Joey Gallo’s Strikeouts Shouldn’t Alarm You
Joey Gallo is one of baseball’s most promising prospects, but he’s also one of its most polarizing. On the plus side, he’s got major power. He sported an isolated power of .344 between High-A and Double-A last year, which was the highest mark of any minor leaguer with at least 300 plate appearances. But he’s also hindered by chronic contact problems. He strikes out more than almost any prospect we’ve seen before — or at least anyone who’s gone on to be a successful big-leaguer. According to Minor League Central, Gallo’s 64% Zone-Contact% was the lowest of any minor-league hitter with data available from last year.
Despite his high strikeout totals, Gallo’s received no shortage of praise within prospect circles. Kiley McDaniel ranked him 16th overall in his top 200 ranking, and just about every other prospect analyst agrees that Gallo’s among baseball’s top 15 or 20 prospects. KATOH’s all in on Gallo, as well. It pegs him for 11 WAR through age-28 — the seventh-highest projection among players with at least 200 plate appearances or batters faced.
Gallo’s ridiculous power numbers drive his rosy forecast, but it also helps that he does a little more than just crank homers. He posted a healthy 16% BB% last year, and walked more often than his league at both minor league stops. His projection also gets a boost from his strong BABIP, which shows he hits the ball hard, even when it doesn’t clear the fence. Both of these characteristics have enabled him maintain respectable on-base numbers — in lieu of his strikeouts — and could mean good things for his future as a major-leaguer.
Still, there’s reason to be a bit skeptical of Gallo’s KATOH projection — or any of his stats-based projections, for that matter. Even the best predictive models can produce wonky forecasts when given extreme inputs, and Gallo — with his unique combination of power and strikeouts — certainly qualifies as extreme. Projections are generated from historical data points, and there simply haven’t been many data points like Gallo. Given Gallo’s unusual offensive profile, it’s not easy to say how he’ll transition to the big leagues.
By no means is Gallo the first high-power, high-strikeout prospect to come along. He might be the most unprecedented, though. The graphic below plots all minor-leaguers under the age of 24 who recorded at least 400 plate appearances in a season since 2006. There are 4,867 in all, but Gallo’s two seasons in full-season ball stand out from the other 4,865. The uniqueness of Gallo’s seasons might be exaggerated by the fact strikeouts are becoming more common, but the point still stands: Gallo’s a rare breed.
Striking out too often is obviously a bad thing, but plenty of hack-tastic power hitters have managed to have fine careers despite their swings and misses. Giancarlo Stanton, Adam Dunn, Ryan Howard and Chris Davis come to mind. At the same time, though, all of the power in the world won’t do a hitter any good of he can’t make consistent contact. The prospect graveyard is filled of toolsy power hitters who never figured out how to make enough contact to get by. There’s Billy Ashley, Josh Booty, Chad Hermansen, Dallas McPherson, Brandon Wood, Brett Wallace …. You get the idea. It remains to be seen if Gallo will make enough contact to avoid joining that group.
In evaluating hitting prospects, home runs are good and strikeouts are bad. That much is obvious. But it’s hard to know what to make of a player like Gallo, who does both of these things way more often than the average player. Maybe the normal rules don’t apply to all-or-nothing players. Maybe the Brandon Woods and Joey Gallos of the world are more likely to struggle with the transition from the minors to the majors.
To test this hypothesis, I looked at all hitters since 1990 who logged at least 400 plate appearances in Double-A at age-23 or younger and who also played in the majors. I regressed each player’s home run rate, strikeout rate and the interaction between the two variables ( HR% x K%) onto his WAR through age-28. If there were a reason to be weary of these all-or-nothing types, the interaction variable would likely be statistically significant with a negative coefficient. But that isn’t the case. Home runs and strikeouts are both significant in the direction you’d expect, but the interaction between the two isn’t statistically significant.
In other words, this means home runs are good and strikeouts are bad — but having a lot of both doesn’t make a player any more or less likely to be a successful player. This is a good sign for Gallo, who was excellent in the minors last year, but was excellent in a very unusual way.
Gallo comes with a bit more risk than most highly-touted players who are knocking on the door of the big leagues. Still, it’s hard to bet against a guy who’s had as much success as Gallo has before his 21st birthday. With wRC+ figures of 183, 124, 163, 221 and 141, respectively, Gallo’s crushed it at every minor-league stop despite being much younger than his competition. Most hitters who do this turn into quality big-leaguers, if not stars. And while there’s certainly risk involved with an extreme set of skills, we probably should expect Gallo to do the same, strikeouts and all.
Chris works in economic development by day, but spends most of his nights thinking about baseball. He writes for Pinstripe Pundits, FanGraphs and The Hardball Times. He's also on the twitter machine: @_chris_mitchell None of the views expressed in his articles reflect those of his daytime employer.
Who is that data point in the lower right quadrant?
Anyone of note in those points around Gallo?
I second this.
Yeah, that lonely lil dot stood out to me too.
I third this.
