Prospect Lists Are Unkind to the Angels; Why Doesn't Their Farm Director Care?

When you promote players as aggressively as the Angels do, rankings barely matter.

This week, Baseball America and Baseball Prospectus revealed their annual Top 100 prospect lists. (Technically 101 in the latter case.) MLB Pipeline is soon to follow.

If you’re an Angels fan, these lists are a quick read. Only one player in the organization — Nolan Schanuel, number 89 on BP’s Top 101, 86 on BA’s Top 100 — was deemed worthy of either list.

It’s telling of the Angels’ unique approach to player development that Schanuel has not only reached the major leagues already, but put together a .402 on-base percentage in 29 games. No team has been more aggressive promoting its prospects up the minor league ladder in recent years. This time a year ago, Schanuel was still in college.

Baseball America’s Kyle Glaser explained to Halos Today that ranking Schanuel was a question of where, not if:

“It's incredibly impressive what he did, especially as a mid-major college guy. If he stunk up the joint nobody would've blamed him. You would've said he's not ready. … Talk about adjusting to major league pitching, that's tough enough at Triple-A, Double-A. He pretty much did it straight out of a mid-major college.”

Baseball Prospectus’ Jeffrey Paternostro added more context:

“The inherent issue with the Schanuel ranking actually circles back to his evaluation. He truly doesn’t fit into anything resembling a familiar prospect box. He’s a tall, sturdy first baseman who looks like he should hit for some power but swings the bat like Luis Arraez a lot of the time. He will walk and he will make a lot of contact. His major league contact rates weren’t stellar but his minor league ones were, and I’m willing to give him some grace in the short term jumping from Florida Atlantic to the bigs in just a few months. But you expect this type of quick-moving college corner bat to have a high floor, and Schanuel is a first baseman who hits the ball about as hard as a glove-first shortstop. There really isn’t a major-league floor if he isn’t running a near .400 OBP. And we just won’t know if this will all work against major league pitching until he’s no longer prospect-eligible.”

For Joey Prebynski, the Angels’ director of player development, fretting about which prospects make the annual lists (and where they’re ranked) is a fool’s errand. Their organizational mandate has been to identify who can make a major league impact fastest in the draft, then help him get to Anaheim quickly. That’s not a focus that lends itself to giving prospect rankers a long look at a future star from Rookie ball to Triple-A.

For the Angels, perhaps the question of how many Top-100 prospects they’ve collected is irrelevant. They’re playing a different game. The better question is, “how soon can this player help the major league club, and how?”

With any minor league player, Prebynski said:

“It’s less about where he ranks within an industry ranking, and more on how he builds off the year last year. Our focus is helping him move forward.”

Schanuel’s rookie status is still intact for 2024, leaving him eligible for the lists — albeit barely. As the 11th overall selection in last year’s amateur draft, Schanuel quite nearly became the rare professional to bypass the prospect-ranking system entirely. This led MLB Pipeline to have fun with their selection of which Angels prospect would make his debut in 2024:

MLB Pipeline put out an article about which prospect from each team will make their MLB debut in 2024, for the Angels, they put the player they have the Angels taking in their initial mock draft which is comedy genius on the parts of @jimcallisMLB, @JonathanMayo & @SamDykstraMiLB pic.twitter.com/mhiUcqj02P

— Taylor Blake Ward (@TaylorBlakeWard) December 29, 2023

It isn’t a stretch to say the Angels are breaking the industry model for evaluating a team's prospects. Yet that was never the goal, Prebynski said:

“For us it ultimately comes down, from a player development standpoint, to meet the player where they’re at in their development curve. It’s certainly different whether they’re coming out of high school, college — their overall experience level. Perry (Minasian, the Angels’ general manager) and our player development group overall … when players know we’ll be aggressive pushing them through the system, it creates an urgency for the work. It’s been a positive for us overall.”

Since Minasian was appointed general manager in Nov. 2020, three players have essentially provided the model for the Angels’ aggressive approach: Chase Silseth, Zach Neto, and Schanuel.

Silseth, an 11th-round pick in 2021, was eligible for every prospect list in January 2022, but two unimpressive starts at Double-A the previous September weren’t enough to grab the listmakers’ attention. The right-hander nonetheless made seven starts for the Angels in 2022, eight more a year ago, and enters 2024 as a strong candidate to crack the season-opening rotation.

Neto, the Angels’ first-round pick in 2022, was a consensus top-100 prospect after an impressive 30 games in Double-A Rocket City with his bat (.320/.382/.492) and his glove at shortstop. That was his only year of eligibility on any list. By 2023, he was the Angels’ primary shortstop at age 21.

“The way he plays the game, talking with Perry, (Neto) was a player we thought we could push. He had a nice spring training last year. Where the big league club was at, some intangibles there, we felt he could handle that.”

Schanuel played all of 22 minor league games, batting .365 with a .505 on-base percentage across three levels, before making his major league debut. It was the fastest promotion of a non-pitcher from the draft to MLB in 20 years.

“Similar to Zach, these guys are elite competitors. His competitiveness, his baseball aptitude, his understanding of the game, the plate discipline, the contact ability, we felt would translate to big league performance.”

For Prebynski and the Angels, then, evaluating the farm system might require a different rubric. For any other organization, players like Schanuel, Neto and Silseth would be the crown jewels of their last three draft classes — the kind of players who usually populate Top-100 lists. In the Angels’ case, all three are serviceable 26-man roster players right now. 

Will the Angels’ first draft pick of 2024 be their next star prospect to make the major leagues? Maybe. Prebynski is comfortable with the Angels’ recent habit of aggressive promotions being more of a trend than a fluke:

“For us, we’re going to meet the player where they’re at. As we go through (evaluations), we’ll determine (whether they’re ready to be promoted) as we go. But we’ve certainly set a precedent that we will be pushing guys as we’re ready for it.”