Projecting Rob Kaminsky, Cleveland’s Return for Moss

by
July 30, 2015

Rob Kaminsky, who was the Cardinals first-round pick in 2013, has pitched very well as a 20-year-old in High-A this year. In 95 innings over 17 starts, he’s recorded a 2.09 ERA and 2.53 FIP. His 20% strikeout rate and 7% walk rate have both been better than league average, but he’s also benefited from allowing zero home runs this year. His ability to keep the ball in the park is nothing new, as he’s yielded all of four dingers in his 217 innings as a pro.

Running Kaminsky’s 2015 numbers through the KATOH machine yields a forecast of 2.8 WAR through his age-28 season, which would have put him 183rd on KATOH’s preseason list. This is a notch higher than his 2.5 WAR KATOH projection based on his 2014 campaign in Low-A. These forecasts feel awfully low for a player of Kaminsky’s prospect status, especially considering he’s been one of the best performers in High-A at the tender age of 20. However, KATOH heavily values a pitcher’s strikeout rate for innings thrown in the low minors, and Kaminsky’s strikeout numbers have been rather mediocre. Instead, Kaminsky’s gotten it done by suppressing homers and limiting walks, which on the aggregate, are relatively weak predictors of big-league success.

Here are some statistical comps for Kaminsky and his High-A performance that were calculated some Mahalanobis distance calculations.

 Rank Mah Dist Name IP thru 28 WAR thru 28
1 0.33 Freddy Garcia 1,427 23.7
2 0.61 Oswaldo Sosa 0 0.0
3 0.77 Bud Smith 132 1.3
4 0.78 John Nicholson 0 0.0
5 0.94 Evan Anundsen* 0 0.0
6 0.96 Ryan Tucker* 42 0.0
7 0.96 Tim Alderson* 0 0.0
8 1.00 Jung Bong 78 0.0
9 1.02 Tyler Robertson* 26 0.0
10 1.12 Hector Mercado 106 0.8
11 1.13 Chance Douglass 0 0.0
12 1.13 Aaron Thompson* 47 0.0
13 1.15 Jorge Julio 419 1.1
14 1.16 Jonathan Pettibone* 109 0.7
15 1.16 Logan Kensing 161 0.0
16 1.18 Shairon Martis* 116 0.0
17 1.19 Andrew Faulkner* 0 0.0
18 1.21 Chuck Lofgren 0 0.0
19 1.25 Lee Russell 0 0.0
20 1.37 Brian O’Connor 12 0.0

*Pitchers who have yet to play their age-28 season.

Freddy Garcia is the obvious diamond in the rough here, and it’s encouraging to see that his High-A performance was closest to Kaminsky’s by a pretty decent margin. However, Garcia’s merely one comp, and the other guys on this list never came close to achieving Garcia’s level of success. Kaminsky almost certainly has better stuff than most of the pitchers on this list. But at the very least, this exercise shows that a performance like Kaminsky’s in High-A comes nowhere close to guaranteeing even moderate success in the majors.

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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.

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Treaty of Zoilo Versalles
10 years ago

Three things about Kaminsky’s rather mediocre strikeout rate:

1) As a predictive tool for minor league pitchers, K rate isn’t nearly as important for lefties as righties.

2) As a predictive tool, K rate is much less important for the extreme groundball hurlers, of which Kaminsky is now definitely one.

3) Finally, K rate means much less for pitchers who are young for their leagues, as Kaminsky has been in both 2014 and 2015.

I suspect that the KATOH system is unaware of the first two truisms, and may undervalue the third.

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