Mike Moustakas, 2010
That should scare us all if it’s Mike Moustakas haha.
That’s interesting to me, because while his power has been ok, his problem seemingly is that he makes too much contact.
http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/on-mike-moustakas-and-terrible-contact/
The point in the lower-right was 2010 Mike Moustakas. Some of the guys closest to Gallo are: 2012 Telvin Nash, 2010 Greg Halman, 2009 Cody Johnson, 2008 Giancarlo Stanton, 2013 Miguel Sano and 2007 Chris Davis.
Ah Cody Johnson, the poor man’s Joey Gallo.
Ahh..Greg Halman. Used to play with AND against him. May he rest in peace.
I know I’m a little late to the party an likely no one will read this but your comment made me look up Greg Halman. THAT was interesting, thanks!
Interesting article: I’m glad to see that he has a decent walk rate since I’m looking forward to see his power bat try to perform this year.
He’s had a decent spring training so far, when do you think the Rangers will call him up this year? Is he worth drafting in redraft leagues? or should i just wait until i hear news of a call up?
I’d guess September unless they trade Adrian Beltre.
Listing a bunch of players who didn’t strike out anywhere near as much as Gallo did in the minors is proof of nothing.
The only successful MLB player with MILB strikeouts all that close to Gallo’s is Russ Branyan.
Branyan with less contact and more defense is what should be expected of Gallo. Guys like Stanton, Davis and Dunn have no relation to Gallo.
Stanton at 18 in A ball struck out 26% of the time, Gallo at 20 in A+ struck out 26%. Chris Davis at 21 in A+ struck out 29.4%. Dunn is the one that has no place in this comparison based on MiLB numbers. I think that we all expect Gallo to post worse K% over the remainder of his pro career, but comparing him with players of similar age at similar levels with similar K% isn’t nothing.
You realize that Stanton having the same K-rate in A-ball at 18 as Gallo did at 20 proves my point, not yours, right? When he was Gallo’s age, he put up a .356 wOBA in the MLB.
Cherry-picking prospects’ lowest contact stints and comparing them to Gallo’s absolute best run to draw an equivalency is ignorant, if not disingenuous.
Stanton and Gallo match up almost perfectly with Stanton being a year younger at each level. Not that that shouldn’t be a big deal in the long run, but the one year growth difference shouldn’t be huge, so it should not be shocking if Gallo does this year pretty much what Stanton did at age 20
Dave, maybe you should check their K%’s again.
I’m not saying that it’s perfect, I’m just saying that there is a reason why they were brought up. Also, none of these guys had Gallo’s power, and none of them walked like he does. Honestly, there aren’t good comps available because no one has profiled in the extreme like Gallo in the past, which is kind of the point of trying to find anyone that we can look at and say, ‘well, that’s pretty similar.’ I was also mistaken in that Gallo was 19 when he posted those K%’s in A ball, he wouldn’t turn 20 until after the season was already over.
Adam Dunn didn’t have Gallo’s power? Cool story bro.
Lets completely ignore the significance of Gallo dropping his K% over 10 points moving UP a level. Not significant at all.
I concur with this in broad strokes. However, Gallo did reduce his K rate in Myrtle Beach at age 20 to a level which suggest that he could succeed as a major leaguer. He is a significantly better prospect than Ryan Howard at age 21-22, and of the same general type. I could certainly see him turning into Matt Williams (at the same age Williams hit .240/.311/.404 in the Midwest League with fewer Ks than Gallo but at some reasonable level of similarity given the difference in developmental level).
But as you can see, those players mostly didn’t hit as many homers as Gallo did. Home runs are more good than strikeouts are bad. That’s sort of the point of the article. He is unprecedented in two ways, and we don’t actually know if his strikeouts really are too great to dismiss him.
Brandon Wood hit a ton of bombs, too; and he did it while playing a good SS.
Ks matter. Stanton with 50 more Ks isn’t a league average hitter.
Brandon Wood is an n of 1, and also didn’t have nearly as high a home run rate as Gallo.
Stanton also didn’t hit as many homers as Gallo.
“Ks matter.” Homers matter too.
The reason I’ve repeated this three times if because that is the point. There is no rule that we know of that states that if a prospect K’s more than X% of the time, he won’t make it. If you look at his K rate, you think “how could he make it” but if you look at his HR rate, you think “how could he NOT make it?”
That’s the point. He’s at the extreme. We don’t know what will happen.
If you’re trying to argue that Gallo has more power than Stanton, good luck with that.
Stanton homered in 7.4% of his minor league at bats. Gallo has homered in 9.8% of his, while being only a year older than Stanton was at the same levels. So yes, it’s quite possible he does.
When I look at extreme HR rates, what I think is “The only way he won’t make it is if he can’t make contact.”
Gallo can’t make contact.
Also, turning into Russell Branyan isn’t “not making it.” The man was an above average hitter in the majors for 10 years; he just broke down physically.
You said it yourself. He can’t make contact, and yet he’s been one of the best hitters in minors.
