An Update To BA Grades
What does “average risk” for a baseball prospect actually mean?
Like last offseason, I’m writing up a pair of Top 30s for our annual prospect handbook this year: the Braves and the Guardians.
I’ve completed my top 10 of the Braves system and am now actively working on the top 10 for the Guardians. Once that’s taken care of, I’ll get to work sorting through the 11-30 for both of the systems while also tackling some fun offseason draft-oriented content.
As we roll out our updated Top 10s this year, you’ll notice that we have updated and revamped the grades we use to rate prospects. Editor-in-Chief JJ Cooper wrote more about this update, but I wanted to provide the new scale with some thoughts on why it’s an improvement.
Updated BA Grade Scale
Grade — Position Player Role — Starter Role — Reliever Role1
75-80 — Franchise Player — No. 1 — N/A
65-70 — Perennial All-Star — No. 2 — N/A
60 — Occasional All-Star — No. 3 — Game’s best reliever
55 — First-division regular — No. 3/4 — Elite reliever
50 — Solid-average regular — No. 4 — High-leverage reliever
45 — Second division or platoon — No. 5 — middle reliever
40 — Reserve — Fill-in starter — Low-leverage reliever
30-35 — Org Player — Org Player — Up-and-down reliever
20-25 — Non prospect — Non prospect — Non prospect
Updated Risk Penalties
Low (no penalty) — A player who is close to the majors, typically with little or no projection remaining and no pressing injury questions, with a high probability of having a major league career in some capacity.
Mild (-5) — Some work left to refine their skills, but a proven player who typically comes with upper minors performance.
Average (-10) — The most common or median risk level for players ranked among a team’s Top 30 prospects. The average prospect has significant risk or weaknesses in some areas of their game, typical of most prospects.
High (-15) — Players with injury questions, players who struggle with a key skill (especially control for pitchers or contact for hitters) and many teenagers in the low minors with significant projection remaining.
Extreme (-20) — Players who have well above-average durability issues, multiple skills/tools issues to resolve and inexperienced teenage prospects who are years from the majors.**
At BA we grade players by assigning an overall role grade (IE “60”) with an accompanying risk factor (IE “Average”, with a -10 penalty). The adjusted grade (IE, “50,” in this case) or is then used to help us tier out players and line them up within systems and across the league.
It’s a helpful system to use when comparing a very low risk, but also low-ceiling player who’s near the majors to a high-risk, but much toolsier player who’s years away from contributing but could potentially have far more impact if things pan out.
The tweaks in our grading update include expanding the BA scale below the “40-Reserve” line and re-evaluating our risk descriptions and penalties across the board.
In the Prospect Handbook, we generally won’t need to have grades lower than a 40, because most of the players worth writing up for any given team’s top 30 are generally at that level or above it. As we continue to expand our BA Grading system to the amateur levels, however, it becomes necessary to both describe and apply grades below that level to accurately describe a player’s talent.
JJ writes more on the way we’re describing risks on the new scale in his piece above, but put simply, we are trying to more accurately describe what “average risk” means in the context of prospects overall.
Below, you can see our old risks and penalties (on the left) alongside our update risks and penalties (on the right):
Low (no penalty) // Low (no penalty)
Medium (-5) // Mild (-5)
High (-10) // Average (-10)
Very High (-12.5) // High (-15)
Extreme (-15) // Extreme (-20)
The penalties are the same for the first three tiers of risk, but we’ve scrapped the “Very High” tier alongside its often problematic -12.5 penalty that created some wonky math situations and awkward tier breaks. While both scales have penalties called “Extreme,” the new “Extreme” risk comes with a greater penalty of -20; something we have not had before.
Ideally, players who appear in the prospect handbook will be clustered within the middle three risk tiers (mild, average, high), with low-risk and extreme-risk players both being quite rare.
I would anticipate greater usage of the new “Extreme/-20” risk tier on our draft rankings, where players are inherently more risky than more established pro prospects who are making it into a Top 30. For the last few years we’ve put grades on the top 200 players in the draft. Expanding the BA Scale to the full 20-80 spectrum with detailed roles and a more extreme risk tier will allow us to more accurately grade players beyond that—admittedly arbitrary—cutoff.
Overall, I’m really excited for this update.
It’s good to have a fully described BA Grade scale going from 20 to 80, and the new risks seem both more intuitive and will allow us a greater ability to differentiate and bucket players into appropriate tiers of talent—especially on the amateur side.
Hopefully this all leads to better reports, better clarity and an amateur and pro grading scale that has a lot more cohesion. If you have any questions about the new scale or how we use, don’t hesitate to reach out and ask.
*Below is the work I’ve produced for Baseball America since my last newsletter.
Writing
2025 Draft Report Cards For All 30 Clubs. The traffic our annual draft report cards series got this year was far better than the norm. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it was because of the timing with a heavily-viewed world series, or perhaps it was a function of better SEO on our site. Either way, I’m happy it’s getting some attention. There’s roughly 21,000 words of information on the draft in this series.
Braves Top 10 Prospects. I’m once again responsible for writing up the Braves system in our annual prospect handbook. And I’m once again writing up a lot of Braves pitching prospects.
Braves Prospects Chat. Regardless of the quality of Atlanta’s farm system in any given year, Braves fans are passionate about the team and love talking about the prospects. That makes for a fun prospect chat. We had 43 questions asked and answered in this one.
Jacob Lombard, Potential Top 10 Draft Pick, Commits To Miami. Some relatively minor news in the baseball world at large, but more significant if you are really plugged into the draft or college baseball—though the odds of Lombard getting to campus at Miami seem low.
Podcasting/Video
Future Projection Episode 144: NL East Farm Systems. Ben and I embark on the first series of our annual divisional farm system podcasts. We dive deep on each team in the NL East in conjunction with our Top 10 rollouts on the site.
Future Projection Episode 143: How Did Teams Miss On Trey Yesavage? More thoughts on Yesavage as a great pick in this podcast with Ben.
Draft Pod: Notable Players & Teams From Draft Report Cards. Peter and I talk about some of the notable names from our draft report card series on the latest BA draft pod.
Sorry, this would look much better if Substack had support for tables. I have no idea why that’s not something I can add to a newsletter in the year 2025.