1. How Good Will Jackson Holliday Be?
Jackson Holliday is a 20-year-old baseball player who looks 15. The son of Matt Holliday, he is the sport’s top minor league prospect. Tonight, he debuts for the Baltimore Orioles. It’s a big deal. The last time baseball had a debut this significant was probably when Vladimir Guerrero Jr. first took the field for the Blue Jays, five years ago. It’s no Stephen Strasburg moment, but it’s a big night at the ballpark.
How good’s he gonna be?
There are two ways to look at this. The first is to examine how good he should be expected to be this season. The second is to look at his overall career.
For the first, we’ll look at FanGraphs’s Depth Charts projection, the one which combines other projection systems and prorates their outputs based on expected playing time. Depth Charts has Holliday playing in 117 games this season, earning 506 plate appearances. It has him batting .257 but turning in a .355 OBP, which would have tied him for 32nd-best last year among qualified hitters. It has him as a 2.5-WAR player. Among shortstops in 2023, that would have ranked him 14th in the majors. Holliday, as a rookie, should be about a league-average starting shortstop in terms of his total production. Despite being expected to play less than 75% of the Orioles’ games.
For the second, we’ll look at Holliday’s future value, which is 70. Holliday is considered, by both FanGraphs and MLB Pipeline, to be a 70-grade prospect. What the hell does that mean? Here’s an explainer from Kiley McDaniel, but short version is that he’s a rarity. Over the last seven seasons, only seven prospects earned a grade of 70 or higher at any time in FanGraphs’s Future Value: Guerrero, Shohei Ohtani, Adley Rutschman, Yoán Moncada, Wander Franco, Gavin Lux, and MacKenzie Gore. That isn’t a complete All-Star roster. There’s a wide range of outcomes across it. But that’s the company Holliday keeps.
In 2018, Craig Edwards examined the historic performance of prospects who earned various Future Value grades, basing his examination off of Baseball America prospect lists from 1996 through 2010. Edwards’s exact math isn’t publicly available (his end goal was to assign dollar values to various Future Values, not to give us straight average WAR projections), but working backwards from what he showed, it would seem the average 70-grade position player prospect becomes something like a three-WAR player annually, especially if they enter the league at an age like Holliday’s. This tracks. If Holliday should be a 2.5-WAR player right now playing less than 75% of games, then three WAR in an average season seems reasonable. The current thought, as I understand it, is that players tend to only slightly improve after entering the big leagues, holding rather constant in their production until they turn 30.
Importantly, that’s the average for a player of Holliday’s skill. The average is three WAR a year, which means being a top-60 position player in the majors, annually, until age makes its presence known and the player starts to decline. Over a decade, that kind of production adds up to being a top-35 position player. Someone like Giancarlo Stanton over the last ten years, or Brandon Crawford, to pick a shortstop and someone with better health. That, again, is the average.
How good’s Jackson Holliday gonna be? We don’t know. Our best bet—the average outcome for a guy regarded as highly as he is—is that he’s better than three quarters of starting MLB shortstops over these next ten years. There’s a lot of room for upside coming out of that.
2. Will Robbie Avila Bring His Friends?
Robbie Avila is into the transfer portal, as of yesterday, and he’s got the “do not contact” tag next to his name, indicating he’s made up his mind on where he wants to go. He’s an elite transfer. EvanMiya has him as the ninth-best transfer already in the portal, and that’s in an environment in which the number of 5-star transfers, again per EvanMiya, comfortably exceeds those of the last two years.
Also in the portal are Ryan Conwell, Julian Larry, Isaiah Swope, and Jayson Kent. More players should be expected to hop in, but at the moment, five percent of EvanMiya’s top 100 transfers is made up of Indiana State’s starting lineup from this past season.
Assuming Saint Louis boosters pay Avila something of a competitive NIL rate, him following Josh Schertz to become a Billiken makes sense. Avila possesses a unique skillset and unique limitations. He’s comfortable with Schertz’s offensive schemes, and Schertz knows him better than any other coach. Schertz likely helps Avila be the best player he can be. Pete Thamel has reported that this is the most likely outcome. It seems to be the assumption within the industry.