If he has the same contact and HR rate in the majors, he’ll be one of the better hitters in the majors as well. Even if you want to project both those rates to get worse, there’s still a small range where they could get worse and he’d still be a decent hitter.
Giancarlo Stanton with 50 more strikeouts would still absolutely be an All Star if his batting average was the same (ie contact outs converted to strikeouts)
Hahahahaha.
Well played.
I feel like his second round of AA will really tell us what’s going on. His K% went back up into alarming territory after simply being high in A+, his BB% also went from astonishingly great to good. If he can adjust in his second time around, to at least cut his K% to the upper 20’s, then we can chaulk it up to simply being an adjustment period against better competition, which would ease pretty much every concern that I have about him.
After reading this, I’m still alarmed. Nobody mentioned here had a K rate near the Mid-30% Gallo’s put up in the minors. As for the study, I don’t think I’d have attacked the question the same way you did. You start by choosing players who’ve played in the Majors, which may be skewing this toward guys who have been successful (so maybe you’re missing a bunch who were derailed by this lack of contact and never made it.) You also test for high-HR, high-K guys. But I don’t think Gallo’s HRs are part of the equation really. People are concerned about his otherworldly K rate. What is the relationship between K’ing 1/3 of the time and making it? From that group, does having a high HR (or even BB) rate make it more likely you’ll succeed?
Of course it does. If Gallo strikes out 40% of the time in the majors, but homers in 10% of his plate appearances, he’d be one of the better hitters in baseball.
The reason he tests for the relationship between HR and K is because we’re looking at a guy who is extreme in both regards, and both are meaningful for prospect projection. Since there is no interaction effect, then we can just use K and HR independently to project Gallo. Since he’s extremely good in one important way and extremely bad in another important way, I don’t think it’s clear what we should do.
I think some people are dismissing Gallo offhand, saying that no one with that contact rate could possibly make it. So, the author found some guys who also had alarmingly low contact rates and made it.
Very well put, BIP. I agree that none of the players in my study struck out as much as Gallo, but that’s because no players period have struck out as much as Gallo while also posting a respectable batting line.
Cutting out the players who never played in the majors eliminates the guys who were never good enough to get the call. Given his numbers in the minors, Gallo will certainly get a shot. The question is how well he’ll do.
I don’t know what fuzzy math you are using to where Gallo could hit a HR in 10% of his PAs. Assuming 40% K rate, 10% BB rate, and even really high FB% and HR/FB% rates like 50% and 30% respectively, Gallo only hits 45 HRs in a 600 PA season. That’s 7.5%, and is really giving Gallo the benefit of the doubt.
And the examples used did not have any correlation to contact rate, as we don’t have minor league contact rate information prior to 2011. They used K rate, which is very distinct from contact rate, and less predictive.
That was just a number I made up to prove a point. I don’t think he’s going to do that. However, some people are talking about him like there is no HR rate he could possibly have to counter that K rate. Well, of course there is, it’s just harder to obtain the more he K’s. However, if anyone could maintain such a HR rate, it’s Gallo, given his power is almost literally off the charts.
As for contact rate, is Gallo’s even worse than you would expect given his K rate?
Calvin Pickering pre-2000 looks to be a decent comp. Unless something changes fast, Joey Gallo will not makes MLB for quite some time (if ever). JG is off the charts but Myrtle Beach looks like an aberration more than what we can expect.
You didn’t even mention Gallo’s 58% contact rate in his almost 300 PAs in AA last year. Again, that was in AA. It’s highly unlikely he is going to improve this number when he gets a shot in the bigs, and quite likely that he makes even less contact against the superior pitchers once he gets there. Even hackers like Mark Reynolds and Chris Davis make contact at least 60%. Even Javy Baez, in all his hacktastic glory in his terrible cup of coffee last year, make contact 59% of the time. You absolutely SHOULD be worried about Gallo’s inability to make contact.
Is it though? How rare is it for prospects Gallo’s age to improve their underlying skills? Also, if he has had success with his current approach, he’s not as likely to change it. If he fails at some level, we may see him make an effort to make more contact, which may never have tried before.
Yes, it is. Contact rate is a harsh mistress that is not easily improved upon without drastic changes. It’s unfortunate that we only have a few years’ worth of minor league contact rate to go off of, but in what we’ve seen, it rarely, if ever, gets better upon promotion to the bigs. Power/BB rate guys like George Springer and even Mike Trout are examples as their contact rates have gotten worse.
That’s not to say that the contact rate won’t vary a tiny bit throughout the years. But usually the variance is only 2-3% points. Even at 61%, Gallo is much more Russell Branyan than Adam Dunn.
Gallo’s contact rate in A-ball in 2014 was 66%. If the 58% number in AA represents an adjustment to more advanced pitching, and his true talent level is around 66%, that would boost his projection.
Where on earth are you getting Gallo’s contact rate in High A?
JG has only shown 60%+ contact rate in <200 ABs at any level! Odds are, JG will fail.
