Posts Tagged “Pete Kozma”

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.

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.

Sean “Chone” Smith has applied his TotalZone defensive metric on minor league data for the past few years, although it didn’t become available until last year at MinorLeagueSplits.com. Recently updated data has become available for games up to July 31st. While every defensive metric have their own quirks (especially metrics that depend on scorekeepers coding of batted balls as “line drives” or “fly balls”), the quirks can only be heightened when not dealing with a full season.

I’d trust the scouting reports first, then go with two or better yet three seasons worth of data before making any hard conclusions on a minor leaguer’s glovework. Or better yet, go watch them yourself for a few games.

But for what it’s worth, let’s check out some of the Cardinals’ top prospects and how their TotalZone numbers look. It’s also important to know these numbers translate a better for infielders than outfielders. Let’s start with the up the middle positions first.

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I’ve been talking about TotalZone and prospects the past week at BtB. (Way more often than I had planned, I’ve had way too much extra free time lately. I’ll get a job eventually, right!? Right???)

We’ve talked about some of the leaders and laggards with TotalZone before, but I thought I’d throw together this handy-dandy chart together before the season starts.

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Ben Badler is one of the many talented writers at Baseball America, the standard bearer for all things prospects. Recently I asked him if he’d be up for some Q and A and he very graciously agreed to rap with us. I thoroughly enjoyed his answers and I’m sure you will as well. Thanks to Ben for taking the time out of his busy schedule to give us his insights on the Cardinal farm system.

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Three first rounders stock are up, while three of the Cards’ better pitching prospects are trending down.

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