Archive for January, 2009

First off, don’t miss the voting below as well as the Tyler Henley Q&A (a must read).

KLaw came out with his top 100 today.  The Cardinals come in with Rasmus (12), Wallace (19), Jones (50) and Perez (80).  Feel free to discuss.

As many of you know, Tyler Henley was an 8th round pick out of Rice in the 2007 draft. Rice players can be tough signs, but Henley signed for an above slot bonus of $150K and has since made his way onto the FR radar in a major way, ranking as our #16 prospect. For the first half of last season at Palm Beach, Henley hit .313/.370/.531 but broke a finger and landed on the disabled list. When he came off the DL he had a couple of slow months, but he finished the season with a strong .299/.372/.458 line for the month of August.

We like him around these parts for his all around solid skill set as a CF, and for his hard-nosed style of play. Henley was nice enough to take some time to answer some of my questions over email.

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Yay or Nay?  Prospects are going to flame out but we rank them anyway.  The following is all about whether they’ll have the ability to stick in the majors.  How many of the FR top 20 do we think will have real baseball careers?  We’ll use some arbitrary definitions of 800 games for a position player (~5years), 1000 IP for a starter, 300 IP for a reliever.  Our answers follow.

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I meant to have this up earlier, Polldaddy was playing games with me.

This is where things got tricky for me. After the first four, there are a lot of pluses and minuses for each prospect, and it feels like you can shake the names up, spill them out and leave them where they land and probably be OK.

#4 was a much closer race, with Jones winning by a fairly comfortable margin with Anderson and Motte splitting the votes for 2nd.

1. Rasmus
2. Wallace
3. Perez
4. Jones

Chris Perez won the last one in a landslide. If I knew the vote was going to be that lopsided, I would’ve started here. Oh, well.

Vote for # 4 now.

1. Colby
2. Wallace
3. Perez

If you’re making a prospect list now, you might be too late.

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Alright. We’ve have officially ranked out 2009 prospects. For that matter, so has John Sickels, Kevin Goldstein and Baseball America. It is now you, the Future Redbirds reader’s turn. I figured the first two were no-brainers. Now comes the  tricky part – who’s next? This is a deep class of prospects this year, and you can make a lot of arguments after the top two. The majority rules this time, as we open up the voting now.

1. Colby
2. Wallace

I’m pretty sure this is not what Sky never intended this when he created this spreadsheet, and I’m warning you ahead a time to not make this into something I haven’t said, but if you go over to tab 5 you’ll see the Peak Translations tab for current farmhands only.

First of all, I should probably remind you what Peak Translations are. According to Clay Davenport, they are:

Applies a typical aging pattern to the regular translation, to try and assess how good the player will be at his peak. Peak generally means somewhere around age 27; however, since the components of offense don’t age at the same rates (speed decays earlier than power, for instance), and since players don’t have the same mix of those components, the actual peak age has some variability, as early as 25 for pure speedsters and as late as 30 for sluggers. The adjustments for pitchers are considerably more sketchy; the very idea of a typical aging curve relies on predictable, steady changes in performance, while pitchers tendencies are dominated by essentially unpredictable point impacts, most commonly either injuries or developing a new pitch. All in all, though, the peak translation is an important tool for me to assess prospect status.

I probably left out some of your favorite pet prospects in favor of mine, but for the most part I tried to stick with those who either have been in Baseball America’s Top 30, Sickels Top 20, KG’s Top 11 or our own rankings at one point.  Say it’s 2011 and this somehow, someway manages to be THE team and all these players peak according to their translations from this past season at the same time, it’s a 91 win team. I’d say the odds of something like that happening are like .0000001%, but it an interesting thought.

I think the more interesting part of this exercise is how many wins above replacement each player translates to be based on their stats from last season. You can get an visual picture of what AZ was talking about in his recent “Positional Scarcity” column and why I’m higher than some on both Anderson and Kozma, despite their overall lack of “wow” factor.