I did mention his Z-Contact%. I chose to cite this number since O-Contact% from MLC can be a little wonky. (I’ll have an article on this at some point.)
Even if he doesn’t improve his contact ability (which he still could), that doesn’t mean he can’t be successful. It just means he’d strike out a lot. He’s been one of the best hitters in the minors the last two years despite his high K%, and there’s not much reason to think he couldn’t do that in the majors as well.
I did see that, but z-contact is far from perfect in the minor leagues as well. Basic contact rate is about the only reliable stat down there in this subset.
“It’s highly unlikely he is going to improve this number”
Because a guy’s age 20 season in AA should be purely evaluated based only on numbers, and only at that level?
What jumped out to everyone is the very real adjustments Gallo made after much hard work at A+ ball. He’s been working hard all winter long. I don’t expect another 211 wRC+ season (because you can’t expect that of anyone), but he has shown ability to make adjustments. Don’t rule him out yet.
No, I was speaking only to contact rate. As I said before, it stinks we only have a few years of minor league info to go on, but on what we have, minor league contact rate does not get significantly better as a player ages. Major league contact rates are generally slightly lower than what they are for a guy in the minors. A few players are able to slightly increase their contact rates, but it is usually only 1 or 2 % points.
We do, however, have contact rate at the big league level since 2002 or so, and it will show you that the contact rates for young guys in the majors doesn’t significantly increase over their careers, lending more credence to the position that contact rate isn’t something that can be greatly improved upon just by simply getting more reps and maturing.
Sorry, guys. I was wrong.
I actually think your Russell Branyan comp is ideal. People forget how big of a masher Branyan was in the minors. He had a 40 HR year, just like Gallo. Sad part is, Branyan’s horrific major league contact rate was still several points better than what Gallo did at AA last year.
Not a bad comp at all, but also only one data point.
The issue is, IMO, that Branyan’s really the only data point we have that both struck out as much as Gallo in the minors and had any sort of real MLB career.
Real issue with Branyan is the injury. Gallo, Branyan, Sano and Stanton are about as similar as it’s possible to be in their A and A+-AA seasons. Stanton was19, Gallo and Sano 20 and Branyan 21. In the following season, Branyan and Stanton both destroyed AA after struggling even more than Gallo on their first promotion. Branyan wrecked his wrist after only 43 games and wasn’t right for another year after that at which point he was already 24. Stanton you know about. Sano has missed a year with the elbow so he will provide another data point with Branyan about the impact of missing a year on a young hitter (as aRanger fan I am really worried that Profar will never be anything like we hoped).
Once again, Dave check the K%’s. Nobody is arguing that Gallo hasn’t put up some great wRC+’s, but Stanton put up a 27.2 K%, Sano put up a 26.7 K%, and Gallo put up a whopping 35 K%.
Unless there are many other players who had Gallo’s K rate AND had his HR rate, and didn’t make it, then this is a statement about the weakness of our projection, and not a reason to put extra weight on the Branyan comp.
I’m with Istan.
Everyone always points to Stanton as a comp for Gallo, but it just doesn’t work. Stanton struck out drastically less than Gallo while being a year younger at every level. That year is a big deal for prospects, especially considering that Stanton played football and basketball in HS (and got multiple D1 scholarship offers as a TE), while Gallo only played baseball at the HS level.
When Stanton was 20, he put up a .356 wOBA in the majors.
Gallo isn’t on Stanton’s level in terms of anything other than power.
Oh, I know. I really like the comp. That guy above is just some dickhead who doesn’t know enough about baseball or math to actually argued the point with me.
So you are comparing raw contact rates between players from two different eras? Unwise.
Hah! Seeing as how you dislike me enough to imitate me, I’d expect you to know that I almost never admit to being wrong!
Dead giveaway, haha.
I did this research for Gallo a couple months ago:
I’m going to start with the positives. The obvious thing to start with is the power. He’s mashed an immensely impressive 82 homeruns in the last two seasons, across four levels. If you were going to rank your prospects off of that alone it would be a pure toss-up between him and Kris Bryant for the top of your list. However, I am also a big fan of his walk rate. After posting a solid 10.8% across 446 Pas in low-A last year, Gallo improved to a spectacular 20.7% in 246 high-A PAs before also posting a very good 12.4% mark in 291 AA PAs. He’s also viewed to be a capable defender at 3B. The power/on-base ability from a player who plays a position that’s on the positive side of the defensive spectrum creates a very exciting prospect, at the very least. What is also exciting about Gallo is that he managed to reach AA during his age 20 season.
On the other hand, there is the negative. The good thing about Gallo’s downside is that there’s really only one issue to quibble about. The problem is that it’s a pretty big issue. The most positive thing you can say about Gallo’s ability to make consistent contact is that it’s poor. After posting a truly awful 37% K rate last year he showed excellent improvement while moving up a level, checking in at a manageable 26% in High A. Unfortunately, he was not able to maintain that improvement when he advanced again, posting a nearly unfathomable 39.5% K rate in AA.
