Kiley McDaniel put out his 2015 In-Season Prospect Update on Wednesday, which got everyone up to speed on the game’s most noteworthy prospects. Among other things, Kiley included an ordered list of the top-26 prospects in baseball. To follow suit, I put together an updated top-100 list, according to my KATOH system. Additionally, I produced KATOH forecasts for Kiley’s top 26, the 18 players on his “Minor-League Pop-Up Guys List.”

I know you probably know this, but I’d like to reiterate that you shouldn’t think of this as “Chris Mitchell’s Top 100 List,” and certainly not “FanGraphs’ Top 100 List.” This is simply the output from a flawed statistical model that fails to take into account many of the factors that go into evaluating a prospect. In particular, it ignores a player’s physical tools. As always, you should never choose between beer and tacos if you don’t have to.

This also feels like a good time to run through a couple of programming notes regarding the state of KATOH. I am currently working on an improved KATOH model. Among some other tweaks, it will address two notable flaws:

Currently, KATOH does not directly take into account for a player’s defensive position. A hitter’s stolen base numbers can act as a decent proxy for his defensive value, but that proxy is far from perfect. Most notably, this conspires to underrate catchers.

Currently, KATOH uses raw (but league-adjusted) statistics that haven’t been properly regressed to account for sample size. Among other things, this often causes KATOH to misjudge players who have exceptionally high or low BABIPs.

I expect to roll out this update in November, but don’t hold me to that timetable. In the meantime, all of my posts — including this one — will continue to use the models I built last winter. Just keep this in mind, and I’ll be sure to point out any instances where KATOH might be misjudging a player due to these flaws.

Enough talk. Here’s KATOH’s top-100 list considering stats through August 18th. Only players with at least 200 plate appearances and/or batters faced this year were considered for this list. Before I jump into the list, I feel I should mention Carlos Correa here. Although he’s no longer a prospect, his forecast of 19 WAR through age-28 was easily the highest among players with a meaningful sample of games.

KATOH’s Top 100 Prospect List

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KATOH Forecasts for Kiley’s Top 26 Prospects

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KATOH forecasts for Kiley’s Minor-League Pop-Up Guys