Written by: Ray Butler
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If you’ve been paying attention to our recent content, you’ve noticed we’re making a concerted effort to become a voice of authority leading up to the 2020 MLB Draft. Today, we’re perhaps taking our biggest step yet.
Mason McRae (@mason_mcrae) is joining Prospects 365 as our first-ever MLB Draft analyst. Along with his arrival, we’re elated to introduce The War Room, an MLB Draft board featuring over 700 draft prospects and over 600 individual draft reports.
Mason created his Twitter handle in December of last year. In less than six months, Mason has accrued nearly 500 followers, continually tweeting well-sourced draft updates as well as linking to his content published on futurebluejays.com. It is certainly reasonable to expect his follower count to exceed 1000 leading up to this summer’s MLB Draft, especially now that he’s joined the ever-growing and expansive Prospects 365 Family.
Now the first MLB Draft analyst in the history of Prospects 365, Mason’s value to our site and our vision is immediately evident with the introduction to The War Room.
Here are some of the finer points of The War Room. This is Mason’s real life draft board; it is not a First Year Player Draft board for fantasy purposes. When you scroll down in The War Room, you quickly realize the board consists of nearly 750 draft prospects. While we can’t see the draft boards of individual MLB organizations leading up to this summer’s draft, it’s feasible that The War Room includes every prospect who will be selected in 2020, regardless of the length of the draft. Of the 748 prospects included, 660 (!) have an individual draft report included on their row (more on that later). This is considered a live document, so Mason will continue to make tweaks and updates in real-time throughout the weeks and months leading up to the draft.
Most of the columns in The War Room are self-explanatory. The check-mark next to a prospect’s name and information means their draft report has been recently updated. The Age column is a prospect’s age as of June 10th, 2020. The FV column is a prospect’s Future Value according to Mason’s evaluation system (you can read about his evaluation system on the “Grading” tab of The War Room). Speaking of the “Grading” tab, there are other tabs in The War Room pertaining relevant information such as the 2020 Draft order (“Order”) and organization draft pools (“Pools”), which will be updated in the near future.
Lastly, the Profile column houses Mason’s reports for most prospects within The War Room. For mobile users, you can access the individual report for each prospect by clicking on the clipboards in the Profile column (you may have to click that cell twice depending on the mobile device you’re using), then clicking “Note”. On the desktop version, you can simply hover your mouse over the clipboard on each row and the report should appear. A lot of the reports are north of 100 words, and they dive into the evaluations and methodologies behind Mason’s rankings with solid information available at the touch of a finger or click of a mouse.
To our knowledge, this is the deepest free MLB Draft board published on the internet. While Mason’s evaluations are based on real-life values and projections, it will certainly help you research and prepare for the First Year Player Drafts in your dynasty leagues leading up to next offseason.
We may be a little biased, but we feel strongly that The War Room is an innovative tool for the MLB Draft and dynasty worlds. Along with continuing to update the draft board, Mason will write prospect features, positional ranks, mock drafts and much more leading up to this summer’s MLB Draft, all of which will be published on Prospects365.com.
We hope you enjoy The War Room, and make sure you’re following Mason on Twitter (@mason_mcrae) as he continues to tweet and publish valuable MLB Draft content moving forward.
Follow us on Twitter! @Prospects365
Featured image courtesy of site graphic designer Dorian Redden. Follow him on Twitter (@dRedden26) and Instagram (@d26gfx)