FanGraphs Baseball

With the first couple rounds of the MLB draft now complete, the top drafted talent will soon be merged with previous top-prospect rankings to create new lists. Well, I will jump the gun and give a snapshot of where these players could end up being ranked by looking at past draft and prospect-list information.

For the prospect information, I will use Baseball America’s top-100 prospect list, published annually each spring. The reason I will use it instead of other sources is that the information goes back to 1990, which gives me 26 match drafts and prospect rankings to examine. To start with, here are the overall metrics on players just drafted will end up on Baseball America’s rankings:
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In an attempt to better quantify the meaningfulness of college baseball stats, I recently applied my KATOH methodology to college baseball players. You can read about the details of my methodology, my findings and some of my projections over at The Hardball Times. My piece on college hitters went up on Friday, while I dropped my analysis of college pitchers on Monday.

Now, using the KATOH models I developed, let’s take a closer look at the 13 college players who were selected in the first round of yesterday’s draft. I stopped short of including the players taken in the compensation or competitive balance rounds, but I’ll address many of these players — along with those taken in the next few rounds — in the next week or so.

Please note that my KATOH forecasts for hitters tend to run a bit higher than the ones for pitchers. For this reason, I recommend you compare hitters’ projections to only hitters, and pitchers’ projections to only pitchers.

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The Mets have, theoretically, too many starting pitchers. With top prospect Noah Syndergaard forcing his way into the rotation, the team experimented with a six-man rotation for a week, but has now reverted back to the standard five-man grouping, with Dillon Gee heading to the bullpen as a result. Gee is not particularly happy with this arrangement, and voiced his displeasure with the situation over the weekend.

“I’m almost at the point now where I just don’t even care anymore,” Gee said. “I mean, I’m kind of just over it all. I’ll do the best I can out of the pen now.”

…

Later, Gee was asked if he would have preferred being traded. “I mean, I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not a G.M., so I don’t know. I mean — I don’t know. I’m done trying to figure out this whole situation.”

But even with Gee demoted to the bullpen, the Mets still have too many pitchers. Beyond their three young studs in Matt Harvey, Jacob DeGrom, and the aforementioned Syndergaard, they also have Bartolo Colon and Jon Niese, both of whom are inoffensive back-end innings-eaters. With the first three guys locked in on talent and the latter two unlikely to get dumped for payroll reasons — Colon makes $11 million this year, while Niese is making $7 million and is due another $9 million next year — the Mets rotation remains full, even without considering pitching prospect Steven Matz, who is excelling down in Triple-A. Matz’s performances are forcing the team to consider promoting him sooner than later, even if they don’t have an obvious opening for him at the moment.

But despite the fact that there isn’t really a job opening for a starting pitcher in Queens, it’s become increasingly popular to suggest that the Mets are playing the Super Two game, holding Matz down to prevent him from reaching arbitration a year earlier, and keeping his future earnings down in the process. Joel Sherman, in this morning’s New York Post:

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The Fringe Five is a weekly regular-season exercise, introduced a couple years ago by the present author, wherein that same author utilizes regressed stats, scouting reports, and also his own fallible intuition to identify and/or continue monitoring the most compelling fringe prospects in all of baseball.

What follows is not that usual weekly exercise, but rather a version of it designed to identify the most compelling fringe prospects in the draft. As that same draft enters its second day, the discussion of fringe-type prospects is relevant: while the first round is generally populated by players who will develop into useful major leaugers, even the 100th-overall selection in a typical draft is expected to produce only 1-2 WAR over the entirety of his career. A club that’s able to find a Matt Carpenter (13th round, 2009) or Ben Zobrist (6th round, 2004) out of this interval of the draft is adding considerable value to its franchise where little or none is typically available.

As with the weekly editions of this exercise, central to this one is a definition of the word fringe. For the purposes of this post, a fringe prospect is any draft-eligible player absent from the April edition of Kiley McDaniel’s draft rankings — which document contains roughly 300, or about 10 rounds’ worth, of names.

In addition to McDaniel’s own work, I’ve benefited from that published recently by Chris Mitchell at the Hardball Times in which he examines predictive elements both for hitters and pitchers at the college level.

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Monday, I wrote a post, building off of another post. Now this is a post, building off of Monday’s post. To review, this is said post, wherein I examined the relationship between early-season team performance and rest-of-season team performance. How much might the current standings tell you? Going back 10 years, and choosing an appropriate date:

Right, this has already been published. As has the following plot:

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Ben and Sam talk to former Padres Senior Quantitative Analyst Chris Long about how teams can use stats to improve their performance in the amateur draft.

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Episode 570
Pat Venditte is the switch-pitcher originally drafted by the Yankees who recently made his major-league debut with Oakland. Curt Young is the current pitching coach for the latter of those clubs. They’re both guests on this edition of FanGraphs Audio — talking, in both cases, with contributor David Laurila.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 22 min play time.)

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In 2003, the Yankees drafted Tyler Clippard in the ninth round out of a Port Richey, Florida high school. The righty signed, and began his professional career that summer in the Gulf Coast League, 40 miles from his hometown. Inking a contract was largely about location.

“My decision out of the draft was to play collegiate baseball in Tampa or play professional baseball in Tampa,” said Clippard. “I obviously didn’t know which team I’d go to, but it being the Yankees had a lot to do with me saying, ‘OK, let’s start my pro career, because I’m going to be close to home.’ Had I been drafted by anybody else, I probably would have played college ball (at the University of South Florida).”

Clippard knew New York was a possibility – “It was them and a couple of other teams” – so he wasn’t surprised when the Yankees selected him 274th overall. As for when he expected to hear his name called, that was a complete mystery. “I could have been drafted anywhere from the third round to not at all,” Clippard told me. “Going in, I had no idea. But like I said, because of where I’d be playing, I decided to sign.”

Clippard subsequently spent the 2005 season with the club’s Florida State League affiliate, which is also located in Tampa. In 2007, he was dealt to Washington, where he played until being dealt to Oakland prior to the start of the current campaign.

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve discussed many of the various aspects of the emerging granular batted-ball velocity/exit angle data that is becoming more pervasive in the game today. We’ve already covered both the overall hitting and pitching contact-quality leaders and laggards in both leagues, and are now ready to dig deeper into some of the nuances that make it less than advisable to simply accept raw contact-authority at face value. Let’s investigate the impact of pulling the ball on the ground at an excessive rate; today’s we’ll look at the 2014 AL extreme ground ball pullers, and next week, we’ll check out the NL.

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