Scouting Explained: Introduction, Hitting Pt 1 Pt 2 Pt 3 Pt 4 Pt 5 Pt 6

I wrote a four-part series on the hit tool as an entirely-too-long breakdown of the things I look for when I scout a hitter, but I knew there would be things I forgot to mention.  The one thing I forgot to bring up is something I mentioned in the also-entirely-too-long draft rankings; the different process I use to grade the current hit tool for amateur players.  Quoting from those draft rankings:

The present hit grades for Rodgers and for all amateur players going forward is a peer grade…rather than just putting blanket 20s on everyone’s present hit tool. A peer grade means how the player performs currently in games relative to his peers: players the same age and general draft status or skill level. Some teams started using this system to avoid over-projecting a raw hitter; some use the rule that you can’t project over 10 points above the peer grade for the future grade.  This helps you avoid saying players that can’t really hit now will become standout big league hitters. Obviously, some will, but it’s not very common and it’s probably smart to not bet millions on the rare one that will.

I said I would explain more about this, but I think I said basically everything here.  All but maybe one or two hitters in each draft class will have present 20 hit grades, but the context and amount of evidence will vary greatly.  The peer hitting grade helps tie this all together because, for a player with a short track record, scouts will find themselves projecting only on hitting tools when there isn’t much performance to grade. Using this system, it helps remind you to consider performance, but still weighing it appropriately given the sample size, competition level, etc.  I’m sure I’ll talk more about this with more specific examples as the draft approaches and grading conundrums present themselves.

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I’d like to believe that Jacob deGrom started out as hair. Just hair. Over time, that hair grew into much more than just hair, eventually sprouting a full human figure and developing world-class athletic ability. The hair would go on to play middle infield in college before transitioning into a pitcher and getting drafted by the New York Mets. The hair would then have Tommy John Surgery and never crack a top-1oo prospect list, but nevertheless the hair would reach the majors by age 25. And the hair would dominate.

On Monday night, deGrom made the 21st start of his rookie season, this one against the Miami Marlins. Here’s how he started:
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The footage embedded above comes from an August 22nd game between the Mets and the Dodgers and depicts Wilmer Flores acting out what is essentially the baseball equivalent of a first-day-of-school anxiety dream. With two outs and runners at first and second, Yasiel Puig batted a mostly harmless ground ball to Flores. Instead of converting said grounder into a routine out, however, what Flores did was first to (a) misplay the ball and then, after picking it up, (b) stumble forward unprovoked and fall to the ground in front of everyone.

That no one scored on the play (or the inning) is perhaps some consolation so far as this particular instance is concerned. Still, to the degree that just any one play can, this particular one doesn’t recommend Flores’ hands and agility.

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Scouting Explained: Introduction, Hitting Pt 1 Pt 2 Pt 3 Pt 4 Pt 5 Pt 6

As I was learning to evaluate, I was overwhelmed by this challenge of grading the hit tool. I wasn’t advanced enough to notice when hitters seemed uncomfortable as fast as I wanted to notice it and I hadn’t been on the beat long enough to have multiple years of history with players to know how to put what I was seeing in context of their whole careers. The easier part, however, was noticing the raw hitting tools. By the time an evaluator gets good at noticing and grading these, the other stuff tends to follow.

I break hitting into three components, but you could easily break it down further into many more. I saw three basic groupings and put every observation into one, then graded each group on the 20-80 scale, then use those to get to a hit tool grade in a more objective way. Scouts all have different ways that they do it and I’ve tinkered with different methods, but this one works for me and also gives me a guide for what to ask scouts about with hitters I haven’t seen recently.

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We’ve reached the point in the regular season where, moving forward, a lot of our posts will be focused on the playoff race and teams within the playoff race. This is simply a natural shift of attention that occurs as the season progresses. Everything throughout the regular season builds up to the playoff race and now we’re here, so everything that happens which directly affects the playoff race becomes all the more noteworthy.

That doesn’t mean much for the New York Mets. They’re playing without their best and most exciting player, are currently eight games below .500, just two games out of last place and all but mathematically eliminated from playoff contention, with a a 0.1% chance to make the wild card.