As evaluators we are all entitled to come to whatever conclusions we want about the importance of the positives and negatives that are currently apparent in Gallo’s overall game. However, the entire point of evaluating year over year is to consistently improve, so that we can be more accurate over time. We might not be able to say what quality of player Gallo will be in the Majors today, but if a carbon copy of him shows up 10 years from now we should all want to be able to more accurately predict what kind of player Joey Gallo 2 will be. So with that idea in mind, let’s take a look at recent AA performances to see if we can parse out some players who match either Gallo’s positives or his negatives.
I looked back at all seasons in AA since 2006 for players with at least 200 ABs. There is probably a sample size issue there, but I wanted to include as many players as possible, since we’re trying to figure out what Gallo is going to be going forward. The first comparison I made was based off Gallo’s positives, so I searched for players 21 and younger who posted an ISO over .250. The result was an impressive group of 10 players (Gallo included):
Name Age PA ISO BB% K% wRC+
Oscar Taveras 20 531 0.252 7.90% 10.50% 159
Giancarlo Stanton 20 240 0.417 18.30% 22.10% 206
Mike Moustakas 21 298 0.34 8.70% 14.10% 194
Eric Hosmer 20 211 0.303 7.10% 12.80% 165
Wilin Rosario 21 297 0.267 7.10% 19.20% 142
Colby Rasmus 20 556 0.275 12.60% 19.40% 149
Brandon Wood 21 522 0.276 10.30% 28.50% 132
Javier Baez 20 240 0.344 7.90% 28.80% 180
Miguel Sano 20 276 0.335 13.00% 29.30% 145
Joey Gallo 20 291 0.292 12.40% 39.50% 141
Six of these players have seen significant time in the majors and five of them have enjoyed at least some level of success. There’s one elite player here, Stanton, one below average regular who produces a lot of value defensively, Moustakas, and three players who are pretty average offensively over their careers, Hosmer, Rasmus and Rosario. Then there’s Brandon Wood. Most people have pretty high hopes for Javier Baez despite his debut. Miguel Sano is well-regarded as well, but is coming off a lost season. RIP Oscar Taveras.
The common theme that stands out to me here is that all of these players were very highly regarded as prospects. If I’m not mistaken, only Rosario never received at least an A- grade from John. While I think that Hosmer has a pretty good chance to eventually become an all-star caliber player, I’m less hopeful that anyone else currently in the Majors will reach our expectations of them as prospects. It’s also worth noting that the two players who have played in the Majors with the K rate closest to Gallo’s in these seasons have combined for 980 PAs of a wRC+ around 40.
The next thing I wanted to look at was to see if there are any success stories coming out of Gallo’s negative side. I sorted for players who posted a K rate north of 25% while maintaining a wRC+ of at least 100. To balance it out, I also limited it to players with a BB rate of at least 10% and again limited it to players 21 and under. This time I came up with a list of eight players:
Name Age PA ISO BB% K% wRC+
Anthony Gose 20 587 0.161 10.60% 26.20% 114
Jordan Schafer 21 350 0.202 14.00% 25.10% 130
Cameron Maybin 21 459 0.179 13.10% 27.00% 125
Travis Snider 20 423 0.199 12.30% 27.40% 121
Brandon Wood 21 522 0.276 10.30% 28.50% 132
Wladimir Balentien 21 522 0.205 13.40% 26.80% 100
Miguel Sano 20 276 0.335 13.00% 29.30% 145
Joey Gallo 20 291 0.292 12.40% 39.50% 141
Again I notice that all of these players were highly regarded at one point in time. However, unlike last time, there are no real success stories. Gose just broke into the majors, Sano has yet to debut, and maybe Maybin figures something out, but there’s not a lot of bright spots to point to, other than Balentien mashing over in Japan. One positive, however, is that other than Gallo and Sano, all of these players have at least made it to the Majors. It is worth noting that Stanton would have appeared on this list again (his age 19 season) if I had set the BB rate minimum at 9%.
In summary, I think it’s safe to say that Joey Gallo will get a fair chance to play in the Majors in the near future, barring injury. That’s fairly significant, because the biggest fear of a prospect is the complete bust of never reaching the bigs. He’s also got Stanton as a fairly reasonable comp, given the criteria for both sets. That’s a huge win. On the other side, Stanton is the only one of the 13 players to have played in the Majors from these two lists to have success. That’s still a really low rate for a player we think is going to be ranked among the best prospects. The big negative is that Brandon Wood appears to be a stronger offensive comp than Stanton, and he was seen as a better defensive player. However, it’s unlikely that he ends up at either one of these extremes.
Note: I kept the rather arbitrary cutoffs where I did for this because Gallo has a pretty extreme skillset: extremely good power with extremely bad contact. If you expand any of the criteria, such as dropping the ISO from the first set to .200, you’ll find a lot more names ranging from Evan Longoria to Eric Duncan. I personally did not feel that including more names made the data any more meaningful.
