A last look at age-based minor league comps for Christian Scott

This article is a companion piece to yesterday’s exploration into the likelihood of 25-year-old Christian Scott making the majors and being a success at his relatively advanced age as a prospect. Yesterday we looked at players making their MLB debut at age 25. Today, we’ll look at prospects at similar ages in Double-A to what Scott was last year (24) and when/if they made the majors. It’s a different way of looking at the issue and while we’re using the same time frame, we won’t have a complete overlap of our samples. There’s nothing wrong with that, you just need to be aware that it’s going on.

Let’s get right to it. Between the 2008-2012 seasons, there were 230 pitching seasons with at least eight starts in Double-A while being between the ages of 23-25. Of those, 53 were age 25, 98 were age 24 and 79 were age 23.

Age 25
Majors pre-25: 1
Majors 25+: 11
No Majors: 41

Age 24
Majors pre-25: 4
Majors 25+: 38
No Majors: 56

Age 23
Majors pre-25: 24
Majors 25+: 20
No Majors: 35

There are duplicate seasons, with the same pitcher making the list in more than one year. Let’s remove those, along with the ones who made their MLB debut, to get the number of individual pitchers, along with how many of those made it to the majors:

Duplicate Seasons: 18
Majors pre-25: 29

Beginning sample (230) – Duplicate Seasons (18) = 212 pitchers

Our 212 pitchers break down as follows:
29: Majors before 25
69 – Majors 25 or later
114: Never made the majors

Eliminating the 29 pitchers who made the majors before their age-25 season, we have 183 (212-29) in similar circumstances to Scott and 37.7% of them made the majors. And the vast majority of them didn’t see significant time in MLB. Only seven of those 183 pitchers (3.8%) made 50 starts in the majors.

This is great evidence for not getting excited about a random pitcher above the age of 22 in Double-A. But it’s not necessarily a good group to compare to Scott, who was great in his 12 starts last year in Binghamton at age 24, with a 2.47 ERA.

Let’s narrow it down even more, looking at pitchers with at least eight starts in Double-A and with an ERA of 2.75 or less at age 23-25. We have to expand our years to get a decent sample. FanGraphs has these minor league numbers dating back to 2006. So, we’ll start there and go thru 2019. That should still give our pitchers some time to make the majors. And even with this expanded number of years, we have a sample of just 34, an indication of how well Scott pitched last year after his promotion.

The first four columns after the “Name” column are what the player did in Double-A. After that is the age the player made his MLB debut and we finish up with games and starts in MLB.

Name	Age	G	GS	ERA	MLB Debut	MLB G	MLB GS
Daniel McGrath	24	27	15	1.68	No
Brian Johnson	23	20	20	1.75	24	65	26
Kyle Hendricks	23	21	21	1.85	24	247	246
Tyler Anderson	24	23	23	1.98	26	174	166
David Martinez	25	26	18	2.02	25	7	0
Eric Surkamp	23	23	22	2.02	23	52	16
Matt Albers	23	19	19	2.17	23	616	24
Trey Supak	23	20	20	2.20	No
Chris Heston	24	25	25	2.24	26	41	33
Tyler Wagner	24	25	25	2.25	24	6	3
Elih Villanueva	23	28	28	2.26	24	1	1
Corey Oswalt	23	24	24	2.28	24	26	14
Gus Schlosser	24	25	25	2.39	25	15	0
Joe Biagini	25	23	22	2.42	26	222	22
Zack Brown	23	22	21	2.44	No
Vidal Nuno	24	20	20	2.45	25	155	42
Yender Caramo	24	34	10	2.45	No
Matt Shoemaker	24	23	23	2.48	26	128	115
Joe Martinez	25	27	27	2.49	26	21	6
Phil Coke	25	23	20	2.51	25	407	15
Grayson Long	23	23	23	2.52	No
Douglas Arguello	25	22	22	2.55	No
Zac Lowther	23	26	26	2.55	25	11	6
Samuel Deduno	25	24	24	2.57	26	83	44
Tom Koehler	24	28	28	2.61	26	161	133
Michael Roth	24	22	22	2.62	23	23	1
Steven Jackson	24	24	24	2.65	27	51	0
Andy Sonnanstine	23	28	28	2.67	24	132	80
Griffin Jax	24	20	20	2.67	26	154	14
David Hernandez	23	27	27	2.68	24	547	27
Ryan Hartman	24	25	18	2.69	27	1	0
Tyler Lumsden	23	20	20	2.69	No
Pedro Vasquez	23	24	23	2.71	No
Mike Clevinger	24	27	26	2.73	25	152	138

The good news for Scott is that the majority of these hurlers made the majors. Here’s how it breaks down by age at Double-A:

Age 25
Majors pre-25: 0
Majors 25+: 5
No Majors: 1

Age 24
Majors pre-25: 2
Majors 25+: 10
No Majors: 2

Age 23
Majors pre-25: 8
Majors 25+: 1
No Majors: 5

If we eliminate the 10 players who made their MLB debut before age 25, we have a sample of 24, where 16 made the majors at age 25 or later. Of those 16 players, four have made 50 starts in the majors. That’s a 25% hit rate before accounting for the survivor bias – higher than my expectations but not very encouraging. Clevinger had really good seasons in 2018-19, with a combined 8.7 fWAR in that span.

It’s not without precedent for someone in Scott’s situation to be a successful MLB pitcher. But no matter how we look at the question it’s tough to come away feeling like the odds are anywhere close in our favor of this working out in a really good way. His excellent results in Double-A certainly looks like a good omen for him making the majors. But we’re more likely to get another Oswalt rather than another Clevinger.