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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about a bad highlight, then preview the Cardinals’ 2017 season with Will Leitch of Sports on Earth and the Royals’ 2017 season with Rany Jazayerli of The Ringer.
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Baseball America recently published their top-100 list of prospects, as have Baseball Prospectus, Keith Law and MLB Pipeline. Eric Longenhagen will be putting out his top-100 this spring, too. I submitted my contribution on Tuesday, when I put out KATOH’s top-100 prospects. All of these lists attempt to accomplish the very same goal: identifying and ranking the best prospects. But KATOH goes about it in a very different way than the others. While most others rely heavily on scouting, KATOH focuses on statistical performance.
On the whole, there’s a good deal of agreement between KATOH and the more traditional rankings. Many of KATOH’s favorite prospects have also received praise from rea- live human beings who’ve watched them play. Andrew Benintendi, J.P. Crawford, Michael Kopech, and Austin Meadows all fall within this group. However, there are other KATOH favorites who’ve received very little attention from prospect rankers. The purpose of this article is to give these prospects a little bit of attention.
For each position, I’ve identified the player, among those excluded from all top-100 lists, who’s best acquitted by KATOH. These players have performed in the minors in a way that usually portends big-league success. Yet, for one reason or another, each has been overlooked by prospect evaluators.
Of course, the fact that these players missed every top-100 list suggests that their physical tools are probably underwhelming. That’s very important information! Often times, the outlook for players like this is much worse than their minor-league stats would lead you to believe. There’s a reason people in the industry always say “don’t scout the stat line.” Although KATOH scouts the stat line in an intuitive fashion, it still overlooks the non-numerical attributes that can predict big-league success.
I performed this exact same exercise last year, as well, and I’m proud to say there were some successes. This time last year, Edwin Diaz was a KATOH guy who was unanimously omitted from top-100 lists due to his high-effort delivery and lack of a viable third pitch. Now, he’s coming off of one of the best reliever seasons we’ve ever seen. Zach Davies also appeared on this list last year as a soft-tossing righty. He promptly posted a 2.8 WAR season as a 23-year-old. He was especially effective in last year’s second half, posting a 3.40 FIP after July 1st.
Of course, I also touted Ramon Flores, Clayton Blackburn and Zach Lee in this space last year. One year later, those guys are flirting with non-prospect-dom. But let’s try to remain optimistic and not think about them right now. There will be hits, and there will be misses.
Bear in mind that this exercise excludes the KATOH darlings who still wound up on top-100 lists. For example, KATOH loves Jake Bauers, Manny Margot and Thomas Szapucki way more than most. Even though KATOH’s assessment of these prospects is more optimistic than most, they’re ineligible for this list because at least one well-respected outlet ranked those same prospects among the top-100 rookie-eligible players on the planet. The players below are the ones who are a bit further off the radar.
*****
C – Garrett Stubbs, Houston (Profile)
Why KATOH loves him:
Stubbs hit a slick .309/.397/.472 between High-A and Double-A last year while walking nearly as much as he struck out. For a catcher, that’s amazing, especially considering he opened the year as a 22-year-old. He also swiped 15 bases, which suggests he’ll provide additional value with his legs. Though he’s mastered Double-A, he’s still just 23, which is relatively young for a college bat.
Why scouts don’t (per Baseball America’s Prospect Handbook):
He projects as a near-average hitter with well below-average power… Stubbs’ size is the biggest impediment to him becoming a big league regular. No regular backstop today weighs as little as Stubbs, but he could still be a solid contributor even if limited to a part-time role behind the plate.
Don’t hesitate to ignore all this introductory matter.
Over the last couple years, the author has published a periodic statistical report designed to serve as a mostly responsible shorthand for people who, like the author, possess more enthusiasm for collegiate baseball than expert knowledge of it. Those reports integrated concepts central to much of the analysis found at FanGraphs — regarding sample size and regression, for example — to provide something not unlike a “true talent” leaderboard for hitters and pitchers in select conferences.
What follows represents an updated report for the 2017 college campaign.
As in the original edition of this same thing, what I’ve done here is to utilize principles introduced by Chris Mitchell on forecasting future major-league performance with minor-league stats.
