While MLB Pipeline, Baseball America, and every other prospect publication only make changes to their prospect rankings periodically, one of the goals of my Hobby Rankings has always been to try and give more frequent updates for those of you collecting Bowman cards. What I’ve learned is that even with my weekly updates it isn’t really possible to move prospects as quickly as their card market moves when they catch fire. Often we would have players that I would say were a ‘buy’ but then their price would go up by $20 and it led to a lot of, “well, is he still a buy?”, which was always a tough question for me to answer. That’s why over the course of the last few weeks I’ve been working on an updated ranking system for prospects that will help them move much more freely based on weekly performances so that we can try and capture the corresponding movement in the card market. The only missing piece was figuring out how to formulate a buy rating. After testing it out for the last month I was able to assign target autograph values to find the discrepancies between where a player is ranked and how expensive he is. As both rankings and prices change I will update you all who has moved into a buy range on a weekly basis. The truth is that the Bowman market doesn’t move true to normal prospect rankings. People overreact. Players trend like stocks. Now we have a ranking system that does the same.
Buy Ratings
5.0 = Strongest Buy (price should be at least 100% higher)
4.5 - 4.9 = Strong Buy
4.0 - 4.4 = Buy
3.5 - 3.9 = Hold (lean towards buying)
3.0 - 3.4 = Hold
2.5 - 2.9 = Hold (lean towards selling)
2.1 - 2.4 = Consider selling
2.0 = Sell
This post is for paid subscribers
Become a paying subscriber of Prospect Analytics to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content.
Upgrade