Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times, orange for TechGraphs and blue for Community Research.
Episode 536
Dayn Perry is a contributor to CBS Sports’ Eye on Baseball and the author of three books — one of them not very miserable. He’s also the definitely splendid guest on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.
Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.
You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.
Audio after the jump. (Approximately 48 min play time.)
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What follows does not constitute the most rigorous of statistical analyses. Rather, it’s designed to serve as a nearly responsible shorthand for people who, like the author, have considerably more enthusiasm for than actual knowledge of the collegiate game — a shorthand means, that is, towards detecting which players have produced the most excellent performances over the first weeks of the college season.
As in the first ever edition of this same thing from last week, what I’ve done is utilize principles recently introduced by Chris Mitchell on forecasting future major-league performance with minor-league stats.
Just over four years ago now, I wrote a post for this site called Dollar Sign on the Scout. A nod, that title, to an excellent work of non-fiction by Kevin Kerrane. The basic goal of the post was to identify those scouts who had created the most surplus value for their respective clubs — which is to say, had signed the players who produced wins above and beyond the sort their respective signing-bonus dollar figures would typically fetch on the open market. For the purposes of that study, I used Victor Wang’s then mostly current work on prospect valuations (updated multiple times in the interim). I also used the signing-scout data made available for each prospect by Baseball America in their annual handbook documenting such players.
By this methodology, the top scout over the five-year period between 2006 and -10 was Detroit’s Bill Buck, who was given credit for signing Cameron Maybin, Rick Porcello, and Justin Verlander — which triumvirate received nearly $10 million in bonuses, but whose rankings among Baseball America’s top-100 prospects at various points suggested they’d produce over $70 million more than that for the club in terms of overall value.
The thing about Porcello and Maybin and Verlander, though, is that they were all drafted in the first round, and first-round signings are typically the result not merely of a single, unkempt bird-dog following his intuition down a dusty, rural two-track, but rather of a decision made by a collection of front-office employees — including crosscheckers, a scouting director, and the general manager. As such, it doesn’t entirely make sense to credit an area scout with the signing of first-round draftee.
Episode 535
Promising Cuban infielder Yoan Moncada signed with Boston on Monday for $31.5 million. FanGraphs’ lead prospect analyst Kiley McDaniel spoke with him on Tuesday and has provided a series of audio vignettes from that conversation, which are reproduced here. Note: the actual audio with Moncada begins at about the 10:30 mark. It’s preceded by a brief conversation with McDaniel, who provides helpful contextual notes and other observations.
From McDaniel’s conversation:
Grabbed some lunch con mi amigo Yoan Moncada. He laughs when he’s talked about on MLB network. Will post audio soon. pic.twitter.com/D0xSJf0bEQ
— Kiley McDaniel (@kileymcd) February 24, 2015
Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.
You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.
Audio after the jump. (Approximately 26 min play time.)
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Earlier today, Kiley McDaniel published his consummately researched and demonstrably authoritative prospect list for the Oakland Athletics. What follows is a different exercise than that, one much smaller in scope and designed to identify not Oakland’s top overall prospects but rather the rookie-eligible players in the A’s system who are most ready to produce wins at the major-league level in 2015 (regardless of whether they’re likely to receive the opportunity to do so). No attempt has been made, in other words, to account for future value.
Below are the top-five prospects in the Oakland system by projected WAR. To assemble this brief list, what I’ve done is to locate the Steamer 600 projections for all the prospects to whom McDaniel assessed a Future Value grade of 40 or greater. Hitters’ numbers are normalized to 550 plate appearances; starting pitchers’, to 150 innings — i.e. the playing-time thresholds at which a league-average player would produce a 2.0 WAR. Catcher projections are prorated to 415 plate appearances to account for their reduced playing time.
Note that, in many cases, defensive value has been calculated entirely by positional adjustment based on the relevant player’s minor-league defensive starts — which is to say, there has been no attempt to account for the runs a player is likely to save in the field. As a result, players with an impressive offensive profile relative to their position are sometimes perhaps overvalued — that is, in such cases where their actual defensive skills are sub-par.
5. Raul Alcantara, RHP (Profile)
| IP | K/9 | BB/9 | HR/9 | FIP | WAR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 150 | 5.4 | 2.8 | 1.1 | 4.62 | 0.3 |
The right-handed Alcantara produced a strikeout- and walk-rate differential just above 15% in 2013, placing him at approximately the 90th percentile among all minor-league pitchers by that measure who recorded at least 100 innings or more. That he did it as just a 20-year-old facing older competition in the Midwest and then California Leagues (between which he split his season almost precisely) is more impressive. Owing to elbow trouble followed by a Tommy John procedure, Alcantara made only three starts in all of 2014 — and the earliest likely return is the middle of 2015. Despite the lack of current data, however, the Steamer forecast still calls for run prevention at something slightly better than replacement level — best among Oakland’s rookie-eligible pitchers.
Episode 534
Dave Cameron is both (a) the managing editor of FanGraphs and (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio — during which edition he discusses the risk and potential reward attached to the $63 million spent by Boston on Cuban defector Yoan Moncada.
Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.
You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.
Audio after the jump. (Approximately 33 min play time.)
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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What follows does not constitute the most rigorous of statistical analyses. Rather, it’s designed to serve as a nearly responsible shorthand for people who, like the author, have considerably more enthusiasm for than actual knowledge of the collegiate game — a shorthand means, that is, towards detecting which players have produced the most excellent performances over the first week of the college season.
As in a pair of earlier posts, what I’ve done is utilize principles recently introduced by Chris Mitchell on forecasting future major-league performance with minor-league stats.
Episode 533
Kiley McDaniel is both (a) the lead prospect writer for FanGraphs and also (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio — during which edition he discusses, after a brief detour to consider Vanderbilt right-hander Carson Fulmer’s breaking ball, he discusses his recently published and massive top-200 prospect list.
Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.
You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.
Audio after the jump. (Approximately 1 hr 03 min play time.)
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Episode 532
Dave Cameron is both (a) the managing editor of FanGraphs and (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio — during which edition he discusses the precarious balance for an organization between playing for the present and building for the future.
Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.
You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.
Audio after the jump. (Approximately 35 min play time.)
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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