For the others, though, the destination is harder to pin down, in part because the talent is more conventional. Conwell, Larry, and Swope would fit as guards just about anywhere. Kent is similarly a universal fit as a wing. As top-100 guys in this portal, nearly any roster would be lucky to have them. Even Kent, the lowest-rated of the three, grades out as a +3.43 guy in Miyakawa’s projected 2024–25 BPR. This year, that would have put Kent right alongside Samson Johnson in value. Samson Johnson played some big minutes in Monday night’s national championship.
There’s been a thought that Schertz might be able to bring his whole starting five over from Indiana State to Saint Louis. It’s possible that will happen. But there are going to be a lot of bidders for all five of these players, if the players allow it. Saint Louis could probably challenge for each individually. Hauling in all five might require a few to take a home-coach discount.
To be clear, Schertz can still build an immediately competitive roster even without bringing over his former guys. Neither Conwell nor Swope was a Sycamore last year. Theoretically, it should be even easier to land good transfers at SLU, where NIL resources are bigger than they are at Indiana State. But building an entire competitive rotation out of transfers is expensive even for power conference schools. A fair assumption seems to be that SLU can afford two or three of these guys, and that Schertz will then have to go back to moneyball for the rest of the 2024–25 lineup.
Year One might be a bit of a rebuild in St. Louis, even if Schertz gets to center that rebuild around Avila. For Kent and Larry—two guys each entering their final year of college eligibility, if I’m counting correctly—a rebuild might be a tough sell.
3. Would You Rather Play the Knicks or the Bucks?
The NBA playoff situation is as follows.
In the East:
- Clinched First Round Appearance (2): Boston, Milwaukee
- Clinched First Round or Play-In Tournament (6): New York, Orlando, Cleveland, Indiana, Philadelphia, Miami
- Clinched Play-In Tournament (2): Chicago, Atlanta
- Clinched Lottery Spot: Detroit, Washington, Charlotte, Toronto, Brooklyn
In the West:
- Clinched First Round Appearance (5): Minnesota, Denver, Oklahoma City, LA Clippers, Dallas
- Clinched First Round or Play-In Tournament (5): New Orleans, Phoenix, Sacramento, LA Lakers, Golden State
- Clinched Play-In Tournament (0):
- Clinched Lottery Spot (5): San Antonio, Portland, Memphis, Utah, Houston
There’s no question over who’s going to finish below the Play-In Tournament. These final five days of regular season games won’t decide that. They will, however, decide which four of the six bubble teams in the East make the “real” playoffs right away, and which one of the five in the West gets to say the same.
My question is how valuable it is to get that 6th or better seed.
At the moment—and this is especially true with some uncertainty surrounding Giannis Antetokounmpo’s calf—the Knicks are probably a little better than the Bucks. It would be better to play the Bucks in the first round than to play the Knicks, if given the choice. The Bucks currently lead the Knicks, though, by a game, and the Bucks hold that tiebreaker. Could it be better to be the 7th-seed in the East than to be the 6th?
The answer is no, because even with home-court advantage, the 7th-seed will likely only be favored by four or five points over the 8th-seed in the Play-In Tournament opener. That’s not far from a 50/50 matchup. The 6th-seed probably has to play the Knicks, sure. But the 7th has only a little better than a 50/50 chance of playing the Bucks. In the other scenario, they’ll have to play the Celtics, and that’s if they take care of business as a big favorite against the Bulls or the Hawks.
In the West, there’s no such matchup disparity. There isn’t much of a question. If there is a setting where a team could benefit from a poorer seed, it’s probably a top-4 seed looking to avoid a specific 5th through 8th-seed, but who lands where is still too unknown to make much of it. Plus, all of the Suns, Lakers, and Warriors should theoretically be better in the playoffs than they’ve been in the regular season, because of the impact of veterans in April, May, and June.
Overall? No strategic losses this weekend. Not for the playoff teams, anyway.
