How Many Prospects Will Become Stars? (AL Edition)

A couple days ago I revisited the article Scott McKinney wrote a couple years back showing the historical importance of being a ranked prospect by Baseball America in their top 100 prospect rankings.  He had enough data to feel it sufficient to boiling things down to every ten spots and subdivide that by pitcher or catcher.  For instance, 26th ranked Kevin Gausman stands to be a star player (an annual value above 2.5 WAR) 14.3% of the time.  By that, we mean that Kevin Gausman is part of an arbitrary historical grouping of pitchers that were ranked between 21st and 30th by Baseball America.  As a population (which contains a wide range of pitchers with different skill sets), individuals became star pitchers 14.3% of the time.  So, keep that in mind.  Gausman may indeed be an exceptional example of a 21-30 pitcher due to how powerful and polished his repertoire is or he may be exceptional in a poor way because his breaking ball is not above average.  However, it is not my interest to discern that in this post.  Also, this post is not interested in prospects past the top 100 even though they certainly have value and the potential to become stars.  They simply lie outside the scope here.

What this post is concerned with is looking at the projected outcome of stars on different teams.  I took the BA list and ran through the probability of the likelihoods of teams winding up with different numbers of star players as well the the potential for their ranked prospects to go bust:

AL East
	Four	Three	Two	One	Zero	Busted
Baltimore	0.0%	0.0%	3.8%	33.2%	63.0%	47.0%
Boston	0.1%	2.3%	14.4%	44.7%	38.5%	12.2%
New York (A)	0.1%	2.3%	15.3%	41.8%	40.6%	25.0%
Tampa Bay	0.0%	0.0%	6.1%	43.0%	47.0%	15.9%
Toronto	0.0%	0.0%	0.3%	12.3%	87.3%	69.7%
AL Central
	Four	Three	Two	One	Zero	Busted
Chicago (A)	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	8.4%	91.6%	83.3%
Cleveland	0.0%	0.0%	3.4%	30.1%	66.5%	39.1%
Detroit	0.0%	0.2%	5.2%	34.0%	60.6%	38.4%
Kansas City	0.0%	0.3%	6.3%	35.7%	57.7%	42.7%
Minnesota	0.7%	14.4%	26.4%	38.9%	19.4%	4.4%
AL West
	Four	Three	Two	One	Zero	Busted
Houston	0.5%	10.4%	16.9%	42.9%	29.2%	8.2%
LAAA	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	22.1%	77.9%	70.6%
Oakland	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	16.7%	83.3%	68.0%
Seattle	0.5%	7.6%	19.4%	42.8%	29.6%	11.8%
Texas	0.1%	1.0%	33.9%	25.8%	39.3%	12.2%

As mentioned in our previous posts using the Victor Wang methodology or with McKinney's work, position players tend to pan out moreso than pitchers.  No, pitchers are not a lucky crap shoot in finding value, but they certainly are a more volatile commodity.

The three teams that did worst in this assessment, Chicago, Toronto, and Oakland, have to hope that their unranked prospects develop into valuable pieces.  Oakland has a very strong and deep post-100 prospect group.  To a lesser extent, so does Toronto.  Chicago however is quite shallow.