Archive for the “Season Wraps” Category

I finished this series before the AFL season ended. Success!

• Is PJ Walters our own version of Yusmeiro Petit?
• Given the options, I really, really hope Jaime Garcia seizes the 5th starter job.
• Can we have a mulligan on that Mark DeRosa trade again? With bland and blander throwing out of our bullpen, it would be nice to have Perez and Todd back. Don’t even look at Perez’s Cleveland numbers, they will make you cry.
• I didn’t see the re-emergence of Hawksworth coming. Move over, Wonderbrad.
• I can see the organizational intrigue for Pete Parise. 58% groundball rate for any pitcher is interesting.  I wouldn’t be shocked at all to see him in some sort of low-leverage role next season.

Forgive the slowness of wrapping up this series, we still need to look at our beloved Triple-A affiliate.  I deleted pitchers and players with less than 100 at bats.

It was definitely a banner year for the Redbirds, who won the PCL Championship.

• Allen Craig is my favorite monster, as is yours, but if there is a red flag with him other than the fact that the Cardinals do not believe he can play third base, it’s his BB/K ratio.
• I must have been in a cave, but I had no idea David Freese had the type of season he had, even if it was an abbreviated one.  He’s a year older than Craig, and the Cards do believe he can play third base, which is why there’s talk of Freese starting at third base next year and we saw Craig not even receiving a September call up. I haven’t seen both players play at much length, but my judgment is Craig is the superior hitter, albeit not by a lot. If Freese can play third and be at least average while putting together a .320 OBP and .435 SLG, that’s more valuable than a left fielder who would give you a little better production at the plate.
• Tyler Greene quietly had himself one fine season. Among other things, look at that stolen base/caught stealing numbers. The man has some speed and knows how to pick his spots. With the Boogstache firmly holding on  the SS job, it’s nice to know Greene is there as a fallback option and backup. He may fill up a boxscore with steals, doubles, strikeouts and errors; it’s never a dull moment with Greene.
• As for disappointments, look no further than Bryan Anderson and Jon Jay. Jay pulled himself up after a nose-dive of a second half, but it’s hard to see him becoming better than a fourth outfielder at this point. The Cardinal brass bragged about Jay and his potential future batting titles, so that’s not quite the future they had pegged for the quirky outfielder. Anderson was once a Top 100 prospect and has since tanked it hard. Before hitting the DL he was allowing about a stolen base per game and his offense bit the dust. He’s currently hitting for a .630 OPS in 27 at-bats in the Arizona Fall League, for what it’s worth.

• Eduardo Sanchez. Who saw this coming?
• Lance Lynn, King of Ordinary. Nice ERA, but league average peripherals other than that he did a great job keeping the ball in the yard. I mean King of Ordinary in a nice way.
• Unless Francisco Samuel is the second coming of Mitch Williams, I wouldn’t get too worked up about his chances. We knew about his spotty control, but wow. 23.3% of the batters he faced were put on by Samuel beating himself, either by the BB or the HPB.
• Eddie Degerman, King of Weird. Great college stats, quirky delivery, didn’t work out.

We’re making some real progress now, all the way up to AA.

Let’s preface by giving the context talk again. While Palm Beach is a hitter’s graveyard, Springfield is an extremely hitter friendly park. The HR factor for Palm Beach is 80, for Springfield it is 122. What that means is if you can hit down in Florida, you will really like the move up to Missouri. Using Jeff Sackmann’s MLE calculator to illustrate this, last year Daryl Jones hit .326/.406/.476 for Palm Beach. Translating that to the Springfield environment, Jones would have hit .334/.413/.485. It’s no surprise then that Jones’ number improved upon moving up to Springfield last season. (Not so much this year, no thanks to injuries)

So this is why you don’t get overly excited when you see a .180 ISO from Tyler Henley. There’s nothing really in his scouting reports or past history to suggest he’s some sort of slugger or will likely ever be one. He might be a decent hitter and a nice player, but a power hitter he is probably not.

The league average line is .266/.340/.391 to give you a little more context. The average hitter is 24 years old.

I’m not saying it’s time to jump on the Jim Rapoport bandwagon, but those are some nice plate discipline numbers. His walk rate was 4% last year for Springfield, 13% this year. That’s quite a jump. He also has some nice range in CF.

What do we make of Dan Descalso? He tore the cover off the ball, put up great numbers, got good reviews from scoutts, but once he was moved up to Memphis he slowed considerably and played a lot of games at 1B or DH. Jarrett Hoffpauir is 26 doesn’t project as anything more than a utility player, but yet was hogging up all the games at 2B. Oh, and Hoffpauir is a lowsy defensive 2B. Maybe all the early season Descalso hype was a bit premature.

Hooray for Mark Hamilton, who also hit well for Memphis.

Brutal season for the Kozmanaut.