But that doesn’t mean all hope is lost. Looking beyond this season, the Mets have a lot to be excited about, thanks to some combination of Matt Harvey, Zack Wheeler, Jacob deGrom, Noah Syndergaard, Jon Niese, Rafael Montero and Dillon Gee making up one of most promising young pitching staffs in baseball. Looking towards the rest of this season, there is less to be excited about, as neither Harvey or Syndergaard will pitch in the majors this year. But deGrom is still enjoying an unexpected breakout year and Wheeler is living up to the hype of being really, really good.

And there’s something else about Zack Wheeler that will make the rest of his starts this season a little more interesting.
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There are a lot of reasons not to like Bartolo Colon. He’s 41 years old. He has a 50-game suspension for synthetic testosterone in the recent past, and he underwent controversial stem cell treatments before that. He pitched a grand total of 257.1 innings in a span of five years between the ages of 33 and 37. When he bats, he looks like this and this, and he still has $11 million coming to him for his age-42 season next year — along with the million-plus left on this year’s $9 million. If we’re thinking about the Moneyball scouts who (probably really didn’t) prioritize selling jeans over winning baseball games, Colon is the guy they were thinking about.

For all those reasons, and who knows how many others, Colon went unclaimed through the waiver process earlier this week. If the paragraph above was all you knew about the man, that would make a lot of sense. A fat, old, expensive pitcher who doesn’t throw hard or strike people out shouldn’t draw interest. Big deal, right?

Maybe it’s not. It’s probably not, because Colon is no ace. And yet it still raised a few eyebrows around the game, because Colon, for all his considerable flaws, is well into his fourth consecutive season of being a useful major league pitcher. And that’s after an earlier career portion that had eight seasons of being a useful — or better — major league pitcher. There’s a select few contenders Colon couldn’t help right now. There’s plenty more that could benefit, and there’s precious little pitching available. So why is he still a New York Met?

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It almost seems funny now, but for the entirety of spring training and into the first few weeks of the season, the Mets were unable to resolve the issue that had been hanging over their head for more than a year: Ike Davis or Lucas Duda? Davis had hit 32 homers in 2012 and had certainly had his moments otherwise, but was never able to produce consistently around an injured ankle and a bout with Valley Fever, and had generally been awful in 2013. Duda had shown he could consistently be something more than a league-average hitter, but he’d never had 500 plate appearances and was such a bad defensive outfielder when forced out there that he was no longer an option anywhere but first base. Both are lefties, and neither can hit lefty pitching, ruling out a platoon. One had to go.

Duda started seven of the first 15 games at first, plus another at designated hitter. Davis started five. Josh Satin, a righty swinger who has long since been dispatched to Triple-A, started three more. On April 18, the Mets finally made a call and dealt Davis to Pittsburgh for minor leaguers Zach Thornton and Blake Taylor. Since then, Davis has been a replacement player — literally, 0.0 WAR — in part-time play for Pittsburgh, and he’s about to lose playing time to the Pedro Alvarez experiment.

The job, then as now, belonged to Duda. You might say that the Mets chose wisely.

* * *

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During his minor league career, Jacob deGrom had a 3.62 ERA and struck out batters at about a league-average rate. Those are OK numbers, but without the context of his actual stuff, it’s not surprising he’d never been featured on Baseball America’s top 100 prospect list — or that he’d rated no higher on the New York Mets’ prospect list than Marc Hulet’s No. 7 ranking coming into this season.

Now that the pitcher with the hair and the command and the fastball and the changeup is dominating the major leagues, it’s fair to ask: How did we miss this?

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Because of  interleague play, many of this season’s All-Stars have already seen who’s on the other side. But there’s a unique opportunity to see the best of the other league on one field in Minnesota. So I asked some All-Stars if they were looking forward to a particular matchup today.

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Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.

In this installment, I’ll discuss three pitchers I’ve come across in A-ball who boast more polish than most at their level.

Summary
Plutko gained plenty of prospect helium with a dominant run at Low-A early in the season, but he’s found the going tougher after a promotion to the Carolina League.

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