As long as baseball has existed, there have been teams looking for an edge in how to evaluate players. This became a mainstream obsession when "Moneyball" brought "market inefficiencies" into the baseball fan lexicon 18 years ago, leading to a publicly tracked evolution of how the cutting-edge clubs have found value.
The window from when a team or two has an edge to when the majority of the league copies them is now down to a couple of years at best. Here's a breakdown of the two main trends clubs have been chasing through the lens of the two teams doing it better than anyone else right now.
The Cleveland model of pitchers
The traditional view of scouting and developing young pitchers was previously built around looking for physical projection -- i.e., a prospect who stands 6-foot-4 and is 180 pounds with broad shoulders as a teenager, projecting to land 20-30 pounds north of that in his mid-20s -- combined with athleticism and feel for off-speed pitches at a young age that will/could/should blossom into a front-line pitcher. The idea is that velocity and arm speed come from gaining strength, which takes care of the raw stuff and having athleticism as the building block of repeating your delivery, thus control and command.
There are plenty of Hall of Fame level examples along these lines, like Clayton Kershaw (seventh overall pick in 2016 out of a Dallas-area high school), where just having those three physical building blocks (I'll skip the mental ones to keep things simple), maybe even with no third pitch and a high walk rate early in his career, is the best bet to developing an ace. In search of ace upside, you'd typically be choosing from high school pitchers, as the price to acquire this sort of player goes up over time, so best to get in as early as possible.
There's an obvious downside to this general approach. You'll end up with a lot of busted pitching prospects that are physically impressive and throw hard, but never find consistency and command, or lose arm speed and then have very little to offer. The natural attrition and injury rate of pitchers really makes any strategy look silly if you look at enough examples.
Cleveland has had an impressive run of big hits in the draft with pitchers: Shane Bieber (122nd overall in 2016 out of UC Santa Barbara), Aaron Civale (92nd overall in 2016 out of Northeastern), Zach Plesac (362nd overall in 2016 out of Ball State) and James Karinchak (282nd overall in 2017 out of Bryant). As you'd assume, they've also had plenty of misses because that's how things work, but Cleveland's successes all come from a different approach to scouting and developing pitchers -- none of whom were high picks, all of them coming from four-year colleges.
The idea was twofold. First, athleticism didn't perfectly map to command, but you know what does? Command! Secondly, it helps to be a traditionally projectable young athlete, but that market was already established and priced correctly, maybe even overpriced. So Cleveland aimed to lean into the data (now widespread) it was on the bleeding edge of, to help less projectable or completely non-projectable pitchers improve their stuff. Tweak a slider grip here, drop a changeup for a cutter there, use weighted balls to improve arm speed, etc. Essentially, the tech that helped more objectively measure how good a pitch was helped make physical projection less important in improving raw stuff, the most fundamental building block to a successful pitcher.
The archetype ended up being a college pitcher with decent, mostly average raw stuff who threw a lot of strikes, otherwise seen as a potential back-end starter or middle reliever. This type of pitcher had no enthusiasm in the industry and was basically who teams started drafting when they ran out of players they liked.
This edge has pretty much disappeared because if I'm writing about it (and I'm not the first), then every team is aware and a good number of them are executing their own version of this strategy. It's possible this wave of inefficiency has passed, as Cleveland's top pick in the 2019 draft was a high school righty who often hit 100 mph, Georgia prep star Daniel Espino. He's not projectable and his stuff is and was plus, so he isn't a prospect where projecting his frame and raw stuff was part of the evaluation, but he's a stuff-over-command high school right-hander, arguably the riskiest type of prospect in the whole draft.
Status: Does drafting Espino signal that Cleveland has moved on from this strategy? No, it's just one pick. Cleveland's pitcher development is still among the best in the industry, but the price for this sort of pitcher in the draft has certainly gone up in recent years. I've had conversations with execs about recent draft picks where I ask why they took a college pitcher with average stuff at a high pick. They would give some version of "Well, people underrate being a successful multiyear starter who throws strikes." I'm not sure that's true anymore, but it definitely was a few years ago and still may be in some sub-demographic pockets of the 2021 draft.
Driveline founder and Cincinnati Reds director of pitcher Kyle Boddy weighed in on the idea of focusing on pitchers who can throw strikes during a recent Twitter thread.
If it's true that we can develop velocity and stuff (movement, let's call it), then why wouldn't teams be interested in people with elite strikethrowing ability - the one skill that seems quite hard to develop - if they truly believed in player development?
— Kyle Boddy (@drivelinebases) April 26, 2021
2020 draft examples: LHP Reid Detmers (10th overall out of Louisville, Angels), RHP Trent Palmer (77th overall out of Jacksonville, Blue Jays) and RHP Ian Bedell (122nd overall out of Missouri, Cardinals).
Detmers is a premium version of this, with every intangible you can name as a plus and roughly average raw stuff that plays up due to the varied movement profiles. Palmer (elite mid-major performer) and Bedell (above-average stuff on the Cape, fringy in the spring) would flash some 55s at times and performed well.
2021 draft examples: RHP Michael McGreevy (42nd in my 2021 MLB draft rankings, UC Santa Barbara), RHP Michael Morales (43rd, Pennsylvania high school, Vanderbilt commit) and LHP Mason Albright (79th, Florida high school, Virginia Tech commit).
Ole Miss RHP Gunnar Hoglund (No. 5 in my updated draft rankings) was a perfect example of this until his velocity spiked this spring from averaging just below 90 mph last year to hitting the mid-90s frequently this year. Most scouts grade his stuff as 55s (above average) across the board, so you could stretch a bit and say he still fits the definition. He's what happens to a late first-round version of this sort of prospect (what he was leading into this season) when his stuff gets more optimized and the velocity pops.
