Posts Tagged “Allen Craig”

The Pujols negotiations are, well, pretty boring. If you are like me, you’re sick of hearing about aimless speculation about what will happen next. So lets speculate less aimlessly, if you will, about the future at first base without Five. We’ve got a few options. One, Matt Adams, may be a little far away, but that could change with an incredibly important, and what I cautiously see as a difficult, year for him in 2011. The other two are Mark Hamilton, and Allen Craig, viable mid-20′s players that could provide what most teams want from the corners — a hitter — one being more practical than the other. Let me explain…

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Another thought experiment for the end of the year 2010, this one a bit darker and one I hope never comes to fruition.  If the Cardinals do not re-sign Albert Pujols at 1B, will they be able to replace him internally from the farm system?  (Odds are that the Cardinals WILL re-sign Albert, but it does not hurt to take a look at our 1B depth just in case.)

The First basemen in the Cardinals system have been blocked by Pujols ever since he moved from 3B to LF to 1B and stayed there.  Pujols has been a full-time first baseman since 2004 and any prospect that was reaching the minor leagues’ ceiling as first base needed to be moved for a player at another position.  (See Wallace, Brett who will be a permanent 1B in the majors.)  That being said, what do the Cardinals have left in the minors at first base?  The great thing about first base is that it can be played by any slugging player that does not quite have a position and the Cardinals have a few of those as well.

Obviously, no one in the universe is going to replace Pujols’ production, so we can only look at the internal candidates to replace him at 1B and how well they will do.

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I’m sorry that we skipped the FR Reader rankings this year. That was lame of me. In order to make it up to you, the reader, I thought we’d try something a little different. This idea was inspired by Bryan Smith’s article at FanGraphs and some of the cool stuff he does. (Bryan is very smart).

Please click on this poll and enter your input on some of our hitting prospects. This poll is designed to seehow confident Future Redbirds readers are on a prospect’s ability to be an average big leaguer during their first six full seasons. The wOBA presented for each prospect is the minimum based on their defensive position and skill for them to be a 2 WAR player, or a major league average regular. DO NOT CONSIDER IF THE PLAYER IS CURRENTLY BLOCKED. And remember, this is what you think the player is capable of averaging during their first six major league seasons, or in other words, when they are under team control.

For those of you not hip to wOBA, well, get with it. wOBA is the new and improved OPS. Instead of just combining slugging and on-base percentage, wOBA takes the run values of offensive events and then scales it to a rate that is scaled to on-base percentage. You can read up on wOBA here and here and here.

To give you some frame of reference, Albert Pujols had a .449 wOBA last year. NL average is about .335. To give you further frames of reference, Nate McLouth had a .350 wOBA last year. Billy Butler had a .369. Ryan Sweeney had a .330. Cristian Guzman had a .301. Adam LaRoche had a .357. Orlando Hudson had a .342. Got it? Good.

Again, the reason why I picked the wOBA for each prospect is based on the minimum requirement based on their position and defensive skill to be at least two wins above replacement player, or in other words, an average player. For their position, I took the position they currently play, or what Baseball America pegged them for, as in the case of Steve Hill. (Catcher was a nice idea, at least). Their defensive skill is hidden, but it comes from their CHONE projected defensive runs above average. If a projection wasn’t available, I just went with their scouting report and fudged a number. This explains a bit why Ryan Jackson’s offensive threshold is so low.

You can skip any player if you’re not quite sure, but try and answer as many as possible. It’s on a scale of 1-5, 1 being not confident at all, while 5 would be that you feel very confident the player will hit for that minimum batting requirement on average during their first six seasons in the majors.

Thanks for your input.

Poll away.  <——–Um, yeah. Go here.

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.

Well, this has been an eventful day. I meant to get this up much sooner, thankfully I didn’t. Wagner Mateo would have been my #4 prospect on this list, but who knows what is going on now.

A caveat here — I still like waiting for fall leagues to get over with before I come up with an “official” ranking, but in the name of collaboration and blogging, here’s my ranking. This system has greatly thinned and now looks a bit thinner without Mateo, who’s ceiling as a hitter I had at least believed to be higher than others. I’m starting to sour a bit on the whole international signing scene, there’s just too much shady dealings going on. I’m not saying the Cardinals should abandon it. It’s just not always the bonus babies that rise to the top of prospect lists, as evidenced by my #6 rated prospect.

1. Shelby Miller – No brainer here, even though he hasn’t thrown more than 10 professional innings. You all know the scouting report. Miller’s a potential 1-2 starter. The road from here to there is long, and there’s a lot of ditches along side that road, but it’s exciting to have a pitcher with Miller’s ceiling in the system.
2. Jaime Garcia – Jaime is back from Tommy John, which was the only knock on him the previous season. He’s burning worms and missing bats, just like before. Ceiling is #3 starter, which is why he is here.
3. Daryl Jones – 2009 was better than his bad seasons but worse than his terrific year last year, no thanks to injury issues that dogged him all season long. Scouts remarked as to Jones looked more like a 4th OF due to his lack of speed and power, but the speed part was because of knee issues. Carl Crawford lite is the lofty comparison. I think he can be an average LF because his range will make up a little bat for a lack of thump. My semi-realistic but maybe overly optimistic hope for DJ Tools: .280/.355/.445, +5 defense, double-digits in steals.
4. Lance Lynn – The big hoss does nothing super spectacular, but avoids ugly innings, misses an average number of bats and gets a little better than average ground ball outs.
5. Allen Craig – Met with a big dose of skepticism from the scouting community despite mashing year after year. He got off to a slow start and still managed to have his finest season to date. I know he’s a little older at 25, but after this season in Triple-A I believe Craig can help the club now, whether that be at the hot corner or in the OF.
6. Eduardo Sanchez – The breakout prospect of the year. He’s about on par with Reifer and Samuel in terms of stuff, only the big difference about Sanchez is he can command it more often than not. Look for him at some point in 2010.
7. Robert Stock – People seem to forget he’s only 19. He mashed in the Appy, not sure if that amounts to much, but after suffering through the slumps he suffered through at USC it was nice to see him hit. The back-up plan of pitching has to be on the shelf for now. I do hear some concerns about Stock’s swing mechanics. I’m not fully on the bandwagon yet, but he was formerly mentioned as a possible first rounder and he has a nice ceiling. I just don’t get too thrilled after good Appy stats, call it the Niko Vazquez shakes.

The pocket-sized version of Allen Craig‘s player profile is this: third baseman drafted out of college, has hit for good average and power at every stop and the only question mark is whether his defense is good enough at third base to play in the majors. Hmmm… that sounds familiar for some reason.

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It actually was snowing here in Iowa for a few minutes. Snow! That’s just not right. Another sign of the season is Dan Syzmborski’s ZiPS projections are out. I’m sure someone at VEB will be covering the projections for the big club, here we’ll run down some of the minor leaguers projections. I’m sure most of you know by now these aren’t to be taken as gospel, and I’m not here to argue their merit. If you don’t care for them, come back another day. Some thoughts after the jump-

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