Literally just an hour or two ago, Travis published this article, titled “Has the Fly-Ball Revolution Begun?” It was his latest piece in what’s unofficially a series, but I can’t help myself but piggyback, because it’s a fascinating subject.
A few years back, for the Hardball Times Annual, I wrote about how the information age had handed the advantage to the side of run prevention. Pitchers could better hone in on hitter weaknesses, and defenses could better prepare themselves for expected batted balls. Back then, I wasn’t sure how hitters could fight back. It seemed like theirs would be a losing battle, since their very job is to respond to whatever the pitcher is wanting to do.
Now we have Statcast. Even before Statcast, there was HITf/x, but there’s more and more accessible information than ever about exit velocities and launch angles. So the collective hitter response seems to be trying to hit more balls in the air. This is the developing push-back. This is how hitters are making up ground.
The spring-training games have begun in earnest, all of the top-50 free agents have been signed, and a new page has flipped over on the calendar. This seems to be a good time to simultaneously look backward and forward to get a feel as to what might transpire during the regular season.
Last month, I explored whether more MLB hitters will get off the ground to improve their offensive numbers. As background for that piece, I asked private hitting instructor Doug Latta, who believes in lifting the ball, why there has been resistance to the the uppercut swing. Latta’s philosophy helped two of his clients, Justin Turner and Marlon Byrd, become dramatically better hitters.
We know fly balls are much more valuable than ground balls. In 2016, batters hit .241 with a .715 slugging mark and a wRC+ of 139 on fly balls versus a .238 average, .258 slugging mark and of wRC+ of 27 on ground balls.
“You see a (Josh) Donaldson, you see a Turner, you hear people talking a little more. Now you can quantify [quality of contact]… But it’s still a small movement,” Latta told me. “The results speak for themselves, but you are taking on 100 years of thought.”
Latta noted how slow the game is to move from conventional thought, and there appears to be little change in GB/FB tendencies league wide.
As if being a 27-year old rookie weren’t hard enough, Ryan Schimpf went at things in an unprecedented way last season. While the fighter — schimpf literally means “to curse and fight” in German — probably established himself as a useful major leaguer with a couple of important tools, regression will come for a player with such an extreme batted-ball mix.
Since we started recording these things, no batter has ever had a qualified season during which he hit fewer than four grounders for every 10 fly balls. Schimpf hit three for every 10 in his debut last year. Even if you relax the entry to 300 plate appearances, the San Diego second baseman is an outlier — only one person has ever recorded a higher fly-ball rate.
Baseball announced a handful of rule modifications today. For the most part, they’re concerning pace-of-play adjustments — there’s the modification about the new, automatic intentional walk, and there’s a line in there about a two-minute guideline for determinations on replay reviews. There’s nothing in there that should cause too much of a stir. We were given plenty of warning about the intentional walks. Yet one bullet point stands out from the others:
With that, baseball has moved to clarify and formalize its position on Carter Capps‘ delivery.
Adam Ottavino is a cerebral pitcher. You probably already know that, especially if you’re a regular reader of FanGraphs. Eno Sarris and I have both talked to, and written about, the Rockies reliever multiple times in recent seasons. From spin rates to spin axis to release points, he digs deep into data in search of any and all advantages he can find.
Last week, I approached Ottavino at Colorado’s spring-training facility — the scenic-and-pristine Salt River Fields at Talking Stick — to get a pitcher’s view of how launch-angle studies could end up impacting the game. His answer, studious as always, segued into the optimization of his own offerings.
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Adam Ottavino: “It’s going to be a natural, evolutionary process. People are going to change what they’re doing at the plate and, as pitchers, we’re going to have to change in response to that. They’re trying to get on plane and create fly balls, staying through it really well. I think we’re seeing more guys now with the ability to lift lower pitches. In years past, the swing wasn’t really designed to do that. They were trying to hit the ball on the ground, hard, and run.
“I think we’re going to continue to see pitchers elevating. We’re going to continue to see pitches designed to turn those fly balls into weak fly balls. But I think until it’s fully embraced — the uppercut swing, and all that — until it’s prevalent throughout all of baseball, it’s hard to imagine we’ll see a major trend on the pitching side in response to that.