Very thorough and well done. Excellent complement to the article.
Not one of the better articles on here. Gallo is SHALLOW.
Fuck off and let the adults talk, kiddo.
I commend you for your work!
One thing to consider about his walk rates. Minor league pitchers could simply be scared as hell to let up bombs to him, so they pitch around him, hence his 20+% walk rate in high A.
Exactly. Part of the reason his K-rate tanked in Hi-A is that pitchers flat out stopped throwing him strikes.
Part of my concern with Gallo is that he does have a good eye. It’s not a mental thing; he just can’t make contact.
Yes, I saw research which I believe may have been from the author of this article who found that minor league BB rate don’t mean much until AAA.
Pitching around Gallo is exactly what they started to do in A+.
Hasn’t been much of an issue elsewhere, but he was getting the unintentional/intentional walk Bonds treatment a fair bit over the last month in Myrtle Beach, and for good reason.
@Cool Lester Smooth – actually, the K rate tank happened BEFORE pitchers stopped throwing to him. Check the game by game info or (less valuable) splits.
Good write up. So basically Joey Gallo will be a MLB player, that will strike out a ton and hit some home runs. Sounds like he could play for a few years and have a good season here and there but don’t expect him to be a superstar. This guy strikeout rate is 10% higher than the next guy on your list that is alarming. He swings and misses so much because he has a very high uppercut swing with a small margin for error. Good luck to him hitting MLB pitching. We all know how Javy Baez is turning up
I see people denigrating Gallo as “only” a Russ Branyan clone, but Branyan was a damn good MLB hitter. He had massive injury problems, but he played in parts of 14 seasons with a career 111 wRC+. I’m sure the Rangers would take that in a heartbeat, considering he couldn’t be any worse defensively or health-wise than Branyan was.
He averaged 1.5 WAR/year across his MLB career. It wouldn’t be a bust, I guess, but that’s a below average regular.
True but I think that the Gallo alarmists feel he could never even be an average major league hitter with that contact rate.
If Gallo manages only a 111 wRC+ with elite-elite power, it will definitely be somewhat disappointing, but it will also totally vanquish the idea that player can’t succeed with a contact rate like he has. 111 is good.
Oh, Gallo never could even be an average major league hitter with his current contact rate.
If he dramatically improves his contact rate, raising it to Branyan’s level, which I think he can do, he’s got a shot at being a Branyan type hitter.
The Branyan comp is an optimistic one.
You keep saying that but you haven’t really backed it up. Pointing out that his K rate or contact is worse that all his comps is pointless because his HR rate is better than all his comps. So in a sense he doesn’t have a true comp.
You keep making these assertions without once considering the counterpoint I’ve been making.
Take Stanton’s 2014 season, make the K-Rate 35%, but leave the other peripherals (ISO, BABIP, etc.):
It goes from .288/.395/.555 to .189/.307/.456; that’s a ~110 wRC+, if we assume that he makes more contact in the MLB than he did in AA and has a .350 BABIP.
That’s what I would be hoping for, were I a Rangers fan.
If you assume that, like Stanton and Davis, he’ll never better his age-20 AA K-rate, the line drops to .135/.262/.402, which comes out to ~.280 wOBA (~75 wRC+).
Stanton’s 2012 line (when he had roughly the same HR% in the MLB as Gallo just did between A+ and AA) turns from .290/.361/.608 into .167/.241/.485 (~.300 wOBA/88 wRC+) when you give him Gallo’s K%.37/5
So, yeah. If he doesn’t dramatically improve his AA K-rate, he’s not going to be all close to being a league average hitter.
And Giancarlo Stanton had a better HR% as a 20 year old in AA than Gallo did at either level last year, so I’m really not sure where you got the idea that Gallo’s power is unprecedented.
Oh, I dunno. It could be that the guy hit 87 HR in his first 1,000 professional plate appearances. No one has ever done that, and we are at a historically low avg. HR rate across baseball.
CLS, you seem to like to compare Gallo to Branyan and Stanton. At this point you must know that both struggled in their first go at AA , much more than Gallo using any performance measure other than strikeout rate, and that both dramatically improved when they returned to AA the following year. As Stanton was a year younger than Gallo, and Branyan a year older, it seems likely based on our sample of two that Gallo will also dramatically improve if reassigned to Frisco. Talk about cherry picking. You claim Branyan is the ceiling for Gallo based on the similarity of their minor league records, ignoring that Branyan was a year older at each level, and that he suffered a major injury after just 43 games in the following season, and then claim that Stanton being a year younger means that we can throw out any similarity in their minor league records and just compare performance at the same age.
If Gallo cuts his k rate to 25% at AA this year will that change your expectations? Or is failing to dominate AA at age 20 in a small sample a sufficient statistic for. Major league futility? Not gonna be a lot of prospects left by that measure.
It’s not about “failing to dominate AA.”
It’s about being utterly unable to make contact against AA pitching, over a statistically significant sample size. No one who has made that little contact over a 250 PA sample in AA has ever been a MLB average hitter.
