What a Prospect Grade Is Actually Worth

FV 60 is roughly a one in four shot at a fantasy star. FV 45 is one in twenty five. The full ladder, with the sample sizes.

Every prospect list hands you a number. FV 55, FV 60, a 45 with a plus. The grade is doing real work, and almost nobody tells you what it converts to in fantasy terms.

So we measured it. Every graded prospect from the 2017 to 2020 classes, followed forward through their MLB careers, sorted by the grade they carried at the time.

The ladder

"Star" here means a season inside the top 50 at the position group by fantasy points. "Useful" means a season worth rostering in a standard league. Brackets are the range the true rate most likely sits in, because the top of this table is thin and it would be dishonest to print 33 percent from six players without saying so.

What that actually means

FV 60 is a one in four shot at a star. Not a coin flip, and not a sure thing. Sixty of them came through those four classes and fourteen turned into fantasy stars. The other forty six did not.

FV 45 is a one in twenty five shot. These are the names that fill out the back of dynasty rosters and the middle of every FYPD draft. Eighty five percent of them reach the majors, which is why they feel like real prospects, and four percent become someone you actually want. Reaching the majors is a low bar.

The drop from 60 to 55 is the steepest on the board. Star rate falls from 23 percent to 15, and it is the only single step where those ranges barely overlap. If you are trading a 60 for two 55s, the ladder says you are losing.

FV 40 is a lottery ticket priced like a prospect. Sixteen hundred of them, a two percent star rate, and a median peak of 21 fantasy points. That is not a prospect tier, it is a raffle.

The part most sites will not tell you

We do not use these grades to rank prospects, and the same study is why.

We tested it. Given a prospect's list rank, the FV grade adds nothing on top: the partial correlation is approximately zero, and in some classes slightly negative. The information in the grade is already in the ranking, because the same scouts produce both. Blending FV into our model would add noise, not signal.

The individual tools are worse. Once you know a prospect's FV, the hit tool is the only one with any residual predictive power. Game power and raw power collapse into each other, because the scout already blended them for you. Pitcher grades are fully absorbed. And speed is actively negative for points-league outcomes, which is the single most counterintuitive result in the study: fast prospects underperform their grade, because speed gets credited as a tool while contributing very little to a points total.

So the ladder above is useful for calibrating your own expectations. It is not useful as a model input, and we do not use it as one.

How to actually use this

Anchor on the list rank, then use the ladder to price the grade. When someone offers you a package of FV 50s for one FV 60, the table tells you the 60 is a 23 percent star and each 50 is a 10 percent star, and that three lottery tickets are not a favorite.

And treat the top two rows as directional. Six players and sixteen players are not enough to separate a 70 from a 65, whatever the single numbers say.

Who is in this: all graded prospects, 2017 to 2020 classes, followed through 2025. Outcome bars derived empirically from the top 150, 50 and 25 seasons at each position group. Full method in the prospect calibration study.

All articles · Redraft rankings · Dynasty rankings