Hooray. We’re moving along to more meaningful stats. Well, sort of. As I mentioned before, Roger Dean is a hitter’s graveyard. Therefore, it makes pitchers look a little better than they actually are. Moving from Palm Beach to Springfield can be one of the toughest transitions for any pitcher; it separates the men from the boys.

Before we dive in, here’s the league averages: The pitcher’s average age is 23. League average ERA is 3.56 (!). Hits per nine is 8.6, HR/9 is .5, BB/9 3.2, K/9 – 7.3, SO/BB 2.31, WHIP is 1.3.

Gorgen, Kopp and Castillo probably would rate as the best starting pitching prospects on this  team. I wouldn’t say any of their performances really stood out this past season.

Blake King put the K in King, but was still way too wild. My personal man-cruch Adam Reifer proved to be more hittable than I thought he would be this past season, but he settled down a bit as the season went on.

Other than Sanchez, who pitched more innings in Springfield, I wouldn’t give any of these prospects better than a C, C+ grade.

Behold! Numbers for your perusal, sorted by the best on-base percentage to last.

• Context! Florida State League hit .252/.329/.363 and scored only just 3.9 runs per game. Minor league park factor for Roger Dean is pretty rough. It’s a 93, meaning it cuts runs down 7% on average.  HR factor is 80, meaning a lot of balls that normally would go out die on the warning track. This makes Aaron Luna’s slugging % look pretty impressive.
• I wonder what Pete Kozma would have done a full season at Palm Beach.
• Cutler hit .351 in the Midwest League, thanks in part to a .380 BABIP. He didn’t have the same luck in the FSL, but gotta like that plate discipline and walk rate.
• Tommy Pham hit a respectable .256/.353/.450 in the 2nd half. Hopefully that’s some sort of precursor to the breakout we’ve all been waiting for.
• 16 triples and 21 steals and a .370 on-base percentage for Adron Chambers. I think we’ve been sleeping on Chambers a bit. I hear he’s a nice fielder, too.

We’re out of small season stat-land, but there still plenty of caveats that apply. The average aged Midwest League hurler is 21.7. The league average ERA is 3.96 and the normal K/9, BB/9, H/9 and HR/9 rates are 7.8, 3.4, 8.6 and 0.6.  So while a player Arquimedes Nieto got a little bit of hype (from people like me), he was pretty darn average.

Someone who was a whole lot better than average was Casey Mulligan. His 0.50 FIP is pretty ridiculous by any standards, even if it was just 20 innings and usually an inning at  a time. Mulligan’s peripherals took a step or two back with each level jump, but his overall season was pretty good.

Do-stats, do-stats, do-do-stat stat stats.

The parallels between Stock and Vasquez’s 2008 and 2009 are sort of alarming, which makes me a little gun-shy about jumping full force onto the Robert Stock bandwagon. Stock will still probably rank pretty high on my list, but only because the system has thinned out so much because of trades.

I can’t believe it took Charlie Cutler 278 plate appearances to get promoted. Not much really much else to see here, in my opinion.

Context check: The Midwest League is a pitcher’s league. Average batting line is .256/.329/.373 and the ballpark formerly known as JOD is a pitcher friendly park. Neutral when it comes to home-runs, but it also cuts down doubles.

Sample Size Stats! Get your sample size stats here!

Bullet-pointy thoughts:

• Justin Smith took his K’ing ways from Johnson City up to Batavia. Short season caveats aside, he’s intriguing to me.
• Color me intrigued with Scott Schneider as well, who was July’s organizational pitcher of the month. Schneider carried his success to the Quad Cities as well. He’s mostly a sinker-slider guy
• Daniel Calhoun is one of Liam’s personal cheeseballs. Low walk rate from college carried over to his pro debut. Light on stuff, but a ‘crafty lefty’.
• Eric Fornataro doesn’t miss many bats for someone with a 92-95 MPH fastball.
• The best prospect on this squad is 3rd round pick Joe Kelly. The former college closer’s stuff has yet to catch up with results; he was rather hittable and didn’t really dominate as I would have hoped. That might be expected, as the Cardinals tried him out as a starter for a few games.
• After serving his 50 game suspension, Deryk Hooker’s performance was rather bland.

League averages: 7.9 K/9, 3.3 BB/9 0.4 HR/9, 1.30 WHIP, 3.50 ERA. WHIP and ERA are pretty useless, but whatev.

Stats! Just for a frame of reference, the league average batting line is .257/.328/.384. Average batter’s age is 20.6.

The Robert Stock bandwagon has now been firmly established. Matt Adams is no man. He is a mindless hitting machine. BA scouting blurbage:

A burly 6-foot-3, 245-pound slugger, Adams has a good swing and a mature offensive approach to go along with solid-average to plus power. He’s adequate at best defensively at first base, and he’s well-below-average behind the plate.

Rich “the Rock” Racobaldo was Billy Madison throwing dodge balls at hapless 3rd graders. He’s not doing quite as well for the QC.