And I feel the Branyan comp works because Branyan’s Ks were significantly lower. I’m assuming the numbers would have been more similar were he pushed as aggressively as Gallo was.
And, again, the only similarity between Stanton and Gallo as prospects is their power. Stanton was significantly better at making contact from jump, despite having much less baseball experience and being a year younger at each level, and is a better athlete.
Stop trying to wave away the fact that Gallo can’t make contact. It matters. He can put up a .300+ ISO and a .350 BABIP, and still only manage a .300 wOBA if he Ks as much as he did in AA.
Branyan’s WAR was affected by poor defense and health. Surely Gallo projects better at each of those.
Oh, exactly. That’s why I find it absurd that people think I’m saying he’ll bust.
A healthy Russell Branyan is a great outcome for any prospect.
Consider me one of the few prospect analysts who absolutely would not put Gallo in my top 20, or anywhere near it for that matter. I’ll try to explain why, but first I’d like to see the discussion move deeper than K% and BB%. K% is influenced by a lot of things, for instance I noted regarding Joc Pederson that his huge jump in K-rate was not primarily a result of struggling to make contact against AAA pitching. Instead he had a 51% jump in strikeouts looking while his contact and swinging rates were largely similar to what he posted in AA. If Gallo was striking out a lot because he was taking borderline pitches, that would be a lot less concerning than having a very low rate of making contact.
Similarly, BB% can mean a discerning eye at the plate or it could just mean you’re being pitched around. Thiago Splitchange mentioned that above and was absolutely correct. Gallo swings a lot. His 55.1% swing rate tied with Hanser Alberto among 2014 RoughRiders with at least 100 plate appearances (and 11th highest among all AA hitters for whom MLC has this data), while his 23.5% swing rate at pitches outside the zone was far and away the most of anyone on the team with at least 100 plate appearances (Jorge Alfaro was 26.4% but just missed the cutoff). So the walk rate itself is not actually evidence that Gallo has a good eye. When you consider that similarly contact-challenged George Springer had a minor league O-Swing rate of 8.7%, that starts to get a little scary. Some of that difference can be attributable to the more sketchy outside the zone classification from MLC that Mr. Mitchell referenced above, but it wouldn’t come close to explaining the massive gap between them.
As Mr. Sullivan noted last February in his column on George Springer, prospects with these types of horrific contact rates experiencing prolonged major league success is extremely rare. Springer at least had the benefit of speed and defensive value, but even then I stated my belief that “the only way I can see Springer succeeding as a regular is if his Z-Swing% is very high and his O-Swing% is very low.” Fortunately for Astros fans, that’s exactly what they got from him in 2014, as his 46.8 gap between O-Swing% and Z-Swing% was the second largest in the majors behind Chris Iannetta. And even then Springer’s horrible contact rate depressed his value. Gallo doesn’t have the speed, may not be able to stick at third, and he doesn’t have Springer’s eye.
So just how bad is Gallo’s contact rate? Of players with 100+ major league plate appearances last season, only Springer (68.4) and David Ross (69.5%) came in below a 70% Z-Contact rate. That 68.4% from Springer was worse than anyone with 200+ plate appearances in a season since Russell Branyan in 2003 (with Branyan’s 2002 being the only worse mark since the millenium). Even guys with massive strikeout numbers typically aren’t anywhere near this bad at making contact with pitches inside the strike zone. Kudos to Cool Lester Smooth for being the first to make the Branyan comparison, as there lies Gallo’s potential path to success. While contact rate and especially Z-Contact rate correlate strongly from year to year, Branyan was one of the exceptions to post significant improvement during his career, going from the high 60s in his first four seasons to the mid 70s by his final four seasons. Gallo will need to buck the odds and experience similar improvement, only he has even farther to go given that even Branyan’s rates were not this bad.
Still completely missing the point.
Gallo strikes out more than anyone else because he has more power.
If he had finished the season in Myrtle Beach he would have had huge numbers and a perfectly acceptable 26% k rate as a 20 year old in A+ ball.
He didn’t do that entirely because joey Gallo striking out 26% of the time is Barry Bonds so they had to promote him cause he wasn’t getting any pitches at all.
Striking out 30% of the time he was the best hitter in the Texas league for 6 weeks until TL pitchers started giving him shit to hit and he got a bit undisciplined. Even with a stretch at the end where he was completely lost he posted the sixth best OPS in the league, and had more at bats that most of the guys above him.
Gallo is the only guy in baseball who gets pitched around even when he is striking out 40% of the time. So he is the only hitter who strikes out that much. He will keep striking out 35% of the time until he cuts down his swing or makes the big leagues. Like Bonds he can strike out less in the big leagues because there is no where to promote him to.
Cherrypicking his High A K% and ignoring his Low A and AA K% is ridiculous. You can’t pretend like he would efinitely have a 26 K% in High A if he stayed there all year long. We don’t have those numbers, so we have to incorporate his AA numbers and the context of a higher level.