McGreevy draws some Bieber comps for similar stuff at the same stage at the same school. Morales works 91-94 with solid average stuff and above average feel, while Albright has average stuff headlined by an above-average changeup. Most of the closest comps to the Cleveland draftees still aren't in my Top 100, projecting for rounds 3-6, like LSU RHP Landon Marceaux, Florida RHP Christian Scott, Stanford RHP Brendan Beck and Tulane RHP Braden Olthoff.
The Rays model of hitters
The Rays have the best farm system in baseball. For years, they have had such a stacked middle-infield depth chart in their organization that it seemed like they would have trouble finding playing time for all of their prospects. There's a reason for this! The Rays have had (and probably still have) a type: the middle infielder who most teams don't think can play shortstop and doesn't have much power -- but can really hit.
For our purposes here, I'll focus on the hitting part of that equation. Most middle infielders are smaller than the average prospects and thus have shorter arms. Shorter levers equate to less raw power output (physics alert!) but also a shorter path to the ball, which makes contact easier.
You can probably see where this is headed. It's hard to teach pitchers command when they don't have much of it, but you can teach stuff more easily. It's hard to teach hitters how to hit when they can't hit well, but it's easier to teach a good hitter with little power to hit for more power.
It's really simple, basic logic and basic physics. But for a long time, the scouting industry was largely stuck on certain types of players with high picks (a big athlete you can dream on) while largely ignoring the skilled undersized guy with high picks -- often to the team's detriment. This should sound familiar to fans of the NBA and NFL drafts, or international soccer.
Digging a little deeper, there's a component of hitting, which is an unwieldy thing to really consider, that clubs are looking at as an indicator. Contact rate, either defined by plate appearances that don't end in strikeout, or (if you have more detailed data) the amount of swing that doesn't end in a whiff is what teams are after.
The theory goes that hitting and plate discipline (choosing the right pitches to hit) are inexorably tied together -- you can't hit a ball that's three feet out of the zone -- but other than in that sort of extreme case, the marginal difference is hard to spot. Teams now think that pitch recognition (identifying what pitch is coming in time to act appropriately) is almost impossible to teach or improve more than a marginal amount. This makes some sense that the combination of your eyes and brain have limits like foot speed; you can improve it a bit, but there's a giftedness that can't be learned.
Now, there's a difference between pitch recognition and plate discipline. Think of pitch recognition like knowing that ice cream isn't healthy and plate discipline is making the choice to not eat it. If you're an adult reading this article and don't currently understand that ice cream is unhealthy, it's going to be hard to teach you that fact. If you know it and just eat it too much, it is much easier to solve that problem.
Teams look at simple measures of contact rate and know that an elite contact rate is a big sample size, while facing your peers has pitch recognition and eye-brain skills baked in, along with some physical requirements like the strength and bat speed to let those mental skills show up on the field. If a player with elite contact skills doesn't walk very much, teams think they can teach that player to walk more (i.e. not eat the ice cream) and teach that skill to that player much more easily than to teach a fitness model with elite physical characteristics and no baseball skills how to hit.
There is some proprietary data teams used to come to this belief. This winter when doing my prospect lists, I had at least five execs from five different teams tell me a similar version of the last couple of paragraphs. It also passes the smell test. If you've performed or read any kind of research about hitting stats for college players that predict big-league success, strikeout-to-walk rate is always right there at the top of the list. Old school scouts also knew this back when the data wasn't available, as is often the case, from arguably the most repeated scouting maxim of all time: hitters hit.
Status: Leaning into college performance, with an emphasis on plate discipline rather than physical tools, was one of the biggest takeaways from Moneyball, so this is hardly a completely new idea. There's been a noticeable trend in recent drafts of clubs targeting this Rays sort of player, what I've termed the "short-armed performer" usually with some, but not much defensive value or raw power. Adding the launch angle revolution (or whatever you want to call it) to the existing archetypes has added a new ceiling, with Mookie Betts, Jose Altuve and Dustin Pedroia forever changing the conception of what a short position player can be.
2020 draft examples: 2B Justin Foscue (14th, Rangers, Mississippi State), SS Nick Loftin (32nd, Royals, Baylor), LF Daniel Cabrera (62nd, Tigers, LSU) and 2B Kaden Polcovich (78th, Mariners, Oklahoma State).
Foscue has SEC and Team USA performance and 55 raw power, so that puts him about as high as the second base-only, short-armed performer can go in the draft. Loftin is a perfect example offensively, but has a sure glove at shortstop to add more defensive value than the classic, stone-cold second base examples. Polcovich (whose high-level performance was a summer on the Cape and a few weeks in the Big 12) is a good example of a player that would go at least a round later just a few years ago, due to the increased popularity of this profile.
2021 draft examples: 2B Tyler Black (35th, Wright State), 2B Peyton Wilson (36th, Alabama), 2B Peyton Stovall (52nd, Louisiana high school, Arkansas commit) and SS Jonathan Vastine (71st, Florida high school, Vanderbilt commit).
There's a tier of elite prospect fitting this description with CF Sal Frelick (8th, Boston College), SS Kahlil Watson (9th, North Carolina high school), C Harry Ford (18th, Georgia high school) and CF Will Taylor (19, South Carolina high school) all projected for the first round partly because their secondary skills of power and/or defense are strong.
Fitting more classically into the description are college pop-up infielders Black (average raw power but doesn't pull the ball in game, mid-major competition) and Wilson (shorter track record, also limited power) while Stovall lacks an average in-game tool beyond his bat, and Vastine has less pop than Stovall but more fielding ability.