FanGraphs ZiPS Projections Give Atlanta FOUR Top 100 Prospects

The Atlanta Braves are widely considered to have a lot of legit pitching prospects in their farm system.

But which ones are the best is seemingly an unsettled topic, as there's been various permutations of public Top Prospect lists for the Braves and none can seemingly decide on the right order for the Atlanta arms. 

There's some consensus that Hurston Waldrep belongs in the top two, with him holding one of the two spots in almost every list we've seen so far (and Braves Today putting him at the top of our rankings), but there's one name that hasn't broken into the top two yet...until now. 

FanGraphs, unveiling their ZiPS prospect rankings, gives Atlanta four different Top 100 prospects, the highest of any prospect evaluation outlet so far this spring. 

And there's names we've seen in Top 100s already, with AJ Smith-Shawver at #35, infielder Ignacio Alvarez at #96, and Waldrep at #69.

But the computers that make the ZiPS rankings also really like Owen Murphy, putting him at #38 on the rankings, making him the #9 pitching prospect in all of baseball. 

(And unlike several other lists, FanGraphs is including foreign professionals, and so two of the names above Murphy are Yoshinobu Yamamoto of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Shōta Imanaga of the Chicago Cubs.)

There's not much explanation given to the specific rankings - the only comments about Murphy from author Dan Szymborski are a joke about a potential Own Murphy-Sean Murphy battery. 

"Owen Murphy at no. 38, a Braves first-rounder from 2022 who got a dynamite translation in ZiPS despite the relatively lackluster ERA. Really though, I just want him to pitch to Sean Murphy in the majors so I can make Murphy’s Law jokes and/or article titles." 

But it's important to note the way that these ZiPS projections work. Unlike most conventional rankings, which are compiled by humans who watch film, look at stats, and decide where to put everyone, ZiPS is a computer projection system that MLB.com explains "uses growth and decline curves based on player type to find trends". It feeds in performance statistics, weights events, applies an aging curve, and then spits out a future projection based on how other players of that age typically improve or decline. 

And so there's a simple reason that Murphy can end up as a top ten pitching prospect in all of baseball despite putting up what Szymborski called an "lackluster" 4.72 ERA last season - he did it at age 19. 

Murphy went 6-4 with a 4.72 ERA in 21 starts, mostly in Single-A Augusta, striking out 11.3 batters per nine innings to only 3.2 walks per nine innings. But at 19, he was 2.6 years younger than the typical Single-A player and a whopping 4.1 years younger than the average High-A player, who he faced for his final three starts of the year as a member of the Rome squad.  

Combine this with his four pitch mix that, while still lacking premium velocity, gets swing and miss and is controlled well, and you have a combination that the robots think could be dominant in the future. 

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