Now for some explanation, clarification and otherwise random thoughts:

• For the defense I used for the most part their FRAA on the Peak Translation page, other times I just guessed or I may have docked a run or two. In Freese’s case, I left his rather enthusiastic FRAA alone. You can dock or add as many runs to a player in your mind to get a clearer idea of his WAR.
• For baserunning, I honestly just guesstimated with the scouting reports in mind.
• For pitchers, I used ERALF, which is luck-free ERA.  Clay Davenport says it is essentially the same as DIPS. It is quite unfriendly to Jess Todd.
• I used the peak translation for where the player had the lion share of his plate appearances/innings pitched.
• No 2008 draftees other than Wallace, and with him I honestly just fudged on his numbers. No players are included that didn’t play on a full season club, either, obviously.
• I think in the grand scheme of things,  Colby and Jones’ slugging % will swap.
• Freese fans will get happy.  Craig fans, too.
• The Daryl Jones controversy rages on. Jones believers will love it, pessimists will decry there’s no way he’s a 5 WAR player even at his peak. The truth lies somewhere in the middle, I presume.
• Yes, I know that Jay doesn’t have the arm to handle right field. Neither does Jones. Colby does, but he will not budge. The picture is what the player’s value is at their peak as a corner OF. Don’t worry about who is where, the positional adjustment for LF/RF is the same.
• TINSTAAFAITCS. That’s There Is No Such Thing As A Future Ace In The Cardinal System. Jaime Garcia might be a decent #2 on a Cardinal team, however.
• Hill, Cruz and Descalso may be flying under the radar.
• Jason Motte looks high in his team mugshot.
• I like bullet points.

You can say peak translations are flawed because they only take into account one season, and that’s right. I’m thinking when PECOTA comes out we could run through a similar exercise and see what we come up with. But for now it gives you something to visualize when it comes to a players’ potential worth in while he is in his peak, and if you disagree, I’m pretty sure you can just cut and paste and put it into Edit Grid and play around with it to suite your own intuition.

Hopefully the weather does warm up a little bit in St. Louis this weekend.  For those of you not in the area, it was 1 degree F on my way into work this morning with a wind chill of -20.  Needless to say I showed up more acerbic than usual.

This weekend is the Cardinals annual Winter Warm Up.  All the proceeds go to the Cardinals’ foundation Cards Care.  We talk about prospects here and players at VEB but when was the last time that we really mentioned how tremendous their support of the community is?  Sadly, I can’t remember, but the team and players do an incredible amount of charity work that they deserve to be lauded for.

I’ve not been to the Winter Warm Up before but I’m strongly considering it this weekend.  Winter Warm Up pass — $40.  Colby Autograph — $30.   Daryl Jones Autograph — FREE! There’s a presentation on Sunday about merging stats and scouts, which I hope and believe the organization is trying to do more and more, that sounds intriging.  Another presentation on Monday that might be more up our alley here with Jeff Luhnow and John Vuch discussing the minor leagues.

There’s something for everyone here and if you’re looking for something to do this weekend, Jan. 17-19, the Winter Warm-Up should be a lot of fun and you’ll be supporting kids in need at the same time.  If you’ve been before, let everyone know what you thought and any tips you have for getting the most out of the event.

1. Colby Rasmus, of
2. Brett Wallace, 3b
3. Chris Perez, rhp
4. Jess Todd, rhp
5. Bryan Anderson, c
6. Clayton Mortensen, rhp
7. Daryl Jones, of
8. Jason Motte, rhp
9. David Freese, 3b
10. Pete Kozma, ss

Link

The top of the list remains the same for almost everyone, after that it seems everyone diverts in any number of different directions. I can personally attest that this year’s crop is a squirrely one to rank, as the depth of the system has so much improved and there are a lot of prospects with different controversies that are hard to weigh out.

Derrick Goold will be chatting with BA subscribers @ 1:30, don’t miss it if you can help it.