Tom S — I agree with fewgoodcards that Jackson is a bit slower Ryan.

cariocacardinal — Speed score is just a generic speed score. What I use is the formula <a href=http://www.projectprospect.com/article/2008/03/14/prospect-speed-analysisfrom this article. It’s a pretty generic speed score. The components are stolen bases attempted per time reaching first base, SB%, CS%, triples per at-bat, grounded into double plays per at-bat. Obviously it’s not a perfect number and things like GIDP can fluctuate given who’s hitting in front of you. It also operates on the assumption that you wouldn’t be attempting to steal unless you’re a good base runner, so it’s more of a baserunning stat then it is a “speed” stat.

That said, it doesn’t get a lot of weight in my rankings. I get the raw numbers and divide those by 2.5, and that gives me a range from, roughly, -5 through 25. When I use it in my “score,” it gets divided by 3, so it’s got little weight in my numbers as some guys — especially in the lesser conferences like the Mountain West — have outrageous raw speed scores.

as you mentioned tyler greene is a completely different animal. both jackson and ryan are very strong contact hitters, and contact is really the only thing keeping greene from being a star. he has great power and speed and is a future 20/20 man at short if he can make enough contact.

maybe it’s a little unfair, since brendan seems to be a moving target in terms of his level of big league talent, but there it is.

i would say tyler greene too as a good glove, question mark bat, but the skill sets on offense are so different — low power, high walk rate, with the converse for tyler.

Now, I don’t take those correlations as fact because he’s got selection bias in his favor; he’s using only the top 50 college bats drafted in each draft he looked at. I feel that won’t give an accurate sample. That said, I would guess that a players BB% and K% would correlate somewhere in the .5-.6 range. I would say higher, but there are college hitters that are routinely walked and most college websites don’t give Intentional BB’s and unintentional BB’s in separate categories. So, if a player has a good reputation and gets off to a scorching start in the first two weeks of the season, the next 2-3 series can over inflate his BB% through intentional walks or other teams just not pitching to him (Guys like Grant Green of USC and Pedro Alvarez have been noted as being continually pitched around in their junior years).

My plan is to add more numbers this summer and get back to somewhere like 2000 or 2001 — I feel that’d give me a data base of about 10,000 players (I get about 1000 players per year from all of the conferences I look at which are SEC, ACC, Big East, Big West, Big 12, Big Ten, Pac 10, Mountain West, Conference USA, and I just added the 2008 numbers for the Sun Belt and will also be adding in the WAC and the MAC for the 2009, 08, and 07 years as well), with which to run correlations and try to figure out why someone who appeared to be a great hitter in college flopped in the majors and/or never even made it, or vice-versa.

I also am probably going to be looking for some help in doing all of this as this gets kind of mind-numbing after a bit, so anyone willing to help in their spare time, drop me a line at mikerogers04@gmail.com.

2009 tiers:

149.85 Elite
128.01 Very good
106.16 Good
84.32 Average
62.48 Below-Average
40.63 Bad
18.79 Terrible

For 2008 or earlier, the tiers are:

150.08 Elite
124.69 Very Good
99.31 Good/above-average
73.93 Average
48.55 Below-Average
23.16 Bad
-2.22 Terrible

These scores are different for a couple of reasons: My 2008 and 2009 numbers incorporate Runs Above Average into the score; so I have about 20 hitters above the 150 plateau (including Conley’s 2008). The other reason is that my 2008 and 2009 numbers don’t seclude bad hitters. I’m using every player in each of the conferences I’ve looked at that accumulate more then 75 plate appearances. Like I said, my 2009 numbers are solely guys that I had read about/found to be interesting statistically. So generally, the 2009 numbers are just the “good” college players and not some of the kids with 100 PA’s and posting wOBA’s in the 0.200′s.