Luken Baker is the best performing player in AAA this season and it's not particularly close.

In fact, there's only one player (Jonathan Aranda) in the same stratosphere as him by fangraph's weighted runs above average (wRAA):

This got me wondering, does great AAA performance actually mean anything? Figure I'd share the results by listing the league leaders in wRAA for the past 10 seasons, as well as their wRC+ in parentheses. Note that I filtered by >300 PA, and if they led wRC+ as well that year their name is in bold.

2012: Adam Eaton, 47.1 (163). Mauro Gomez beat him by one point in wRC+.

2013: Chris Colabello, 42.2 (196).

2014: Joc Pederson, 46.0 (164). Stephen Souza jr (180) led wRC+.

2015: Matt Hague, 38.5 (161). Defensive legend Jose Martinez put up a second-place 37.9 wRAA with a league-leading 177 wRC+ in the royals system this year.

2016: Mitch Haniger, 33.5 (185).

2017: Christian Walker, 36.3 (147). Garrett Cooper (167) led wRC+.

2018: Jabari Blash, 39.9 (188).

2019: Ty France, 49.9 (196).

2021: Jose Marmojelos, 34.5 (166). Taylor Motter (sigh) beat him in wRC+ by 1 point.

2022: Matt Davidson, 31.6 (156).

So... there's some good names on this list. there's also some bad ones. Adam Eaton, Joc Pederson, Mitch Haniger, Christian Walker, and Ty France have all had good (even great!) years before. The other 5 that once led wRAA, well, not so much. With that being said, most of the guys who weren't great have still had at least average offensive production by OPS+, it's just their defense bringing them down. Shoutout Jose Martinez.

There's a lot more analysis that could be done here, but I'm happy leaving it at that. if there's a 50/50 shot of Baker being a legit MLB producer as my list somewhat implies, well, that's a lot better than most prospect odds. Between him and Burly, I'm pretty confident saying that there's gonna be at least one good first baseman on this team even after goldy's gone.

I'd say have a good rest of your weekend, but it's sunday night, so... have a good week i guess!