I’m excited to introduce a new in-season series to you all – Hobby+. Some of you are aware that I created a stat-driven formula to track the best prospects out there who don’t have Bowman cards. Well, this is the inverse of that. This includes every non-debuted hitter (maybe next year for pitchers) that DOES have a Bowman card, from 2021 releases forward.

However, I’m expanding it so we can all keep tabs on who’s showing out well in certain areas, who’s improving in-season, and who might be undervalued in the hobby. Undervalued in general terms, that is. I’m not interested in getting into price wars!

In this piece, the order and numbers of the players I’m showing is all from 2024 data. Also, don't worry about the Team being incorrect, or a weird player being too high. That will self-correct as soon as I start pulling in 2025 data, which is mostly what we'll be doing!

So, what makes this list different? A few things. Below are my explainers for each pop-out I’ll be keeping tabs on. Each section has a link to a sheet with the Top 100 for each pop-out. The color-coded names refer to the product the player is first seen in, with a key at the top of the sheet.

Age-Dependent Power

Age-Dependent Power tracks age to level and values that very highly – the hobby likes their prospects young. If a young player is hitting a bunch of homers at a high level, he’s going to be high on this list. So this list, in a bubble, will have a lot of teenagers, as you can see from the chart below. It’s not a complete picture though, and not intended to be. 

Hitting Skill

Hitting Skill is more simple. It’s based in K% and BB%, with threshold values for each, ratio values for each, and some level adjustments for the DSL and Complex (where pitching is bad). This list, as you may expect, has quite a few power-vacant players, but it’ll be important to check in to see if those guys are seeing improvement to their impact at the plate. If those guys start ripping a high number of doubles and a few homers (as I expect someone like Yolfran Castillo to do), they start to become a lot more interesting.

Hobby+

The third pop-out is Hobby+ itself. This is a combination of the other two (weighted differently), with a little kicker for SB. It’s the most complete picture, in my mind, that we can get through a hobby lens for a prospect using only statistics. I’ll call out caveats with a player’s real-life skill set when I do updates – see Deyvison De Los Santos. Last year he hit 40 bombs with a reasonable K%, at AAA, at age 21. We all know he’s not close to a Top 10 prospect, even for the hobby. I know, stats can be dumb.

The Plan

What’ll be most interesting is tracking improvements to each of these three categories from period to period. In-season improvements can be tough to see if a player struggles out of the gate. I’m hoping to spot trends within this to identify players to get in on early!

My plan is to do updates and breakdowns periodically – at least 2 weeks apart, and I’ll start as soon as I see a significant number of players starting to hit my minimum AB threshold (90 AB’s).