Batter's Box Interactive Magazine: All-Time Jays Prospects

We're all wondering about prospects as the Jays have made trades, promoted guys, have a lot in the top 100 right now. So lets look at some history. Baseball America has been doing Jay top 10 lists for prospects since 1983, top 100's for MLB since 1990 roughly. So I thought lets do a summary of them. I thought about others - MLB.com's (2012 and up), Baseball Prospectus (2007 and up) but BA's was easiest to find and actually has guys whose careers have ended for sure so more useful for this purpose.

60+ WAR: Roy Halladay. Yeah he earned those 3 #1 ranks.
50-59 WAR: John Olerud, David Wells, Fred McGriff - funny, all 3 were on the team in 1989 & 1990.
40-49 WAR: Jimmy Key, Tony Fernandez, Carlos Delgado (Key & Fernandez were also on those 89/90 teams - yeah, they were stacked)
30-39 WAR: Shawn Green, Chris Carpenter, Pat Hentgen, Orlando Hudson
20-29 WAR: Jayson Werth, Vernon Wells, Alex Rios, Shannon Stewart, Michael Young, Aaron Hill, Kelvim Escobar, Todd Stottlemyre
10-19 WAR: 10 guys (guys like Kelly Gruber, Mike Timlin, Marcus Stroman, Noah Syndergaard)
1-9 WAR: 46 guys from 9.9 Ricky Romero to 1.1 Carlos Perez (a catcher)
under 1 WAR but still positive: 25 guys from still growing like Tellez to overhyped Sil Campusano
under 0 WAR: 49 - guys who it might have been better to have not called up like Deck McGuire
Never reached: 48 guys (13 stll in minors)
Most negative WAR: Kevin Cash at -3.1 (better manager than player) with worse than 2 in the hole going to Deck McGuire, and Sandy Martinez,

So for top 10's out of 383 player seasons - 197 unique players we got 1 HOF'er (so far), 3 near HOF'ers, and 3 more fringe HOF'ers. So 7 who are near impossible to get unless you develop them normally (Jays traded for McGriff back when the Yankees were run horribly) or 3.5%. 20+ WAR players I put in the 'star' category (again hard to get for less than an arm and a leg, unless you develop them) and there are 19 of those (including the HOF levels) = 6.0%. 10+'s are solid - add 10 more to get it up to 14.7%. 1-9.9 WAR suggests they at least had some value, 46 more there = 75 or 38%. Under 1 WAR and I'm going 'what was the point' - for the sub 1 WAR guys we get 74 = 37.5%, the 'total waste' are the guys who couldn't even get a September call up - 48 of them = 24.4%. So 1 in 4 top 10 guys will never get up it seems, while another 37.5% will produce nearly nothing = 61.9% of top 10's who will be forgotten by all but their families and weirdo's like us who obsess on these things. Some of those - 13 or 6.5% still have a shot - so even if all of them make it then over half of the top 10's fail to do anything of note.

Who of our top 10's was dumped too soon? IE: was traded and made the Jays regret it (or released like David Wells was).

40+ WAR after leaving: David Wells (he did come back and produce more here 7.8 on his 2nd time here vs 7.3 before his being released but that counts against the Jays on this chart but he annoyed Cito one time too many I think)
30+ WAR elsewhere: John Olerud (curse you Gord Ash!), Fred McGriff (cost of getting Roberto Alomar),
20''s: Jayson Werth (part of a roster crunch in 2004 - traded for Jason Frasor but we had Rios/Wells/Johnson/Catalanotto in the OF and Phelps at DH so forgivable), Chris Carpenter (released due to budget and injury issues, who knew?), Michael Young (0 WAR here, bloody Ash), Shawn Green (pretty much demanded the trade or would've left as a free agent a year later as I recall)
10's: Jimmy Key (free agent), Orlando Hudson (didn't know he did that well elsewhere), Roy Halladay (glad he got that playoff no-no), Noah Syndergaard (sigh), Kelvim Escobar (free agent), and 7 more.

Not as bad as it could've been. No one reached the level of HOF elsewhere - only Jeff Kent came close but was never on a top 10 list surprisingly - 54.1 WAR elsewhere vs the 1.3 here, but he was the price of getting David Cone in 1992 so we all could live with it.

All-Time Jays Prospects

Friday, February 19 2021 @ 10:30 PM EST