Over the weekend, the Red Sox promoted Blake Swihart, who was our highest-rated catching prospect heading into the year. The Padres followed suit two days later by promoting another highly-touted minor league catcher in Austin Hedges, who ranked 130th overall on Kiley McDaniel’s pre-season list, but was rated much higher by most other outlets. All indications are that Hedges serve as the Padres backup catcher behind Derek Norris, who seems unlikely to be benched after his excellent .323/.343/.500 start to the year. Hedges made his big league debut on Monday by striking out as a pinch hitter in the 9th.

Although they’re both well-regarded catching prospects, Hedges is a much different player than Swihart. Swihart is a plus defender with an interesting, but still-developing bat. Hedges, on the other hand, is widely considered to be one of the best defensive catchers on the planet, who offers very little in terms of offense. Through the end of the 2014 season, Hedges owned a .251/.311/.378 batting line in the minors, which earned him a 91 wRC+. This was bookended by a wimpy .225/.268/.321 (67 wRC+) showing in Double-A last year.

Despite these struggles, the Padres opted to challenge Hedges by having him open the 2015 season in Triple-A. He adapted surprisingly well. In 21 games in the PCL, he hit a loud .324/.392/.521. Obviously, this a tiny sample, but the signals emerging from this tiny sample were good. Hedges walked exactly as often as he struck out, and also hit for power in his month against Triple-A pitching. He came nowhere close to doing either of those things in Double-A last year. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in February, there was some discussion about the transition from Triple-A to the majors, and whether that jump was getting any more difficult. It certainly seemed that way. Several highly-regarded minor leaguers completely flopped in their first tastes of big league action last year. Gregory Polanco, Jon Singleton, Xander Bogaerts, Jackie Bradley Jr. and the late Oscar Taveras all didn’t hit a lick after tearing it up in the minors. And perhaps worst of all, Javier Baez — a consensus top 10 prospect heading into the year — hit a putrid .169/.227/.324 with an unsightly 41% strikeout rate.

Jeff Sullivan and Ben Lindbergh both looked into the validity of this phenomenon, and wrote response articles more or less debunking it. Both concluded that the gap between Triple-A and the majors wasn’t growing after all, or at least not in any meaningful way. So much for that.

However, after thinking about it for a while, I started to wonder if there might be other ways to explain the initial failures of guys like Baez. Perhaps it might be more informative to look at these transitions from a different angle: Not across time, but across skill sets.

Baez’s flaws were easily identifiable. He struggled to make contact, and also showed a tendency to chase pitches out of the zone. But perhaps his rough transition wasn’t unique to him. Maybe his skill set — his poor plate discipline and/or poor bat-to-ball ability — just doesn’t play well against major league pitching. If that’s the case, it might help us be wary of the next Javier Baez. Read the rest of this entry »

Milwaukee Brewers fans haven’t had much to get excited about this year. Their team’s 5-17 record is easily the worst in baseball, and with a BaseRuns differential of -45, it appears as though they’ve been about as bad as their record suggests. It’s unlikely the Brewers will continue to play this poorly, but it’s probably safe to say the they won’t be anywhere near the playoff race this fall. Our playoff odds calculator gives them a minuscule 1% of even making it into the Wild Card game.

The current iteration of the Brewers is pretty depressing — Adam Lind is literally their only player who’s hitting better than league-average. But despite their current struggles, Milwaukee has a few intriguing minor leaguers on the horizon, who represent beams of light for Brewers fans. One of those players is shortstop prospect Orlando Arcia. Kiley McDaniel deemed Arcia the Brewers best prospect over the winter, and the 20-year-old has lived up to that billing with a hot start to 2015.

Through 78 trips to the plate in Double-A Biloxi, Arcia’s hitting .409/.468/.545. This is obviously a very small sample of games, but still, a .409 batting average is pretty eye-popping. Arcia’s year-to-date numbers are almost certainly good enough to make us re-evaluate what we thought of him a month ago. Read the rest of this entry »

The recent promotions of Kris Bryant, Addison Russell and Carlos Rodon have created a good deal of buzz these past couple of weeks. Deservingly so. Kiley McDaniel ranked the trio first, third and eighth respectively in his pre-season rankings. Any time a prospect of that caliber gets called up to the big leagues, it’s certainly newsworthy.

