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Full Count: The Diamondbacks need a miracle

Jesse Friedman

December 30, 2022

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If you’ve been listening to the PHNX Diamondbacks Podcast over the last year, you have probably heard some people refer to me as “Well-Actually” Jesse.

I’ve taken a lot of heat around here for being the pessimist — or, as I might argue, the realist. My co-host is Derek Montilla, after all. Of course I’m going to be the reasonable one!

But I do have to acknowledge that this week’s newsletter might snap the holiday cheer right out of you. It has to do with Corbin Carroll, Jordan Lawlar, Druw Jones, Gabriel Moreno, Brandon Pfaadt — basically all of the players that your future Diamondbacks hopes and dreams rely on. It’s time to have an honest conversation about prospects.

Growing up, I thought I understood how prospect rankings work. If a player ranks among the top 10 in baseball, they will, at the very least, make a few All-Star teams. Top-100 prospects are generally good everyday players. And there’s no such thing as a top-100 prospect who doesn’t at least play in the big leagues for a few years.

Only now, after more than a decade of obsessing over this sport, have I really come to understand: The majority of top prospects, for lack of a better term, stink, except for an elite few who overcome the odds and have a few successful years in the big leagues. Only the elite of the elite have long, star-studded careers.

Diamondbacks fans should know this as well as any. To illustrate, here is a list of every Diamondbacks position player who was ranked as a top-100 prospect by Baseball America from 1998 through 2019. There are 23 in total. For context, the table includes which years they appeared in the top 100, their highest prospect ranking and some basic career stats, including bWAR, OPS and OPS+, so that we can see how well they actually performed in the big leagues.

Player	Pos	Years	Highest Rank	Career bWAR	OPS	OPS+
Travis Lee	1B	’98	8	7.3	.745	95
Karim Garcia	OF	’98	77	-3.2	.703	82
Jack Cust	OF	’00, ’01	31	9.4	.813	120
Alex Cintron	SS	’01	62	-2.2	.707	80
Scott Hairston	OF	’03, ’04	26	6.5	.738	97
Lyle Overbay	1B	’03	65	16.5	.776	106
Carlos Quentin	OF	’05, ’06	20	10.5	.831	120
Conor Jackson	1B	’05, ’06	17	2.2	.757	95
Justin Upton	OF	’06, ’07	2	32.3	.812	117
Stephen Drew	SS	’06	5	15.9	.741	94
Chris Young	OF	’06, ’07	12	16.5	.743	95
Carlos González	OF	’06, ’07	18	24.4	.843	112
Miguel Montero	C	’07	63	14.3	.751	100
Alberto Callaspo	3B	’07	82	9.6	.693	92
Gerardo Parra	OF	’09	88	10.8	.725	91
Matt Davidson	3B	’11, ’12, ’13	88	-0.7	.719	94
Adam Eaton	OF	’13	73	18.4	.763	108
Didi Gregorius	SS	’13	80	17.8	.728	95
Chris Owings	SS	’14	66	2.3	.653	72
Yasmany Tomás	OF	’15	57	-2.5	.765	97
Jake Lamb	3B	’15	78	7.2	.756	97
Brandon Drury	3B	’16	94	2.0	.736	93
Jazz Cisholm	SS	’19	59	4.9	.754	104

Diamondbacks top-100 position player prospects via Baseball America, 1998-2019

Based on OPS+, only seven of the 23 players have above-average offensive numbers: Jack Cust, Lyle Overbay, Carlos Quentin, Justin Upton, Carlos González, Adam Eaton and Jazz Chisholm. Out of that group, only Upton had more than 500 career plate appearances with the Diamondbacks. The rest — and eventually Upton — were traded away to other teams, where they did the vast majority of their damage.

Granted, that says more about the team’s poor trade decisions than it does about prospects not panning out. But even so, Travis Lee ranked as the eighth-best prospect in baseball in 1998. He ultimately turned into a below-league-average regular. Scott Hairston ranked 26th in 2003. His career on-base percentage was under .300. Even Yasmany Tomás ranked in the top 60 after the Diamondbacks signed him in 2014. The Diamondbacks essentially ate the last three years of his contract because they had better in-house options.

For Chris Young and Stephen Drew, one could look at their prospect rankings and claim that they fell short of the hype. After all, while both were well above-average performers at their peak, but that peak only lasted a couple of years. It’s important to keep the big picture in mind, though.

According to a Baseball America article from 2019, fewer than one in five baseball players who get drafted actually make it to the big leagues. Moreover, of the roughly 23,000 players who have ever played in the majors, only around 1,200 have produced 15 or more career bWAR. In the grand scheme of this sport, Drew and Young were actually elite. Even relative to other prospects who ranked similarly, they held their own.

The same could be said for several others on the list, including Miguel Montero, Didi Gregorius and Adam Eaton. Were they stars? No. But they were impactful major-leaguers for a long time. Regardless of prospect ranking, that is an enormous player development victory.

