Toronto traded (dumped might be a more accurate word) Russell for a pair of low-value prospects today. One of them, Ronny Brito, played in the Pioneer league last year. I wasn't sure if I was going to bother tabulating and posting my Z-score minor league leaderboards for the advanced rookie leagues, but I decided to because Brito seems like a volatile or high variance prospect and I wanted to see where he ranked this year.
Check out the previous iterations of this series if you want to see the other levels and the methods and discussion.
I used a 75 PA cutoff for these lists and did not use BB% in the sums.
Here is the LINK to the full spreadsheet.
The Pioneer League leaderboard:
Ronny Brito didn't make it, but you can see him on the full spreadsheet at 32nd out of 117 dudes. His K% sewered him by being more than a full standard deviation under the sample mean, but his Age, ISO, and BABIP all elevated him to an overall score that was comfortably above average. He's probably an extreme long shot to ever be an MLB player of note, but he's not a complete write off. He also deserves more credit than this if you want to place some value on his position/defense (a bit more on this below).
Blue Jays fans should be a lot more interested in the...
Appalachian League
Alejandro Kirk is a rookie league stud and Cal Stevenson isn't far behind him. And remember, these guys aren't getting credit for their BB rates at this level, even though they look good and are comfortably (Kirk) and extremely (Stevenson) above the sample mean. I don't want to expend too many words on intriguing rookie ball stat lines, and I've already talked about these guys in a previous post, but I think it's sufficient to say that these guys are on my watch list next year.
Kirk's company at the top of the list is notable. Wander Franco is an elite prospect and first rounder Nolan Gorman is probably in any reasonable MLB-wide top 100. The Mets traded a strong performing prospect in Luis Santana (plus more) for J.D. Davis, who will be competing for playing time with like 86 other infielders and corner outfielders on their now crowded roster.
Hagen Danner also had a positive year and barely missed the league top 20. His stat line, from a developmental perspective, was particularly positive following his disastrous 2017 GCL debut, which involved a wRC+ that some of you could probably have bested.
If you scroll down on the main spreadsheet you'll see Dominic Abbadessa at #33, with a +1.46 Z-score sum. That's a similar rank to Ronny Brito in the Pioneer League, so if you're putting together your personal Blue Jay top 75 prospects list (I'm not sure why you would do that - surely you have better things to do) you might want to use Dominic Abbadessa as a barometer for Ronny Brito's value. Have you ever cared about Abbadessa? Probably not. Should you be excited at all for Ronny Brito? I would suggest not... but, again, Brito might deserve a bump for shortstop defense if you buy the scouting reports that are positive in that regard. It's worth mentioning that not all scouts are convinced about the quality of his projected defense.
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Cover image source is a 2080 Baseball Youtube video of Brito (LINK).
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