[Edit: Baseball America, courtesy of Derrick Goold's hard work, releases their top 10 list today. One of us will toss up another post this afternoon for discussion but don't miss the chat with Derrick at BA.]
Brett Wallace was a beast in the few months he played professional ball after the draft. He showed the ability to hit for average, hit for power, take a walk and virtually any other offensive skill you could want. The scouting reports for the draft were glowing and there’s been little to disprove them. There’s still precious little track record (200 ABs) to go on although that does little to diminish the notion that Brett Wallace may be the only other impact player in the system outside of Colby Rasmus.
How much of an emphasis should track record have? The FR Top 20 list had little deviation in where we thought Wallace deserved to land on the list but is that because of group think based on the data available to us? Lance Lynn poses another tricky example. He pitched very little before being shut down with some soreness but he managed to sneak into consideration. The fact that he’s a first rounder carries significant cache and is, in large part, why he was listed.
On balance, there’s no real problem with that logic. Those players are drafted in the first round because professional scouts and front office personnel saw these players and were impressed. Relying on that as an indicator of talent seems reasonable. It’s difficult, however, to break from the pack in that instance though. If a player is drafted 30th but, in reality, is an overdraft there is a difficulty in making that decision given the limited information.
To add to all this, the run scoring environments around college baseball are wildly different. I’m not just talking about the parks (although those are also a concern) but college baseball may have intrinsically different game theory than major league baseball. Without getting too mathy, linear weights are the nuts and bolts behind the premier (imo anyway) offensive statistic wOBA. Each event (a single, double, strikeout, etc.) is evaluating over many, many seasons to see, on average, how many runs that event produces. Those values in college baseball are likely to be different, potentially significantly so, that what they are in the MLB. With aluminum bats, the ability to make powerful contact is often easier so the value of a non-HR event may be somewhat diminished relative to the display of pure power in the college circuit.
For college players, there’s a level of statistical documentation that offers some hope of analysis. With regards to high school players that decreases and for many international signings, it is non-existent. How, then, do you compare an international signing like Robert de la Cruz who received a $1M+ signing bonus? It’s not entirely accurate to say that he’s the equivalent of a first rounder since he’s on the open market, which will cost more to sign than the stifling nature of the amatuer draft. These international players are often young and full of projection with little in the way of present skillsets.
These are conundrums that you have to resolve as you rank these players. I’m disinclined to look at international signing until there’s a track record within the Cardinals’ farm system. Draftees earn a much less harsh response but a healthy degree of skepticism in most cases.
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I am extremely guilty of the 1st round bias. I stayed high on Tyler Greene for a long time because of it. When everyone is telling you he’s a toolsy first rounder who may stay at SS it makes him hard to give up on. I still like his power/speed combo, but it took a long time for me to accept that he’ll probably never make consistent contact. He’ll probably never take a lot of walks.
Moneyball may be out of date, but one of the stories that really stuck with me was Miguel Tejada and trying to coach him to be more selective. You just couldn’t do it, because that’s not the player he was. I don’t think you can teach a guy how to hit for contact, either.
Tyler Greene is an interesting draftee to discuss. It seems contradictory but I think he was a good 1st round choice who probably will not have a real major league career. Actually many, many 1st round draft choices do not have major league careers so he’s not all that unusual. He is the kind of guy who will sink or swim based on whether he can alter his game enough, let the coaching sink in enough to make a career for himself. He has several things in his favor, real speed, some power and reportedly good defense (although the defensive prowess was not evident in his early error totals). All Tyler really has to do is to learn how to work a pitcher enough to get an occasional walk and reduce the percentage of outs he makes per at bat. He has shown absolutely no potential for doing this however. But how does a team evaluate this before a draft? The physical skills were there for this guy to be a real player but he couldn’t learn what he had to to make the final leap. I’d still take more chances on guys like him than on guys who show they can work a walk in college, look great in high A ball, but don’t have the physical skills to make the majors.