Let’s cover the first retrospectively questionable decisions made in the 2005 draft: Mark McCormick over Jed Lowrie.
In both instances, we’ve got the Cardinals taking a questionable arm over a position prospect. Here’s the 2005 pre-draft scouting report on Mark McCormick from Baseball America:
McCormick showed a first-round arm in high school, when his fastball rarely dipped below 92 mph and reached as high as 98. But he slipped to the 11th round in 2002 because he was primarily a one-pitch pitcher and showed a lack of composure on and off the diamond. The reputation followed him throughout his first two years at Baylor, but he has made strides as a junior. McCormick has the most electric arm in Texas, still pitching at 92-95 mph and often touching 96-98. He peaked at 101 mph last summer in the Cape Cod League all-star game. McCormick got hit hard early this spring before he started keeping his fastball down in the strike zone. His curveball is much improved now that he trusts it and uses it more often, and while it can be inconsistent it also can be an out pitch. He has done a better job of throwing strikes and has made every start after missing one due to a suspension and six with shoulder stiffness in 2004. McCormick does not come without questions, however. Because his command can be sporadic, he doesn’t always dominate. Scouts still worry about his makeup and his ability to handle pressure. His adviser, Scott Boras, is always an issue for teams, though he’s considered one of the more signable players in Boras’ stable. In spite of the concerns, McCormick should go off the board in the second half of the first round.
Things fell in to place just like BA predicted with the Cardinals taking McCormick using the 43rd overall pick in the first supplemental round. McCormick would battle injuries throughout his 4 years in the Cardinals system but he was undone mostly by his command. It’s an intriguing scouting report and it’s easy to see why the Cardinals were interested.
Jed Lowrie’s was, to my eyes, a little more pessimistic of a brief:
After going undrafted out of an Oregon high school in 2002, Lowrie emerged as a potential first-round pick a year ago when he won the Pacific-10 Conference triple crown with a .399 average and 17 homers, and tied for the lead with 68 RBIs. But he raised a red flag with scouts during the summer when he hit a team-low .230 with only one homer using a wood bat for Team USA. The previous summer in the Alaska League, also using wood, he hit .224. He hasn’t performed well this spring, either, as he was hitting .328 with 12 homers most of which came in a two-week spurt in February. In fairness, Lowrie has been pitched around in a depleted Stanford lineup and has gotten few good pitches to hit, making him impatient. Though he stays balanced throughout his swing and takes a big cut for his size, Lowrie has an unorthodox approach at the plate. He keeps his hands low and has a high leg kick. A switch-hitter, he is a much better hitter from the left side. He is also a solid defender with good footwork and enough arm strength to fill in at shortstop in a pinch. Scouts have compared Lowrie to current big league second basemen Chase Utley and Adam Kennedy, who were both first-round picks from California colleges, but they say Lowrie is a better defender than both.
There’s a couple of things that stand out to me. First of all, the negative report of Lowrie with a wood bat for Team USA. The Cardinals are avid followers of the Cape Cod league because it gives them a chance to see hitters with wooden bats. They have made many a draft based on a great summer performance coupled with mediocre college hitting. The second is the rather questionable defensive report that implies he’d be better at second. Teams don’t often draft players at 2B but rather use it as a fall back position. The good but not great defense likely played a role.
The other aspect of the 2005 draft with Lowrie is that the Cardinals selected Tyler Greene, a true shortstop, with the 30th overall pick. His report:
The latest Georgia Tech shortstop to wear No. 5, Greene falls somewhere between Nomar Garciaparra and Victor Menocal, now the Yellow Jackets first-base coach. Greene has had a roller-coaster college career, struggling defensively as a freshman (31 errors) but surprising with the bat. As a sophomore, he made just 11 errors but hit .273. In the last two summers, Greene showed aptitude with wood, hitting a team-best .431 with four homers for Team USA in 2003, then batting .296 in 2004 in the Cape Cod League, where he was the No. 2 prospect. Greene’s junior season was delayed by an offseason broken jaw. When he came back, he showed scouts the tools to be drafted again in the second-round range, as he was out of high school. Green is a 60 runner (some say 70 under way) on the 20-80 scouting scale, with good instincts on the basepaths and elsewhere. A plus arm and good range make him at least an average defender at short. The question is offense. His hands are just OK both at the plate and in the field. Greene’s swing has evolved to a metal-bat, inside-out style that doesn’t incorporate his hands, short-circuiting his power and leaving him with several holes. His aptitude with wood, however, reminds scouts of Cubs prospect Matt Murton, who also hit better in summers on the Cape than with Georgia Tech.
An erratic player, Greene would likely have widely varying scouting reports. He was always a tools bet. The Cardinals thought they could refine his fundamentals and turn him into something more productive. With his selection 30th overall, they chose a power arm later in the round over Jed Lowrie.
I don’t see anything that jumps out at me from the scouting reports. Indeed, I think we’d be thrilled to see the Cardinals draft someone like Greene today. The holes in his swing are still true unfortunately and the inability to make consistent contact will always hold him back. Power isn’t as much of an issue as it’s portrayed but I think, even with hindsight, this was a solid pick.
The problem, if there was one, would likely be in betting on a flawed pitcher over a flawed position player. That’s still tenuous ground to make criticisms on and since I wasn’t following the draft as closely as I do now, I’ll leave it at that.
Tomorrow, we look at Josh Wilson and Yunel Escobar.
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If McCormick’s shoulder had held up, he could have turned into a fine ML pitcher. Other teams were more risk averse about McCormick, so he fell about 20 picks from earlier forecasts. The Cards like to bargain shop, so gambled on his shoulder health. They lost.
