Future Redbirds

Apologies for not being around much lately, school & work & all that jazz. I’m starting up another series that will canvas our minor league pitchers. I can’t claim original credit for this idea, unfortunately. A while back in Februrary, Rich Lederer of Baseball Analysts went about classifying all the pitchers in the minors. Here’s a link to his AAA article with links to all the previous ones as well. His study was much more exahustive obviously and I’m assuming he knows somone who pulled a database query from somewhere because Lord knows compiling that data by hand would be a pain in the @$$. It’s a good reference to look at the larger scope of the league and then see where some of our pitchers fall.

In any event, the concept is simple. Let’s look at our pitching corps on a plot that shows their groundball ratio and their K:BB ratio. You’ll notice that Rich used GB% and K%. I’m using the GB ratio because I can grab cumulatives for 2006 easily from MILB.com. I don’t like the idea of just looking at K rate because Chris Lambert looks too good using that rate. K:BB is a better measure of the pitcher’s overall ability to command the strike zone.

Now caveats. I’ve got a ton. First of all, I make no effort to distinguish between relief and starting apperances. For pitchers that made bad spot starts or were better in relief, it’s going to suppress their numbers. Too bad. We know these prospects well enough to spot any major problems in the graph. The next caveat is that some of these pitchers spanned multiple levels. Again, o well. I’m lazy and separating these out on really minute classifications isn’t my goal here. I want to give you a rough and tumble look at the pitchers. The actual data points are below.

So is this a 100% perfect indicator of talent? No, we wouldn’t have TINSTAAPP if it was and I wouldn’t be writing this on a blog; I’d be taking my proprietary data and making gazillions of dollars. With that in mind, let’s take a look at the graph and see what the numbers show us. It’s all after the jump. I wanted to have the chart on the site and make it readable so it’s quite large. . . which causes it to mess with the sidebars. After the jump, you have to scroll down to the bottom of the sidebars. Sorry about my meager formatting skills (if anyone has any helpful HTML to fix the image problem to get it to stop messing with the sidebars, it would be appreciated. shoot me an e-mail azruavatar.futureredbirds(at)gmaildotcom).  WordPress has it’s limitations.  I’ve just gone with the thumbnail as the larger chart was driving me crazy.  Click on the thumbnail, then all sizes and you can view the larger chart via flickr.  Grrrr, wordpress, grrrr.  If anyone knows some slick HTML to remedy/prevent this problem, drop me a line.

So the pitchers farther to the right, show the best control and the pitchers farther up show the most groundball tendencies. Remember that control does not mean the most strikeouts. We’re looking at their overall control of the strikezone so walks are a bad thing. The pitchers further to the right may not have the most K’s by counting.

• Mike Sillman looks like a hell of a prospect on this graph. Nice groundball tendencies and good control of the strikezone. I’m still a little down on his projectability because he’s a lot of deception rather than pure stuff. Still, he looks like quite the reliever here.
• Troy Cate has some nice strikeout rates. He’s a lefty to boot although he doesn’t have a real platoon split. I’m a fan of Cate the reliever — not Cate the starter. He should be a servicable middle reliever in the bigs.
• Hugo Castellanos was pretty good last year. He’s 28 and has been a journeyman for quite sometime so don’t expect much out of him but I wonder why he hasn’t found his way into the back of some bullpen. Calling Wayne Krivisky — interested in a mediocre middle reliever?
• Chris Narveson is someone I like even though he’s not very good.
• The troika of Worrell, Dove and Falkenborg all settle nicely with good control and groundball tendencies. Dove’s got the stuff, Worrell’s got the deception and Falkenborg’s … well, he’s old. Given that Falkenborg’s had several unexceptional tries at the back end of the Cardinals pen, I think he’s smart enough to get AAA guys out but lacks the stuff for the bigs.
• The Memphis Redbirds also have a lot of garbage sitting on their roster. It’s all clustered right around. . .Chris Lambert. How far he has fallen!

I, for one, really like seeing these graphs. They’re very intuitive to me, which I appreciate. I’ll run the numbers for Springfield by Friday.

For your reference, here is the data table.