Oscar Taveras Was Probably Underrated
Posted on May 7th, 2012 by azruavatar in Oscar Taveras, tags: Oscar TaverasBack in January, I asked if Oscar Taveras was underrated. The basic premise of that article was three-fold: (1) scouting reports undersold his actual production, (2) the high BABIP allowed for stat watchers to dismiss the batting line too casually and (3) Taveras is in a farm system with other great prospects who are higher up the food chain.
This past week, Taveras went on a bit of a hot streak and drug his 2012 season line over the 1.000 OPS mark. (It currently sits at .995 as of this morning.) There’s still a lot of time left in 2012 but it’s interesting to see how his work thus far looks like relative to those three items I wrote about in January.
1. Scouting reports undersold his actual production.
I have a particular antipathy toward the phrase “violent swing”, which came into significant use over the last year with regards to Taveras via Keith Law. The term is entirely uninformative and is even now being walked back with comments that indicate Law isn’t as concerned about the swing as Taveras continues to produce at a higher level.
Taveras has taken his game to a new level in one particular regard: power output. In January, I wrote:
Taveras hit better than any scouting report from the previous year would have suggested displaying great power, if not great home run power.
With a .198 ISO and just 8 homeruns, that was true in 2011. But Taveras was a veritable baby in the Midwest League. Now, a year later and two levels higher, still-teenager Taveras has already hit 7 homeruns and has a .313 ISO. The cautionary note here is that some of this increase in ISO is almost certainly park related.
2.The high BABIP allowed for stat watchers to dismiss the batting line too casually.
When you see someone hit .386, you know they’re lucky. That kind of batting average just doesn’t happen without fortune on your side in the modern era. And with a .440 BABIP, that was true of 2011 Oscar Taveras. What it ignored was that with a “normal” BABIP or closer to average, Taveras still should have been hitting around .327 with an OBP in the .380s. It was easy to say that Taveras was lucky without acknowledging that in a luck neutral setting, Taveras was still really good.
In 2012, Taveras is, essentially, showing us what a non BABIP lucky season looks like. With a far more tame .322 BABIP, Taveras is hitting for a .321 batting average. Amazing how that works, huh?
3. Taveras is in a farm system with other great prospects who are higher up the food chain.
This is just the nature of the Cardinals farm system right now. There’s a finite amount of prospect oxygen in the room and guys like Shelby Miller and Matt Adams have already laid claim to much of it. Jumping two levels of competition (as Matt Adams did the year before), has given Taveras a direct tap into that extra level of recognition. He goes from a prospect proving himself in the low minors to someone, not just passing, but excelling at the level that many consider the “weed out” for lesser prospects.
Expect to see more on Oscar Taveras this year. More glowing scouting reports. More high rankings on prospect lists. Taveras is an excellent prospect. Probably the best position prospect the Cardinals have had in the system since some guy they drafted back in 2005. Hopefully, this story turns out better than the last.
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Thanks A. another great story. Thanks again
OT excites me to no end
updated stats at MILB.com have Oscar the Violent at 1.032 ops
…just saying ….
Even more amazing is the physical development of kids like Taveras and Bryce Harper. When they’re 25 they’ll truly be monsters.
Aaron (Red Baron at VEB) had an interesting comment on the January thread: Taveras’ numbers were too good last year.
He was a guy most observers, and even most Cards fans, had never heard of 12 months ago.
The last out-of-nowhere guy to tear it up like that was Pablo Ozuna in 1998, when our team was in Peoria. He was also 19, and hit a ridiculous .357 with 62 steals. I think he also played shortstop. BA ranked him #8 that offseason, IIRC, and the Cards included him in the trade for Renteria.
But it turns out he was 4 years older (born in ’74, not ’78), and for his career he had -1.4 WAR.
I suspect that also helped tamp down enthusiasm over Taveras’ numbers. BA now takes a lot longer to get behind out-of-nowhere prospects; they tend to wait for scouting reports and background reporting.
Number one prospect in baseball. I’m not even sure there’s a close second at this point — depends whether O.T. can be an average MLB CF’er or not.
Here’s some Fun With Numbers:
Oscar’s last 11 games looks like this .351/.454/.757 with seven walks and just *two* strikeouts. Yeah, that’s an isolated slugging over .400, with two whiffs in 40+ plate appearances.
There aren’t 30 guys in the majors who could go down to AA and put up a hot streak like that. Not with the lack of strikeouts.
Not quite, not even sure he’s the top prospect in our farm system. I’d probably give the nod to Shelby since he’s more MLB-ready right now, but the gap is closing fast. A handful of guys I’d still say are better than Taveras (not counting Trout, Harper, or Moore) like Taijaun Walker [RHP; Seattle Mariners], Dylan Bundy [RHP; Baltimore Orioles], and probably Jurickson Profar [SS; Texas Rangers].
OT’s great start after jumping two levels at age 19, compared to Miller just being good so far at AAA has edged Taveras ahead of Miller slightly at this point in the season. That could still change though. I also think position players should also get a slight edge over pitchers.
