced it. BA also expanded to covering international prospects, college baseball coverage, and minor league systems rankings. BA was still scout-first. Still human. Still occasionally stubborn. However, their impact was undeniable; BA shaped the language of prospect evaluation.

In the 2010’s, new voices emerged. FanGraphs leaned hard into data. MLB Pipeline had league access and video. Statcast rewired evaluation. BA adapted, but cautiously, as they integrated analytics, still emphasized live looks, and maintained relationships with scouts, even as teams went quieter. BA became the scout-first counterweight to data-heavy sites. Fans argue which ones are right as front offices use all three. They are all focused on solving different parts of the same “prospect puzzle.”

How well does BA do? I asked the AI how accurate they are about prospects. No one gets it right all the time, but here is what I discovered about BA’s Top 100 from 1990m to 2015:

• Reached MLB – 70-75%
• > 5 Career WAR – 40-45%
• >10 Career WAR – 25-30%
• Star > 20 Career WAR – 10 – 15%

BA excels in the following:

• Floor identification: spotting who will at least be useful
• Pitching depth: arms with multiple paths to value
• Amateur evaluation: especially college hitters and polished prep bats

But, BA also struggles with ultra-athletic, late-bloom profiles, fringe defensive players, and players whose value comes from optimization rather than tools. The Dodgers are a classic example. The Dodgers routinely confound traditional scouting narratives by drafting “boring” players and developing them into monsters (not literally). Examples of this are Max Muncy, Justin Turner, and Will Smith (although not all were “drafted” by the Dodgers – they were developed by the Dodgers). Of course, BA got Seager, Kershaw, and Buehler right…. duh!

Baseball America measures what a player is; modern player development teams measure what a player can become; analytics sites estimate what a player is likely to produce. The best organizations, like the Dodgers, fuse all three. BA still matters because tools still matter, makeup still matters, and context still matters. But the game now rewards change, and that’s the hardest thing to scout.

Baseball America is currently owned by a baseball-focused investment group rather than a big corporate media conglomerate. BA was acquired in February 2017 by a group led by Alliance Baseball, LLC — a company involved in owning and operating minor league baseball franchises. This ownership operates the business as Baseball America Enterprises, based in Durham, North Carolina, and continues to publish the magazine and run its digital and event businesses.

Now we also have MLB Pipeline, which is operated by MLB. It is Video-heavy, published with clean, polished rankings, has access to teams, facilities, and Statcast feeds, and has an optimistic tone by design, asking: “How good could this player be if things go right?” On the other hand, Baseball America is independent, scout-sourced, more skeptical, willing to ding players for risk, and will say “role player” out loud. In comparison to MLB Pipeline, BA asks: “What is this player most likely to become, and why might he not get there?”

Then along came Keith Law, who is an important part of this story, mostly because he represents the pivot away from old-guard scouting prose toward evidence-driven evaluation.

His influence came first through front-office work, then public analysis, not organization capsules. Keith Law did not write for Baseball America as a regular correspondent, but rather, emerged in the early–mid 2000s as a counterpoint to the BA-style voice. Keith Law worked in the Cleveland Indians front office under Mark Shapiro and was greatly influenced by probability, statistical indicators, and developmental outcomes. He entered the public domain at ESPN and became the first mainstream analyst to openly critique tools-only scouting, routinely call out bad drafts, and downgrade “athletic but raw” prospects early. That alone put him on a different axis than BA at the time.

Early on, Law was actually skeptical of the Dodgers, much like BA, but for different reasons. He questioned his tools, swing decisions, and the consistency of their player development. Later, after the Dodgers evolved under Andrew Friedman, Keith Law became one of the first national analysts to acknowledge the team’s systemic excellence, especially in pitching development and swing optimization. It’s ironic that BA was late to trust the transformation, but Law was late to trust the Dodgers. Both eventually converged.

I don’t have the time, nor the inclination, to dig deeper into who is right or wrong in evaluating prospects. Keith Law was right more often on hitters; Baseball America was right more often on pitchers. The Dodgers eventually learned to exploit both perspectives, and they are currently among the best organizations in baseball at developing prospects. In fact, I would argue that they are the model.

In conclusion, here is what I say about the Big Three Ranking Services:

• MLB Pipeline – Fast Food (Think McDonald’s… maybe Chick-fil-A)
• Baseball America – Steak
• Keith Law – Lobster

All are useful, but BA and Keith Law are the ones I take most seriously. That Keith Law (one man) has become an institution is amazing, and his insights are valued highly!