I can’t remeber. Was 2005 the year that Lunhow and Jocketty banged heads over the draft, or was that 2006?
Part of the this could stem from the cards not having clear lines of athority/consistant draft plans those years.
I don’t find the McCormick/Lowrie comparison as interesting as the Greene/Lowrie one, seeing that the one is an apples-and-oranges thing and the other is not. Going with a high-risk, high-reward power arm for a late-first-round selection instead of a marginal-looking middle infielder seems entirely reasonable, given that they’d already drafted a marginal-looking middle infielder earlier in the round. The question is, knowing what they knew then, did they draft the RIGHT marginal-looking middle infielder? On the basis of the BA scouting reports, it would seem difficult to assert that they did not — knowing what they knew then. Lowrie’s brief is “a little more pessimistic” to my eyes too, AZ.
So moving away from the draft to what followed, was there a screwup in the farm system’s development of T-Greene that the Red Sox somehow managed to get right with Lowrie? Given that very few other middle infielders, or for that matter position players in general, that the team has drafted have developed into acceptable hitters, that might be the more interesting question to pursue.
I don’t think it was development so much as not knowing as much then as they do now about translating college stats to pro performance. Greene had an obscenely high K rate in college — IIRC, it was in the 25% range. We now know that hitters who K in more than 20% of PAs in college will almost certainly have unacceptable rates in the pros.
I agree that Greene was a reasonable choice and his pick over Lowrie is the kind of high risk/high ceiling choice that many of us would like to see more of. I think Gruntosaurus is right that there may also be issues with how we’re developing our young position players. The front office may have some concerns about that too since they shook up the system a little recently.
AZ has an interesting comment about the Cards following the Cape Cod league closely. I suspect they must also scout the Alaska League, given that they were in on a few players from there in the seasons I started attending games (Canham, Daley, others too whose names I forget). This would have been about the time Lowrie was there, and a poor performance there certainly wouldn’t have helped.
I also think it’s worth mentioning that the verdict is still very much out on Lowrie vs. Greene. If Greene progresses this season and Lowrie gets hit with the injury bug again, suddenly Greene looks like the smart pick all over again. Their careers are still young.
You’re actually right. Lowrie hasn’t set the world on fire. Time’s running out for Greene but there’s the possibility that he could hit .250 with homers in the high teens and 30 stolen bases if given a starting job. He’ll never have a high on base percentage but, if he fielded consistently well, he could be slightly better than Ryan, Theriot or Lowrie.
On another note…. I was wondering if anyone thought picking up Andrew Miller who was non-tendered to be the long innings guy out of the pen or to be a stater at Memphis might be an interesting move for StL?
http://mlb.mlb.com/team/player.jsp?player_id=453192
the issue to me is the drafting/developing one
if the yield on infielders, particularly MI, then we need to be drafting more of them
we have no MI on the team now that we drafted and the outlook for more isn’t too bright
how many years has it been since we drafted a player who ends up as a starting infielder in mlb
adam kennedy?
My conclusion: drafting & developing MLB caliber SS is hard.
An interesting thought, but it doesn’t seem to be supported by the facts, although a more careful look would be valuable.
A quick stroll through B-R says that 64% of all shortstops drafted in the first round in this history of the amateur draft (and this is one place where a more careful look would be good — the draft is very different today than thirty years ago) have made it to the Show. That is a bit above average for all first-round draftees other than pitchers, suggesting that it is EASIER to draft and develop a shortstop than others, at least if the talent is there to begin with. (It’s actually true for pitchers too — 58% make it — but I think it’s apples and oranges.) The difference compared to other positions is small, but probably statistically significant.
The same pattern is observed for shortstops drafted in the fifth round (29% success rate) and the tenth (18%). In each case the fraction of hits is slightly higher than average for position players. It isn’t clear whether the differences are statistically significant, but once again, they probably are. This considers all guys who get at least a cup of coffee, and does not attempt to cut on how well they do. By those standards T-Greene, Ryan, etc., rank as development “successes” since they have reached the bigs.
So at first blush, I don’t think your explanation works, but there’s surely room for a more careful examination there. Incidentally, first-round SS draftees by the Cardinals were 5/6 making it, 5th rounders 1/3, 10 rounders 2/6. Here the sample sizes really are too small for meaningful conclusions to be drawn.
Sorry for the double post, but one other little trivium: the Cardinals were rather less likely to have a first-round success at any and all positions than major-league average, with something like 56% making it to an average around 60% (I haven’t been able to do the math exactly). This is probably explainable by the fact that in general, they haven’t been able to draft early in the first round. It has been established very clearly (Baseball Prospectus) that the top three or four draftees each year have a qualitatively different success rate on average than even guys drafted later in the first round. By contrast, hit rates for the Cardinals in the fifth and tenth rounds seem to be greater than average. This argues that by and large, player development for the Baby Birds hasn’t been a serious problem historically.
Quick question? Are the statistics based on being drafted as and making the majors as a SS? The Uptons come to mind as players who were drafted and announced on draft day as SS, but are now OFs. Can’t think of others right now (brain doesn’t work before 9am), but players moved off SS to 3B, etc.
The stats are just guys that made it somehow, somewhere. Many undoubtedly did move off SS to other positions, which makes sense for lots of reasons. The data I had available for the quick look did not allow easy detection of the ones who moved. They also didn’t shed direct light on how many “major leaguers” were of the cup-of-coffee variety, although as far as I could tell, the average WARP of a SS who made it to the Show was as high as, if not higher than, for any other position.
I repeat: this was a cursory, simple look at a complex question. However, that look does not suggest that shortstops are unusually hard to develop, and it contains insufficient data to judge whether the Cardinals have a harder time doing it than anyone else. A careful study here might be interesting.