But there was another promising, young prospect who recently got the call. But his debut was somewhat overshadowed — at least outside of the New York region — by Russell and Rodon, who both debuted on the same day. As you probably guessed by the title of this piece, that player is 24-year-old Mets catcher, Kevin Plawecki.

Plawecki got the call to replace Travis d’Arnaud, who broke his finger after taking a pitch on the hand. d’Arnaud’s expected to miss at least the next month, but that timeline could easily grow longer given the unpredictable nature of hand injuries. Plawecki — and not the objectively handsome, yet offensively challenged, Anthony Recker — will pick up the lion’s share of playing time in d’Arnaud’s absence, meaning Plawecki will play a crucial role for the surprisingly-competitive Mets.

Plawecki may not have the cachet of the other guys who got called up over the last couple of weeks, but he’s a pretty well-regarded prospect in his own right. A supplemental first round pick in 2012, Plawecki placed 40th on Kiley McDaniel’s top 200 list last winter, and landed in the middle of just about every top 100 list out there. Read the rest of this entry »

Just as we were all finally getting over our Kris Bryant Day hangovers, the Cubs gave us something else to celebrate. As you’ve likely heard by now, the Cubs summoned Addison Russell to the major leagues yesterday. He started at second base last night, and went 0-5 in his big league debut.

Russell’s promotion came as something of a surprise. Although he’s a very talented player, and is one of the most highly-regarded prospects in the game, he’s had very little exposure to high-minors pitching. He’s played all of 77 games above A-Ball, and only 14 of those games came in Triple-A. Due to this relative lack experience, most anticipated that Russell wouldn’t make it to the majors until late 2015, if not sometime 2016. Yet here we are. It’s April 22nd and Russell is playing major league baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

Four weeks after he hoisted the Vince Lombardi Trophy at MetLife Staduim in February of 2014, Russell Wilson reported to Surprise Arizona to participate in spring training with the Texas Rangers. Although the Rangers technically hold the rights to Wilson as a baseball player, he didn’t actually appear in any spring training games, and returned home after taking a few grounders and batting practice swings. Wilson made an appearance at the Rangers spring training complex this year as well.

Wilson’s spring training attendance was little more than a publicity stunt, but there was a time when he was a fairly well-regarded baseball player. After his junior season at North Carolina State, the Colorado Rockies drafted him as a second basemen in the 4th round of the 2010 amateur draft. Before he joined the Seattle Seahawks in 2012, he spent parts of two seasons in the Rockies organization, where he recorded 379 plate appearances between two levels of A-ball.

Up to this point, Wilson’s stint as a professional baseball player has been just an interesting footnote. But in a recent interview with Bryant Gumbel, Wilson hinted that he’d be open to playing both sports simultaneously — a la Bo Jackson, Deion Sanders or Brian Jordan. Regardless of what he said in the interview, I find it hard to believe that Wilson will actually try to pull this off. He’s one of the better quarterbacks in the NFL, and has played in two consecutive Super Bowls. Would he really compromise his football career just to see if he might be able to succeed at baseball too? Read the rest of this entry »

Happy Kris Bryant Day!

Kris Bryant is finally free. After spending his obligatory two weeks in the minors, the highly-touted slugger has been summoned to the major leagues. He’ll slot into the Cubs lineup today, and will be playing third base, putting an end to the much-maligned Mike Olt era in Chicago.

By now, you’re probably well familiar with Bryant’s prospect pedigree. After three monster seasons at the University of San Diego, the Cubs took Bryant with the 2nd overall pick in 2013, right behind Mark Appel. Bryant made quick work of the minor leagues, destroying opposing pitchers to the tune of .330/.429/.662 in his year and a half in the minors. Bryant was a highly-touted prospect dating back to his college days, but his prospect status ticked up to elite following his 2014 performance. He hit .325/.438/.661 between Double-A and Triple-A last year, and belted a whopping 43 homers along the way — the most of any player in affiliated baseball.

