I met my wife while she was getting her M.F.A. in music composition. Twenty years—and several more advanced degrees since—I’ve been to a lot of concerts. Everything from intermittent loud bursts of electronic noise in a Brooklyn coffee shop to the literal Met. A lot of them have naturally featured her music. An early point of contention was that my favorite piece was one she considered a bit of a trifle, a piano and percussion piece she wrote shortly after we met. Later I landed on a larger piece for Clarinet and Chamber Orchestra. Nowadays she mostly writes operatic works, so I’m always on the lookout for something that might make an interesting libretto. I’m not always a ton of help, as my favorite non-wife piece I’ve encountered over two decades is Frederic Rzewski’s “Coming Together,” a very different kind of vocal composition.
But last year I happened upon a speculative fiction short story “The Infinite Endings of Elsie Chen.” You should go ahead and read it. I won’t really spoil it, but it’s far better than 1000 words of speculative prospect non-fiction, so I’ll wait. You can kind of sketch out the libretto can’t you? The big arias here and there, maybe some fun electronic stuff when the supercomputer gets involved. Anyway, Jess has a poet she works for with these things, so perhaps I’m just making a nuisance of myself. But the story stuck with me.
“I wanted to make a machine that determines the cause that comes before the effect.”
On Monday we’ll kick off the 2024 edition of Monday Morning Ten Pack. It’s a themed one, our usual opening salvo: “What prospect are you most looking forward to seeing in 2024.” It’s a tricky question for me for two reasons. One, my local park is home to the Angels Triple-A affiliate. They were our 30th ranked organization—that’s last—and tend to skip their prospects over this level. I suppose I might get Nelson Rada at some point. But Triple-A is not a prospect-laden level generally, and the Angels aren’t prospect-laden specifically. Two, once we close the 2024 edition on Monday Morning Ten Pack, I’ll be responsible for cataloging reports on a four-digit figure worth of prospects. It’s impractical to play favorites. But if I were to have an answer, it would be Marco Vargas.
If you glossed over the back half of our Mets Top Prospects List this year—or our Marlins list last year—let me catch you up. He signed for a small, five-figure bonus just before the curtain rose on the 2022 DSL season, perhaps because the Marlins needed another infielder for a complex team. His seasonal line in the low, low minors was pretty good, but not particularly notable on its face. That offseason was slim pickings for Marlins prospects so I did my due diligence and asked our Monarch what it had to say. It responded with the kind of contact rates and exit velocities that portented prospectdom.
I covered my concerns about that before our 2023 list cycle even started. But these are just the table stakes now, you’d be a fool not to be plugged in to the supercomputer. Every model has a human factor though, someone to determine what the inputs are—and as such, kind of determine what the outputs are. Well, you are putting your thumb on the scale at least. And I know my biases after 13 years at the park, and Vargas fits very neatly into a profile I like a bit too much. The hit tool first shortstopbutgonnabeasecondbaseman is not my ideal prospect, but it sings to me. I also catalog my misses with more efficiency than any quantum computer you can conceive of, I will absolutely beat it, John Henry style (the steel-driving man, not the Fenway-Sports-Group Man). And the echoes of Luis Carpio haunt me. I wonder if I have my thumb on the scale.
It was 2015, I wasn’t working for BP quite yet. I didn’t have the Monarch spitting me out contact data—and no idea how you’d install a Trackman unit into the brick and sticks at Hunter Wright Stadium—but I’d wager all the money in my pocket for the money in your pocket that Carpio had a very good contact rate and exit velos below-average for a major-leaguer, but pretty good for a teenager. And yeah, then he tore his labrum, and anyway this isn’t a Mea Carpio, been there done that. But this is a tough profile, and how much will he really hit? Luis Carpio topped out in Double-A, but is somehow still only 26. Marco Vargas is 18 for another month, but how much will he really hit? I will be waiting patiently for the Low-A data.
“And I don’t miss her, not really, but I miss everything she could have been. I miss something that never happened because of a broken umbrella rib, and everything that hurts me now is nothing but a daydream of an AI too smart for its own good.”
I honestly don’t remember what opera we saw at the Met, I think it was The Tempest, I think we went because Jess wanted to get a look at it before she brought her students from the mostly business school she was teaching at. We had a really good pre-concert meal at one of Daniel Boulud’s 17 NYC restaurants beforehand. They really do have that pre-theater prix fixe down to a science. Of course I know which one. I have a better memory for that than the prospect stuff, but it’s just a rhetorical flourish.
Thank you for reading
This is a free article. If you enjoyed it, consider subscribing to Baseball Prospectus. Subscriptions support ongoing public baseball research and analysis in an increasingly proprietary environment.
Subscribe now