The difference is that Shelby could reasonably come up and play well at the big league level. He wouldn’t be a star by any means, but he could handle big league hitters. That isn’t the case with Taveras who still needs a bit more work on his defense and base running. It’s not a huge gap that I have Taveras behind Miller, but it’s where I’d take a more MLB-ready prospect at this point in time. No doubt what Taveras is doing is impressive, but sometimes you’ve got to go with the player whose a bit closer to the big league level.
I agree that being closer should play some part in rating prospects. We really never know if a prospect can handle the major leagues until they are in the major leagues but the closer they get the greater the chance they have. I also think that the burn out rate/injury rate for pitchers is very high, which makes them a much less stable commodity than position players. I also agree that it is very close. I just wish Sheby was dominating AAA the way Taveras is dominating AA.
Oh, I also meant to add: NONE of Oscar’s bump in Isolated Power is park-related.
Home: .288/.333/.593
Road: .364/.417/.727
My park related comment was more about Springfield relative to Quad Cities. There aught to also be a league bump since the Texas League is a better hitter’s league that the MWL.
What, is this post sarcastic? This proves his numbers are hugely inflated by his park, including IsoP. .305 vs. .363 is significant, along with the other ridiculous inflation in his numbers.
just wanted to thank the mods – with the increased frequency of posts over the past year or so, one might have expected quality to suffer, but that has not happened AT ALL. in fact, it only gets better. I really appreciate, in particular, the willingness to evaluate the positions you (and the collective ‘we’ as fans and followers) have held in the past, with the benefit of hindsight. The content is what keeps be coming back every day – the frequency of posts and the often insightful comments are what keep me visiting SEVERAL times per day….. Thanks again
Nice job azru… I’ve been sittin’ here waiting for folks to come around.
It isn’t like Taveras came out of nowhere in 2011. He got plenty of recognition in 2010 at rookie ball. I remember one of the opposing managers suggesting he was one of the 2 or 3 most talented players in the league and just a baby.
I’ve never gotten the violent swing thingy. BABIP is so often misused by the pundits.
Lou’s ditty about Ozuna is the only thing that can logically explain the slow adaptation to Taveras.
If Taveras isn’t top ten prospect next year, the BA scouting system needs an overhaul.
By the way, OT has 8 HR’s.
I wonder how much of the BABIP difference is doubles turning into homers.
Also, people can’t treat a .440 BABIP in the Midwest League the same way they treat a .440 BABIP in the majors, right? It’s an apples to oranges (or maybe apples to pears, I dunno) comparison.
Unless I’m mistaken, BABIP doesn’t have a universal “average” that we should expect every league to adhere to. It even changes in the MLB (league BABIP is down to around .290 I think). So Oscar’s .440 last year league just didn’t mean what some people thought it meant.
BABIP is not constant across leagues. A .440 BABIP is still extremely suspect though.
Right, I was just making sure that the whole “league BABIP tends to be around .300″ thing only applied to the majors.
I don’t even know what minor league BABIPs look like.
Tidbit:
Taveras was conspicuous by his absence on MLB.com’s top 100 list a few months ago.
Now he’s on there, at #96.
So they’re stupid, and dishonest. (Would be one way to interpret events…)
That MLB list is godawful. As another illustration of how terrible it is, they have Wong listed as the 6th best Cardinals prospect but the number 100 prospect overall. The two guys ahead of him on the Cardinals list, Cox and Jenkins, are both not listed on the top 100 list. Truly an awful, awful list.
I posted this on here a few weeks ago, but OT had the second best OPS for a player aged 20 or younger in the last ten years the Midwest League.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkfDXzlVpXVLdER5ZjE0Uy01U2tLQU44bEVOMlhuSWc#gid=1
*in the Midwest League
After seeing him live last year, I just didn’t get any of the dislike revolving around OT. Every major skill was at least average for a major leaguer and his hit skill was really really good. His swing is not perfect it is more handsy than most would call ideal, but he has freaky freaky hand eye coordination.
on a related note, does anyone know exactly how statcorner calculates wOBAr? it says it regresses batted ball rates, but Oscar’s wOBA is .443 with only a .319 BABIP, which seems only modestly inflated, if at all. yet his wOBAr is .368.
are they regressing some of his power numbers, too? his HR/balls in the air number is 15%, more than twice MLB average (they don’t give TL average), so that’s the only place i can see any kind of regression making such a huge difference (.075).
his wOBA* is .410, which is the “controlled for park” number which makes sense.
The reason (IMO) why OT’s wOBAr is so low (comparatively) is his batted ball rates. His LD% is a low 13% and his IFF% is a high 9%.
wOBAr is similar to PrOPS (see statcorner glossay for the difference b/w the two)
http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/introducing-props/
Wait, OT’s LD% is only 13? I thought hard contact was his calling card?
I wouldn’t worry about it. There are classification and sample size issues, as well as the fact that OT has hit a lot of HRs and many of his fly balls or grounders could have been, and are likely to have been, “hard contact.”
Anybody know if home runs can be classified as line drives?