All this is to say: If you’re picturing a future with Jones, Lawlar, Carroll and Moreno all becoming perennial All-Stars, you are setting yourself up to be disappointed. In reality, if even just one of them did, it would be a big success.

Let’s transition to pitchers now. According to Baseball America, the Diamondbacks had 16 top-100 pitching prospects from 1998 through 2019.

Player	Years	Highest Rank	Career bWAR	ERA	ERA+
John Patterson	’98, ’99, ’00, ’03	10	5.0	4.32	100
Byung-Hyun Kim	’00	81	10.6	4.42	107
Mike Gosling	’03	59	0.1	4.85	94
Sergio Santos	’04, ’05	37	2.0	3.98	106
Dustin Nippert	’04, ’06	67	0.7	5.31	87
Micah Owings	’07	98	3.2	4.86	91
Jarrod Parker	’08, ’09, ’10, ’11	29	6.5	3.68	106
Max Scherzer	’08	66	71.7	3.11	135
Tyler Skaggs	’11, ’12, ’13	12	3.6	4.41	93
Trevor Bauer	’12	9	21.0	3.79	116
Archie Bradley	’12, ’13, ’14, ’15	9	5.9	3.92	112
Braden Shipley	’14, ’15, ’16	26	-0.1	5.49	83
Aaron Blair	’15	40	-2.0	7.89	53
Touki Toussaint	’15	71	-0.7	5.34	82
Anthony Banda	’17	88	-0.8	5.64	78
Jon Duplantier	’18, ’19	73	-0.5	6.7	66

Diamondbacks top-100 pitching prospects via Baseball America, 1998-2019

It is no secret that the Diamondbacks have struggled to draft and develop pitchers throughout their history, but the results here are undeniably bleak. In total, D-backs top-100 pitching prospects have produced a total of around 125 bWAR in franchise history, and more than 80 percent of that came with other teams.

Max Scherzer — a no-doubt, future Hall-of-Famer — has had more impact in the big leagues than the rest of the group combined. Unfortunately for the D-backs, only about 2.7 of his career bWAR came with the Diamondbacks before being traded to the Detroit Tigers. Trevor Bauer is the other big name here, with a career 3.79 ERA and a Cy Young award in the shortened 2020 season. He, too, has spent the vast majority of his career outside of Arizona.

Outside of Scherzer and Bauer, the list is uninspiring, in terms of on-field performance. Jarrod Parker was a top-100 prospect for four straight years before nagging elbow injuries held him to just two full seasons in the big leagues. Those years were solid, but both came after a trade to the Oakland Athletics.

Archie Bradley appeared on four straight top-100 lists from 2012 to 2015. He showed promise upon arrival to the big leagues in 2015, but he did not last long as a starter. Bradley was an excellent backend reliever for the D-backs in 2017, but his career has since taken a turn for the worse, and he looks more like a fringe middle reliever now. Even so, Bradley ranked higher on prospect lists than any current D-backs pitching prospect ever has.

From 2015-19, Braden Shipley, Aaron Blair, Touki Toussaint, Anthony Banda and Jon Duplantier also made appearances on top-100 lists. All five have been below replacement level in the big leagues, and only Toussaint and Banda logged innings in the majors in 2022.

Frankly, the Diamondbacks have had almost no success turning their top-100 pitching prospect into successful big-league starters over the last 25 years. Of course, the team’s player development staff has changed over the years. The past is not necessarily predictive of the future.

But there is a hard truth to be reckoned with here regarding pitching prospects at large. When we say that top-100 pitching prospects don’t necessarily pan out, we’re not just talking about a potential ace becoming a No. 3 starter, or a No. 5 starter becoming a reliever. Often times, we’re talking about pitchers that just won’t stick in the big leagues at all, whether due to a lack of talent, injuries, off-the-field issues or a combination of all three. The same is true of position players.

So, what does this mean for Diamondbacks fans today? I’ll start with what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean you should stop dreaming about Jones and Lawlar battling each other for the NL Triple Crown in 2027. Hope makes sports fun, and for D-backs fans, this might be the first time they’ve felt it in a while.

What it does mean is that the Diamondbacks are facing what appears to be an impossible task. In order to consistently compete with the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres atop the NL West, the Diamondbacks will need to churn out the kind of homegrown players the team has essentially never had in more than 20 years as a franchise, and they will have to do it repeatedly. Moreover, they will need all those players to be affordable at the same time, so as to not overwhelm a payroll that, as of now, is less than half that of the Dodgers or Padres.

Frankly, it is highly unlikely that the team’s current 5-10 best prospects will all be productive major-leaguers, much less stars. Granted, the D-backs don’t need every prospect to pan out, but they do need to have significantly more success in that regard than they ever have.

This is baseball, though. Crazy things really do happen. Continue to dream big, D-backs fans. Just know deep down what you are really hoping for: a miracle.

Follow Jesse Friedman on Twitter

Top photo: Rick Scuteri/USA TODAY Sports