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 of the college season.

As in the first two editions of this same thing, what I’ve done is utilize principles recently introduced by Chris Mitchell on forecasting future major-league performance with minor-league stats.

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Earlier today, I published the third in a three-part series devoted to producing and analyzing objective demographic data regarding those players who’ve become good major leaguers. The thought has been that, at best, the results might have some predictive value regarding future good major leaguers; at worst, that they’d at least document the origins of the league’s best players.

In the third part of the series — an examination of which college conferences had produced the most good players over the last five years — I noticed that the Pac-12 Conference was responsible for an inordinate number of talented second baseman. Jason Kipnis, Dustin Pedroia, and Chase Utley were all drafted and signed out of Pac-12 schools — and Ian Kinsler had been compelled to leave Arizona State for Missouri only because he was displaced at shortstop by Pedroia.

Collectively, those four players have produced 75 wins since 2010, averaging just over 4.0 WAR per every 600 plate appearances. Of the 50 player-seasons of three wins or better* produced by second baseman since 2010, they’re responsible for 16 (i.e. nearly a third) of them. And this is merely accounting for those second baseman who were members of Pac-12 schools. Ben Zobrist, another college product who’s played mostly second base, has recorded another five good seasons. Danny Espinosa, Dan Uggla, and Rickie Weeks have all also recorded multiple good seasons by this measure.

*Or what I’ll also refer to as a “good” season throughout the remainder of this post.

That seemed like a lot of college players developing into good major-league second basemen. On account of I’m paid to do such things, I endeavored to determine if it really was.

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What follows represents the third in a three-part series devoted to producing and analyzing objective demographic data regarding those players who’ve become good major leaguers. Last Wednesday, I considered good players by their amateur origins — i.e. whether they were signed to professional contracts out of college, junior college, etc. On Friday, I examined good players by draft round. In this installment, I look at good players by the conferences in which they played as collegiate athletes (which obviously excludes international, prep, and junior-college players).

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Note: this post contains three-dimensional pie charts, less because they’re particularly well suited to presenting data clearly and more because the author’s whole life is an exercise in questionable decision-making.

What follows represents the second in a three-part series devoted to producing and analyzing objective demographic data regarding those players who’ve become good major leaguers. On Wednesday, I considered good players by their amateur origins — i.e. whether they were signed to professional contracts out of college, junior college, etc. In this installment, I look at good players by the round in which they were originally selected during the amateur draft (which obviously excludes any consideration of those players signed as international free agents).

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Recently, Jeff Sullivan wrote a piece here attempting to answer a question notable both for its simplicity and importance. The question: how many good players were good prospects?

As Sullivan notes, one typically finds the question pursued in reverse: of this or that group of prospects (top-10 prospects, top-100 prospects, etc), how did they fare in the major leagues (if they even made it that far)? There’s great utility in this sort of information — in particular where our understanding of prospect valuations is concerned. An appearance by a young player on one of these prospect lists tends to indicate, if not certain future value, at least present trade value. In other words: even those prospects who fail to record even one plate appearance or innings — even they are capable of possessing significant value.

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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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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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.

Read the rest of this entry »

As the author has apparently had cause to mention here before, Apophatic [ap-a-FAT-ik] Theology is the method by which one endeavors to describe God by describing what God is not — the suggestion being that fewer persons and places and things belong to that latter category than the former.

Applied to something less substantial than an all-seeing and -knowing deity, however — like a human man, for example — apophasis [uh-PAW-fa-sis] naturally becomes a more time-consuming endeavor, on account of how human men are little more than walking husks of carbon consumed by vanity. Applied to the sort of very flawed human man who’s also the one composing this document, the process would become nearly infinite.

Which, what I mean to say is: among the many things I’m not, one of them is an expert in the field of college baseball. Accordingly, what follows ought not to be regarded as an attempt to analyze all collegiate baseball prospects. Instead, what I’ve done is merely to assemble — after having consumed the broadcasts of several games this weekend, read reports concerning others, and manipulated data from some of the top conferences — what I’ve done is to assemble a collection of five players whose performances this weekend were notable for one reason or another.

Here are some qualities which might contribute to a prospect’s notability for the purposes of this post:

• He appeared within Kiley McDaniel’s way-too-early draft rankings; or
• He played well relative to his age/level of competition; or
• Video is available for him from this weekend; or
• He possesses some other compelling feature.

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Professor Andy Andres remembers the first year that he and his colleagues, David Tybor and Morgan Melchiorre, taught the Sabermetrics 101 course at Tufts University. One of the more memorable lectures came on October 18, 2004, which was a pretty memorable night in New England. Though Game 5 of the American League Championship Series had started around 5 pm, Sabermetrics 101 — which met in the evenings — was still in session. At least for a time.

“We felt like we had to get through the lecture,” Andres recalls. “So Tybor and I, he’s got the radio, and every half inning we’d write the line score [on the blackboard].” But then in the eighth inning, David Ortiz belted a homer into the Monster seats. Andres and Tybor consulted, but determined that since Melchiorre had been lecturing about Derek Jeter’s defense at the time that they should let him preach, hoping the good karma would continue to rub off on the team. But they weren’t the only ones who had learned of Ortiz’s feats. “One of the girls in the back of the room, went ‘Wahooooooo, Ortiz just hit a home run!” Class dismissed. “We immediately shut it down, and switched to FOX,” Andres says.

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