This past weekend, the Cardinals decided to promote top prospect Brett Wallace from AA to AAA in his first full season of pro ball. The lefty hitting third baseman has responded well in Memphis going 8-for-17 thus far. With David Freese on the DL due to a lingering foot injury, the Cardinals had the opportunity to inch Wallace closer to the big leagues in much the same way they did with 2007 supplemental round pick Clayton Mortensen. Was this the right decision or are the Cardinals running the risk of stunting Wallace’s development by moving him too far too fast?

Let’s set a pair of ground rules for the conversation first. 1) Jeff Luhnow and the decision makers have access to knowledge and opinions that we don’t. Plain and simple; there are coaches and scouts sending in evaluations on where a player is at and that carries weight independent of statistics. If the numbers indicate that this was the wrong decision that still doesn’t mean it was the wrong decision. 2) Wallace’s defense is outside the purview of what I can evaluate. There’s no statistics, it’s too subjective and fielding at3rd base in Memphis rather than Springfield strikes me as a trivial discrepancy. Balls hit to his left and right are going to make it to the outfield regardless of whether it’s a AA or AAA hitter.

Let’s start with some background snippets coming into this year. KLaw to the forefront:

Wallace was the best pure hitter in this year’s draft, but fell to the Cardinals due to questions about his ultimate position. Still, his bat is so special that if he can improve to just a win below average at third, he’ll be a star. He makes hitting look easy — he hits lefties (.387/.479/.484 in 62 at bats last year) and righties, all pitches, all areas of the zone, whatever’s thrown at him — and has pull power to right and doubles power the other way.

Kevin Goldstein:

Wallace is an offensive machine. He has a big-league approach, outstanding hand/eye coordination, and above-average power.

He’ll be a number-three hitter who’s among the league leaders in batting average and on-base percentage, with 20-25 home runs annually.

The consensus at draft time was that Brett Wallace was one of, if not the best hitter coming out of college. No one was quite sure where he would play defensively but the bat was eye-popping. He did little to disappoint in 2008. Starting at Quad Cities, he put up a .327/.418/.490 line with 5 homeruns. He’d be called up to Springfield to augment the offense for a playoff push and hit another 3 homeruns giving him 8 in about 200 ABs. Projections have him hitting for average, hitting for power and getting on base at a 40% type clip.

It’s important to recognize that these projections haven’t appreciably changed after a month and 150 PAs this season. I’m not here to make the case that Wallace is going to be a slow slap hitter who will never make the majors. That said, I strongly question whether the callup was warranted.

Wallace was hitting an inordinate amount of groundballs this season (53%). With his stellar line drive rate (28%) that’s not very many balls in the air (19%). There’s a lot of variation and subjectivity on the part of whomever is logging the game to differentiate between batted ball types. The two main baseball stat providers (BIS & STATS) can come up with datasets that significantly impact defensive metric calculations. (UZR on Fangraphs is tabulated using BIS and while it correlates well with UZR based on STATS data, it isn’t exact.) That said, Colby Rasmus typically hit fewer than 40% of his batted balls as grounders. The lack of flyballs is not necessarily a bad thing but it does go a certain ways toward explaining why Wallace may not be teeing off on minor league pitchers on a more regular basis.

In May, Wallace had 54 PAs at Springfield he was hitting more line drives (34%) but without a significant jump in his rate stats. Some of this is probably bad luck but with an ISO of .067 some of may have been a slightly struggling hitter as well. His walk rate had dropped to 7% and the K:BB ratio was at 3:1. Too often strikeouts are looked at as the demise of minor league power hitters but for someone who was billed as a high average hitter with great plate discipline, May wasn’t off to a resounding start for Wallace.

All told, Wallace hit .281/.391/.438 in Springfield this year good for a .829 OPS. If you’re a bad defender, that’s not good enough. If he was in the majors putting up those numbers, he’d be around +3 wins with the bat. Add in replacement level, take off 1.5 wins for the glove and you’ve got someone who is around +3.5 wins. That’s not a bad player but it’s not an all star either. Wallace isn’t putting up those numbers in St. Louis, he’s doing it in Springfield. You’d hope for more out of your 13th overall pick billed as a near major league ready bat. Again, he still projects as a great player but he wasn’t doing any world-beating in AA.

If that was my only squabble, Wallace hitting good but not great, I’d expect to be derided as overly cautious or having something against Wallace. Fortunately for me, there’s another reason that coincides so nicely with Wallace’ (relatively) tepid hitting: Allen Craig. Craig was a third baseman who, according to CHONE was around average as a defender. He hit well at Palm Beach in 2007 (.900) and better than Wallace last year in Springfield (.868). But if Wallace has been good but not blindingly brilliant, Allen Craig has been a disappointment this year.

Through ~150 PAs, he’s got an OPS of .650. Needless to say that’s bad. It seems to me like we’ve had several quality hitters stall in AAA this year (Jay, Anderson, Craig, Mather, etc) and last year Rasmus famously stalled there as well. I can’t call this a trend but I’m beginning to question the effectiveness of the Memphis coaching staff. The excuse of having subpar talent no longer applies and it’s time to coach these kids into production, but I digress. The point is that Memphis already had a more an adequate backup for 3B playing LF before David Freese hit the DL.

Why the Cardinals chose to promote Wallace seems more perplexing given their insistance that Wallace isn’t going to be in the majors this year. Craig isn’t as bad as he’s looked this year nor is Wallace. But why are the Cardinals in such a hurry to get Wallace to AAA when they have a log jam of outfielders approaching critical mass with the return of Ludwick and Ankiel. Once their subs (Shane Robinson & Nick Stavinfection) are sent back to AAA, where does that leave the gaggle of AAA outfielders? Why further bollix the roster at Memphis with Wallace when you could help reduce the strain by moving Craig to 3B.

The decision to promote Wallace isn’t one that can be blindly labeled as a poor decision. It’s not one that seems an obvious decision either. The benefit of the doubt should go to Luhnow with the additional information at his fingertips but it’s entirely legitimate to question the reasoning behind the promotion and the aggresive nature of the promotion as well. Prove me wrong, Brett Wallace, prove me wrong.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.