Lot’s of articles that I want to direct you attention to before the quick recap of the Springfield game.
First off, Erik was interviewed over at Cardinals Clubhouse. Head over there to read about this site’s esteemed founder and blogger.
I recommended this in the morning but for those of you who missed it, First Inning creator Chris Constancio has an article about Minor League Equivalents (MLEs) at The Hardball Times. Chris does great work at First Inning and I’m excited to see what additions are made to the site next season (he’s hinted at more advanced metrics for base-running and hitting, if I recall correctly). There’s a discussion of Constancio’s article and MLEs in general over at The BOOK blog.
Kevin Goldstein totally fooled me on his picks for “Two Steps Back”. He chooses Daryl Jones and gives a dishonorable mention to Jon Jay and Blake Hawksworth. Jones has been nothing short of abysmal this year and for someone who is so physically gifted, it’s mildly surprising. He’s one of those high-ceiling high school athletes that sometimes just don’t work out. I’ve always been a little higher on Jay than was reasonable. Goldstein rated his ceiling as a fourth-outfielder given the lack of power and the inability to play center. I still think that he might have the plate discipline and corner-defense to be a valuable if atypical everyday RF. And lastly Hawksworth’s poor peripherals another year removed from surgery might lead us to believe that a) the velocity isn’t going to comeback and b) he’s probably not going to have a career in the majors as a starter. In Goldstein’s words:
One of the best athletes in the system, outfielder Daryl Jones proved to not be ready for a full-season league, as he was unable to get his batting average permanently above .200 until mid-July, and finished at .217/.304/.296 for Low-A Quad Cities.
Almost as Disappointing: After hitting .342 in his pro debut, outfielder John Jay suffered through an injury-plagued season, and when he was healthy, his lack of secondary skills caught up with him, as evidenced by a .265/.328/.387 line spread across three levels. Blake Hawksworth’s impressive rebound campaign last year is now a thing of the past after a 5.28 ERA in Triple-A in a year made worse by a plummeting strikeout rate.
My predictions were Tyler Greene who had a mediocre season before suffering a knee injury and Blake King who never really got it together and was then demoted. I know I’ve said this in the past but a subscription to BP is worth it for the Goldstein articles and access to the PECOTA numbers.
<erik butting in>-caught this over at BA, found it surprising considering the good reports we heard about Bryan Anderson’s arm last year. His % of caught stealing was only .268, .0567 below the league average. His OPS is only .015 points better then what Yadi has at the big league level, and he allowed 15 passed balls. Perhaps we’ve gotten too excited about him. </erik butting out>
- Colby Rasmus went 1-for-1 and drew three walks.
- Juan Lucena went 3-for-4.
- Cory Rauschenberger went 2-for-2 with a pair of doubles at the plate. He also pitched a very good game throwing 6.2 inning allowing 5 hit, 3BB and 6 K for just 1 ER.
- Kyle McClellan and Luke Gregerson closed out the game. Gregerson struggled a bit in the 9th allowing a run before retiring the 27th man.
Filed under: Daily Farm Reports
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Nice game tonight from the S-Cards. Hopefully they can keep this up and make the ML team not so depressing. Not sure if this has been linked yet but I saw a good article abound groundballers over at Project Prospect. Good stuff. Comparison #3 is “Brandon Webb and Jaime Garcia.” *drool*
dang, sorry for the double post, but that link doesn’t work. here’s the url: http://www.projectprospect.com/extreme-ground-ball-pitching-p/
Goldstein misses the fact that Jay put up those numbers playing injured most of the year — he’ll bounce back just fine next season, imho. i do agree that Greene should have made that list. I’d also almost add Marti, as I really though he’d earn a September call-up.
Re: caught stealing, i find it amazing that CS% is higher in the minors- I always thought it was the other way around. Regardless, Anderson is just 5% below league average- that’s not such a big deal in my book. I would like to point out the awesomeness that is Nicholas Derba- apparently he’s the best defensive catcher in milb by this metric, 21.1% above average(!) ideally Anderson will get advertised as some kind of hitting prodigy, we’ll trade him for pitching, and then Derba can take over for Yadi in 2-3 years…
Anderson’s power. Any word on what happened to Anderson’s power this year? While he has more home runs this year (6 versus 3 last year) his slugging has dropped 29 points. He has half the doubles he had last year so it makes me wonder why the drop off? He also seems either more impatient at the plate since he has taken less walks and struck out more often then last year which has accounted for 18 of the 22 points that dropped off his OBP this season. Overall his OPS dropped 56 points to .738.
At the same time Yadi has raised his average 63 points, his OBP by 75 points and his SLG by 57 points (total of 132 point raise in his OPS). This is a career year for Yadi at the plate and a normal one defensively.
Will either maintain their current course? Not sure but it is interesting that our ML catcher is improving while our minor league one is not.
Just wanted to say thanks to Erik for the interview. We appreciate him giving us some of his time!
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Jones as a “two-steps back” guy seems strange since he hadn´t taken any forward steps yet. Hawks is an acceptable candidate but I would have liked Edwards a lot more. I think injury guys such as Greene and Jay shouldn´t be evaluated until after they try to comeback from injury.
I assume Lambert wasn´t on the list because he took 3-4 steps back.
Jay wasn’t doing that terrible. At the beginning of the year he was struggling like rasmus was and just before he got hurt he was starting to hit more. Once he came back from injury there was no place for him in springfield and they left him in palm beach until he was hurt again.
This might be more an excuse rather than reason with Anderson and base runners, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see his caught stealing fall considerably whenever Hoffpauir Left springfield. Rowlet made so many miscues and realistically shouldn’t be playing at second base.
However, Anderson looked like a different player from the first halve of the season to the second. His focus certainly declined as the season wore on.