The Dominican Summer League is somewhat shrouded in mystery. While we get better numbers now from the league than we once did, there isn't a way to follow the games live and none of the games are streamed online. So I gathered some of the data we do have from the positional players there from the 2012 season and put it in a nifty little spreadsheet.
While there are players there that are 22 and sometimes even 23, I wanted to look at just prospects (and I didn't account for players recently released), so I only looked at the ones that are currently under 20 and haven't played in an American level (some were promoted in season to GCL or AZL).
I wanted to include signing bonuses along with the numbers as a control group (i.e. how teams viewed the players), but I didn't realize how many players don't have reported (or easily ones to find) signing bonuses.
To create a ranking, I did a similar thing that I did with the NPB hitting prospects. However, I did a better job with the positional adjustments, using Tom Tango's rankings used in this Fangraphs/Statcorner article. Instead of using the run values, I just used the overall rankings, so catcher at 1, DH at 9, etc (I switched left-field and right-field, as I think right-field is harder than left-field and they had the same run values and the chart had left-field ranked higher). To fix the problem I had in the NPB article linked to above when it came to OPS +, I broke everything into 9 sections. So, to use wRC + in this article as an example, each section had 16 players. The highest 16 get a 1 and the bottom 16 get a 9 for example. Since only 29 players had listed bonuses, I broke the first 28 into groups of 4, put the lowest bonus by itself, and put the non-listed bonus guys in their own group. We basically have to assume that the no bonus guys have smaller bonuses than the listed bonus guys, which isn't ideal. Obviously, I could only compare defense (RF/G) by position, but I tried to break the positions into groups of 9 if I could (thus not additionally penalizing the most frequent positions). For catchers I put SB% instead of Range Factor. For age, there were only 3 different ages (17-19), so those rankings only went 1-3 (I debated going 1,4,7, but decided not to). Obviously, the lower the overall ranking, the better. To download the spreadsheet, click on this link or copy and past the below address:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_DUd_c_mKWrNnpvektIendaWnM/edit
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