He seems to be working on pulling the ball and a lot of hit outs seem to be 3 unassisted or 4-3. May be just him working on pulling the ball. Last year he really went the other way a lot. This year he’s pulling alot. It seems he can just work on something when told to. He went from 1 walk in 19 games to 7 more in the following 5. I think it’s just so good that if the team says work on this he can do it at will.
Yeah, please guys, fret not over some phony contrived webstats. ;)
This is a teenager humiliating Texas League pitchers. Does not happen every day. Or year. Or decade.
We are talking about a kid with off-the-charts power, who also strikes out less than any of the other Texas League power hitters.
Specifically, as of a few days back, there were 20 T.L. hitters with at least a .200 Isolated Slugging. And Oscar (Iso. 300+) had…the…lowest…strikeout…rate…of them all.
The kid is a hitting prodigy — no less than Bryce Harper, or anyone else in recent memory. Don’t question it. Celebrate it. :)
I definitely wouldn’t say that Taveras has off-the-charts power. That’s reserved for prospects like Bryce Harper. Don’t think the .300+ ISO is sustainable by any means.
First, I’ve quit putting anything past OT when it comes to expectations – I’m kinda tired of being wrong. Second, and in the same vein, Harper is a deserved phenom, but he is the easy consensus pick. He has been public information since he was 14 or 15. OT is still new on the scene – comparably speaking. Would I be surprised if OT matches or exceeds Harper’s MLB career in terms of offensive production? Not anymore. I expect Harper will always exceed OT on the defensive front.
Sorry ’bout that odd, unintentional spacing.
In refutation of reason #2 above, has anyone ever checked as to the BABIP of other hitters, either in the majors or in the minors, who have hit for such a high batting average?
Maybe “everyone” with such a high batting average “obviously” and “naturally” has a very high BABIP. If so, or almost always so, then a comparison can be made of such players, and where their careers went after hitting for such a high batting average and BABIP.
Just a curious thought….
Umm…the stats aren’t phony…they are stats
I shoulda clarified *which* stats I was referring to as contrived & phony.
I was talking specifically about “normalized” hitting stats that rely on two false premises:
1) Line drive rates are objective. (They’re not.)
2) All hitters convert an equal percentage of ground balls into hits, and fly balls into homers. (They don’t.)
As far as BABIP goes, last year Taveras had a 1.028 OPS, but with a BABIP north of .440. It was understandable that people expected the BABIP to regress, and of course it has.
Now his OPS is 1.032, with a BABIP under .330, which is perfectly sustainable. How did he do it? Fewer K’s, and more homers. The pop is real, Karma. ;)
some of the pop is real, some of the pop is TL
I think it also must be acknowledged that some of the pop is untapped. Power is more often than not the last tool to develop. At 19, it is likely that Taveras will continue to develop more power. While his power production is probably not sustainable, more could be on the way. Last year, pundits were predicting 15 – 20 hr/yr ceilings. Such projections will go up after this season.
Exactly, Bird!
Prospect-er Mike Newman of Fangraphs has already said that someone (scout? exec?) told him Taveras could be a 30-HR Centerfielder, but with “contact issues” keeping the average down.
The latter point is absurd, of course, and rooted in baseball mysticism (poor scouting) rather than reality (actual on-field performance, repeated over and over). But the former point, that Taveras has plus power and the distinct possibility of sticking in CF for awhile, is fairly revelatory.
Whether the power eventually takes a Dave Kingman-type shape, or more of the Bobby Abreu variety, I fully expect Taveras to have an isolated slg. at least 60-70% above MLB average during his prime 6-8 years…while also competing for batting titles.
Do that in center field, and you’re a first-ballot HOFer. ;)
Posting about minor league BABIPs always seemed really silly to me because minor league defenses are always horrible.
I hear you, Wade; but the TL ain’t exactly a hitter’s paradise this year. The league slash line is a so-so .251/.322/.394.
So Oscar’s isolated slugging is *easily* more than double his Texas peers (and better on the road than at home).
The pre-season perception that Taveras is a high-average, medium-power bat, who’s overly reliant on a bloated BABIP, was never aligned with reality in the first place. Oscar has had an ISO at least 50% above his league everywhere he’s played…and now, at the tender age of 19, the doubles are turning into taters.
Which was entirely predictable, given O.T.’s size, age, bat speed, swing plane, contact rate, etc., etc., etc.
The question isn’t whether Taveras is going to be one of MLB’s best 10 hitters in 3 or 4 years. The only question is where he’ll play defensively, and how well.
“The question isn’t whether Taveras is going to be one of MLB’s best 10 hitters in 3 or 4 years. The only question is where he’ll play defensively, and how well.”
Hahahaha, you don’t happen to post on another site under “casejud” do you?
I’m late to this thread, but I just wanted to comment on the “violent” swing. I have never taken that phrase to necessarily be a negative thing. It can be – there are certainly some hacktastic guys out there that basically close their eyes and swing as hard as they can, but I would also classify Bryce Harper as having a violent swing. Vlad Guerrero and Mike Sweeney are two other guys that come to mind that I always considered to have violent swings. To me it is just a descriptor, but not necessarily pejorative. I just thought I would clarify since I used that description of OT’s swing in my post about Spring Training.