Archive for June, 2011

There were 8 total games  played tonight on the farm, including 2 doubleheaders.  Kolten Wong made his professional debut, while Tyrell Jenkins made his 2nd start.  Read on for the details!

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I’m not a big fan of player comps.  Since we have few objective measures of a player’s tools, the comparisons are highly subjective.  There’s also an element of memory involved that I’m skeptical of. A lot of the comparisons made are to players who haven’t played in years — if you ask two people what that players career looked like, you’d probably get two different answers. Humans have a tendency to warp memories to a narrative.

Of course, there’s also the dreaded HoF comparison where a player is compared to the elite outliers of a huge dataset of players. It’s nonsensical to draw straight lines between a new sample/player and a known outlier/Hall-of-Famer but those comparisons happen all the time.

If two players have a similar body type or swing and they they achieve vastly different results with those building blocks, should we care that they looked the same or had the same swing plane? Fundamentally, this is the argument for a player projection system built on statistical comparisons (ZiPS, PECOTA, etc) and that’s a model that I’d rather more adhere to.  Matt Carpenter continues to be an interesting and unusual player to me. He doesn’t hit for much power, he walks a ton and hits for a good average. Can we find anyone in the last decade that looks like that statistically?

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In case you missed it, Kolten Wong signed on the dotted line this weekend and the details are almost exactly in line with the initial report out of Honolulu.

KW Signs

KW at the game Sunday

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Memphis and Palm Beach were both postponed tonight.  The farm went with the weekend theme of going .500 and went 2-2.  Matt Adams stuck to a theme as well, he continued to mash.

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Johnson City provided the offense on a night when the farm put up another .500 performance.  In other news, AAA players have no clue how to hit the 100 MPH heat coming from Maikel Cleto, at least not tonight.

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All six teams were in action tonight and they finished at an even .500.  Let’s get to some dominant pitching performances.

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Short season baseball is full of new draftees, very young players and players coming up through Latin America. It’s an odd mix of older, often low upside players, and very young, very raw high upside players. The level of competition in a league is highly inconsistent from year to year (and from game to game for that matter).

We recap two of the Cardinals’ short season affiliates in Batavia and Johnson City but have not typically covered the Gulf Coast, Venezuelan or Domincan Leagues with any degree of regularity. If you want to take at the short season statistics from time to time, make sure and check in on these 5 players (in no particular order).

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To the DFR!
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