But if he doesn’t arbitrarily exclude 75% of the sample size we have on Gallo, his point completely falls apart!
Since apparently you know nothing about minor league baseball I will share some key information. Players get better as they get older and gain experience. The minor leagues are organized into different levels so that prospects can face age and talent appropriate competition. Teams try to assign players to a minor league team where they will be challenged but not drown.
It is a simple matter of math that Gallo has a predictable distribution of outcomes on batted balls (singles, doubles HRs outs) so given his strikeout rate you can pretty well predict his OPS. Since he has a higher HR rate than anyone else in baseball, and a high BABIP because of how hard he hits the ball, Gallo is more productive at any given strikeout rate than other players. With a 26% k rate at A+ he had an OPS of 1.200. With ak-rate of 40% in AA he still had the 6th highest OPS of any player in the Texas league. As long as the Rangers advance Gallo as soon has he establishes a 1.000 OPS performance level he will continue to strike out more than 30% of the time. Just math.
I do not claim to know what those strikeouts foretell about Gallos future performance as some other people apparently can, but I do know that people that draw conclusions based on bivariate correlations in a multi variate system subject to endogeneity issues should not be ridiculing other posters on the internet.
“Gallo has a predictable distribution of outcomes on batted balls”
Tell me more about how his career .325 babip equates to a “high babip.” Oh wait. That’s right, you’re ignoring pre-2014 because doing so fits the narrative you’ve already decided on beforehand. You really taught me. Especially those college words like “endogeniety.” I reckon that’ll teach me good.
Pretending that you’ll know what babip Gallo will produce in the majors or his singles and doubles outcome is funny. You really should be doing these projections for a living because I have never heard anyone else pretend they can do so. Good for you, Dave. Clearly you aren’t either ignorant of your own stupidity or extremely biased or both.
I do do these projections for a living. And teach them in college.
Endogeneity just means that a random outcome depends on the the decisions of the participants in a stochastic system, particularly when they respond to the focal statistic. In this case the most important source of endogeneity is the team choosing the level Gallo will play at. The other important issues with endogeneity involve the willingness of pitchers to throw him strikes and Gallo’s own patience or lack of it. Each of these things will effect the frequency with which he barrels the pitched baseball which is the underlying ability we are trying to measure through these statistics.
Gallo’s strikeout rate at any given level is a function of all of these things, and many others. When you look at it out of context and claim that Gallo cannot succeed because no player has ever had that high a strikeout rate and succeeded in the majors, you are guilty of one of the most basic statistical fallacies. As the title of the article is “Joey Gallo’s strikeouts shouldn’t alarm you” I think it is useful to know that.
Some years ago I coded up a Bayesian Hierarchical estimator to project player performance, which is the way serious people deal with these sorts of statistical inference problems. Among the many things I learned was a rough rule of thumb for predicting the impact of a level change on player performance. On average a player will increase his total of walks and strikeouts by ten percent and increase the ratio of strikeouts to walks by 1when he moves up a level. A year of additional playing will usually offset these effects for players under 22, which tends to create the illusion that player performance is constant through the low minors.
Personally I don’t think Gallo could hit .230 in the major leagues this year. Since he’s just 21 I do not think that means he will not be a successful major league player, however a lot can happen over a several year span in a young player’s development, so I am not nearly so willing as some of the folks here to prognosticate. I do think he will reduce his strikeout rate considerably in his next go at Frisco (which is where I hope they send him). Based on his spring so far, where he is the Rangers best hitter and talk is he is making a strong case for making the team, there is some chance he ends up at AAA, and I think you might find further evidence for his lack of contact if that is the case.
Joey Gallo hit 42 home runs last year and 40 the year before. I can’t remember a single one on a pitch that came in above his belt. Because of his size and his predilection for getting his arms extended, Gallo has an enormous hole in his swing: pretty much the entire upper third of the strike zone and the inside edge. Whether he becomes a high-upside four corner bench bat or a perennial All-Star in the majors depends completely on the degree to which he makes some sort of mechanical adjustment to hit high heat. (That and some sort of competence in laying off good breaking balls from lefties.) Otherwise, major league pitchers who know how to locate will eat him alive with velocity at the letters. Can he make the adjustment? I don’t think anyone here really knows. What we do know is that he made some changes to his swing last offseason, and he served as a one-man wrecking crew until sometime around his second trip through the Texas League. His development from 2013 to 2014 breeds optimism regarding whether he will continue to progress.
Gallo does to projection systems what Craig Kimbrel did to salary arbitration models. Don’t fret over trying to project outliers. Just watch him play baseball.
Did quick cals (and these could be off, so grain of salt)
If Gallo did the following:
PA = 600
BB% = 10%
HR% = 7%
2B% = 5%
BABIP = .300
He’d hit .238/.284/.527. OPS of .811. 210 K’s, 42 HRs. Not too bad, again if my math is correct. And yeah an extreme split in OBP/SLG.
Nevermind. Math off. Will try to fix.
Would be 238/314/527/841