Unsurprisingly, KATOH’s all over him. My system forecasts the slugger for a remarkable 16 WAR through age-28, which was the 2nd most of any prospect last winter; Only Joc Pederson earned a higher projection. Here are the probabilities my system spits out for Bryant through age-28. Read the rest of this entry »

Oakland A’s first baseman/left fielder Mark Canha is off to a fine start to the 2015 season. Through the year’s first week and a half, he’s hitting a solid .333/.353/.515, and leads all rookies with 11 hits. This is obviously a teeny tiny sample, and we all know better than to read too much into seven games. But even so, an excellent performance from a previously unknown player is a little hard to ignore, especially after his six homers and .297/.342/.635 batting line from spring training. The A’s have to be happy with the return they’ve gotten on their rule 5 choice so far.

Although this is his first taste of big league action, Canha’s no youngster. He turned 26 this past February, and has been playing professionally since 2010, when the Marlins drafted him in the seventh round out of the University of California. Although he started out as a 21-year-old in short-season ball, Canha moved through the Marlins system relatively slowly. He spent a full year at each minor league level, so he’s just now making it to the big leagues.

Canha’s slow climb up the minor league ladder wasn’t due to a lack of hitting. His wRC+s from 2010-2014 were 139, 144, 128, 141 and 131. He’s never hit worse than his league’s average, nor has he come particularly close. But, year after year, the Marlins chose to let Canha mash as an old-for-his-league slugger instead of challenging him with more polished pitching. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I wrote a piece looking at minor league players who saw stark decreases in the number of pitches they saw inside the strike zone. My analysis was inspired by recent research by Rob Arthur that suggested drops in Zone% can be early predictors of a breakout. Essentially, Arthur found that hitters who saw fewer pitches down the heart of the plate late in the year often outperformed their projections the following season. By his theory, a pitcher knows a good hitter when he sees one, and chooses to approach him with caution. So when pitchers change their approach, it’s often because the hitter’s gotten more talented.

One of the hitters who jumped to the top of my list was Richard Shaffer, a third baseman in the Tampa Bay Rays organization. Shaffer spent the entire 2014 season in Double-A Montgomery, where he hit an uninspiring .222/.318/.440. Although he hit for a good amount of power last year, the rest of his game left a lot to be desires. KATOH wasn’t thrilled with this lack-luster season — especially his elevated strikeout rate– and gave him just a 50% chance of even reaching the major leagues. Here’s a look at my system’s full break-down of Shaffer’s odds.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last May, Rob Arthur of Baseball of Prospectus unveiled new research implying that PITCHf/x data can be used to forecast hitter performance. Essentially, he found that hitters who saw fewer pitches down the heart of the plate late in the year often outperformed their projections the following season. The theory behind this phenomenon is pretty straightforward. A pitcher knows a good hitter when he sees one, and chooses to approach him with caution. So when pitcher’s change their approach, it’s often an early indicator of improved talent from a hitter.

This finding gives us yet another tool to use in forecasting hitter performance. As great as statistical projections are, they can sometimes be a bit slow to recognize a breakout when it happens. Simply put, it’s not easy to identify the one breakout from the sea of small sample size flukes. However, Arthur’s research hints that incorporating pitch locations can help us get ahead of the curve.

This past January, Eno Sarris wrote a piece for JABO where he applied Arthur’s findings to 2014 data in an attempt to identify breakout candidates for 2015. Eno noted that this type of analysis is most useful for players who are relatively new to the league. For this reason, he limited his analysis to hitters with fewer than 800 big plate appearances.

I decided to dig a little deeper. To my knowledge, all applications of Arthur’s research have looked exclusively at big league hitters. However, in what follows, I make my best attempt at expanding this practice to hitters in the minor leagues. Read the rest of this entry »