Future Redbirds

I was tempted to run the pitcher’s numbers for Palm Beach but I wasn’t pleased by the quantity of the data for the previous year so I decided against it. Too few innings against questionable opposition quality in the low minors means it wasn’t worth it. At the end of this season, I plan on running the charts for Quad Cities on up to Memphis.

So much as I did with the pitchers, I wanted to do some kind of visual classification with the hitters. I didn’t have an easy template to work from (aka I haven’t seen this done elsewhere) so I tried to spend some time thinking about what I actually would want to graph. The easiest category was isolated power. Major league hitters need to hit for power in most cases. They don’t all need to hit .200+ but if you’re south of .150 then power really isn’t going to get you to the majors. Since we expect ISO to drop as hitters move up the ladder, it’s nice to see at least a .200 gap so that we can feel reasonably comfortable that a prospect could maintain some power at the major league level.

Looking at firstinning.com, there are 30 players with a ISO < .130. Of those 30, only Mark Loretta has a wOBA over .320. (Check firstinning.com’s glossary for an explanation of wOBA. Short version is that .340 is average while .400 is very good.) Loretta is hitting for a crazy .326 AVG and walking enough to have his OBP over .400 — but he’s the outlier. Every other player on that list is a below average player. Of the top 30 players in the NL in ISO, 25 are considered above average and 4 are considered very good. So just eyeballing things tells us that ISO is a relatively good indicator of production. You’ll see it as the y-axis on the graph.

With the pitchers we looked at control of the strike zone. I was hoping that I could do something similiar for hitters but I wasn’t pleased with the outcome. Using a ratio of K:BB was dissatisfying to me because it overrated guys who neither struck out or walked and underrated guys who may have struck out and walked a ton (think Adam Dunn, Ryan Howard). So I went with OBP. The downside is that it’s not differentiated between contact hitters and guys who take walks. I prefer the latter but for prospects we’ll say that if you OBP is over .350, that’s a good thing. You’ll see this as the x-axis on the graph.

The last thing I did was flag some players based on strikeouts. I’m not totally consistent in my view of strikeouts — in a pitcher, I love to see strikeouts while for a batter I really only look for extremes. If a player strikes out a ton but gets on base, I’m fine with that. So that being said, if a player is striking out more than 25% of the time, I’m concerned. On the opposite side, if a player is striking out less than 10% of the time, I’m pleased. The overal effect that this has on how I view prospect isn’t huge but I’ve incoporated it anyway. If a player’s marker is red they strike out more than 25%; if it is green, less than 10%. Everyone else falls somewhere in between and has a black marker. I caculated this based on ABs + BBs so it isn’t quite plate appearances and slightly skews things upwards. . . o well. (You’ll also see each player with their age next to them.)

I’m pretty pleased with the results of how this panned out although there isn’t as much OBP separation as I’d like to see between players. Still, it’s not bad.

Click on the thumbnail and pick the larger size to see the graph in all it’s glory.

Thoughts:

• Rick Ankiel has serious power. Rick Ankiel has serious OBP problems.
• Is Edgar Gonzalez’s defense that bad? He posted a .400 OBP with good power. No one was willing to try him out on a major league bench?
• Ludwick has power but strikes out too much. I recall Christina Kharl in her BP transactions analysis has always been relatively positive on Ludwick. I think Ludwick makes a nice bench player but I don’t think he’ll ever be more than that. The fact that he can play a passable CF makes Juan Encarnacion a largely redundant part. Ludwick has a .249 EqA to Juan’s .256. Let’s not kid ourselves about how totally mediocre Juan is with a bat. If the Cardinals can get someone to bite on his veteran-ness and the rest of his contract, they should even if they get nothing in return. Ludwick can take his spot and I doubt it would be a difference of more than 1 win over the rest of the season even when accounting for defense.
• Rico Washington is a nice organizational player and someone it doesn’t hurt to have stashed away in AAA. He’s out for the season and is too old to be a prospect but I didn’t realize that he’s not a bad AAA player.
• Jarrett Hoffpauir is the only player on the Memphis roster that makes good contact. His ISO was terrible last year and he wasn’t hitting for average. We’ll have to see what his numbers look like at the end of the year.
• Our AAA catchers are bad.
• Skip Schumaker is not a major league hitter.
• Stavinoha’s placement shows his borderline performance while Mather’s makes me wonder if he can sustain his AA production this year at the next level.

Questions/comments about the methodology or specific players are welcome. If you want the raw data behind the graph, let me know.