Posts Tagged “Mark Hamilton”

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.

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.