FanGraphs Baseball

Ben and Sam preview the Astros’ season with Ted Walker, and Sahadev talks to Houston Chronicle Astros beat writer Evan Drellich (at 34:30).

Episode 533
Kiley McDaniel is both (a) the lead prospect writer for FanGraphs and also (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio — during which edition he discusses, after a brief detour to consider Vanderbilt right-hander Carson Fulmer’s breaking ball, he discusses his recently published and massive top-200 prospect list.

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 1 hr 03 min play time.)

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The title of this post is also a question I asked myself while writing a different post that appeared at TechGraphs this morning — over the course of which I provide a nearly competent summary on how and where to watch college baseball online.

One reason to do that (i.e. watch college baseball) is merely because, at a time when the professional game is only just beginning to yawn and stretch its legs after hibernating for the winter, the gentlemen ballplayers of America’s universities have already begun their season in earnest. And a second reason for watching it is (and I’m quoting myself when I say this), is that it allows one to become acquainted with a number of players who’ll be selected during baseball’s amateur draft this June.

How many players, though? It’s a question that’s been answered previously but not recently — and not as substantively as one might like.

To answer the question, then, I sorted through the draft data at Baseball Reference. Using said data, I found two ways of answering the question — looking first at entire drafts from the past three years and then, second, at first-round selections* from the past 10 years.

*The difference in career WAR produced by first-round picks versus later-round picks is substantial. If a viewer’s interest is in watching perhaps a future, real major leaguer, the first-round threshold is a useful one.

Below are the results from the last three complete drafts, rendered into graph form by new and talented FanGraphs contributor Sean Dolinar. 4Yr denotes draftees from four-year colleges; JC, draftees from junior colleges; and HS; draftees from high schools.

First, year by year:

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A few days ago, while Kiley was dominating with his prospect coverage, I asked you about your favorite team’s pitching coach. I was a little fearful that no one would participate, since, who cares, you know, but many of you still found it in your hearts to throw a vote my direction. In all, there were thousands and thousands of votes, and while everything had to be split 30 ways to get material for each team and each coach, I was still left with sufficient sample sizes for all — even for the two new coaches who haven’t been coaches in a season yet. Bless the FanGraphs platform, and bless the FanGraphs readers. That means you!

I ran this project because I couldn’t recall seeing such a project run in the past. And also, I’m fascinated by crowd-sourcing and fan opinion, and while we all know this project won’t actually uncover the game’s best and worst pitching coaches, data has been generated, reflecting something, and now we’re in position to analyze the data. Let us do exactly that. Here are fruits of labors.

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We’re in that awkward time between the true offseason, when most deals are made, and the spring, when all the Best Shape of His Life news stars flowing in. Let’s call it Projection Season, because we’re all stuck ogling prospect lists while perusing the projected numbers for the major league squads.

One of the most frustrating things about projection season can be the fact that most projection systems remain agnostic about change. Many of the adjustments the players talk about in season don’t take, or take for a while and then require further adjustment to remain relevant. So projections ignore most of it and assume the player will continue to be about the same as he’s always been until certain statistical thresholds are met and the change is believable from a numbers standpoint.

But projections do worse when it comes to projecting pitching than hitting, so there’s something that pitchers do that’s different than the many adjustments a hitter will make to his mechanics or approach over the course of a season. The submission here is that pitchers change their arsenals sometimes, and that a big change in arsenal radically changes who that player is.

Look at Greg Maddux pitching for Peoria in 1985. He’s not the Greg Maddux we know and love. Watch him throw fourseamers and curveballs. It was enough to get through the minor leagues, but, at that point, he’s barely throwing the two pitches that made him a Hall of Famer eventually.

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Pitchers are expected to lose command after Tommy John surgeries. Prolific base stealers coming back from hamstring injuries are expected to take it slow for a week or two before regularly getting the green light on the basepaths. A broken finger for a slugger is blamed for the loss of power; a blister for a pitcher might mean a loss of feel on their breaking ball. What is not well publicized, however, is how a player recovers from and reacts to returning from a concussion. For an injury that has been talked about in the media so often in the last few years, we know very little about the actual long-term, statistical impacts that concussions have on players that experience them.

Players often talk about being “in a fog” for some time after suffering a concussion – often even after they return to play. The act of hitting is a mechanism that involves identifying, reacting, and deciding on a course of action within half a second. With that in mind, I wondered: do concussions change the quality of a batter’s eye and discipline at the plate? Do brain injuries add milliseconds to those individual steps? Even though each injury is different, do varying lengths of disabled list stints due to concussions change a player’s performance on the field after they return? The most direct route to answering those questions might be studying the impact of concussions on strikeout and walk rates.

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You may have heard that football is in the midst of a bit of a concussion crisis. Not only is the National Football League facing a number of concussion-related lawsuits, but suits have been filed at the collegiate, high school, and Pop Warner levels as well. Meanwhile, both professional hockey and soccer are also facing their own concussion litigation.

Like football, hockey, and soccer, baseball is also – at times – a contact sport, and baseball players occasionally suffer concussions. In 2013, for instance, former outfielder Ryan Freel became the first professional baseball player to be diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) – the brain disease often associated with professional football players – following a career during which he reportedly suffered nine or ten concussions.

So it is reasonable to ask whether Major League Baseball could be the next league to face a concussion-related lawsuit, and if so, how such a case would compare to those in the other sports?

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Rob Arthur took a very interesting look at how fans are talking about their teams on Reddit, and if you measure things by quantity, there’s only one team more active than Mets fans right now. It’s not surprising that the Giants rate highest when it comes to total emotional words on reddit, though — their team is on quite a run.

Re-sort the list to reflect average positive words per negative word, though, and a different picture emerges:

Yup, down there at 26th you’ll find the Mets. So it looks like Mets fans ‘feel’ the most, at least if you define it by amount of words on Reddit. It’s a Shakespearean question: would you rather feel the most, good and bad, or be a Rays fan, feeling very little, but most of it upbeat?

One missing factor here is the size of the fanbase. For lack of a better easily found way to measure that, we’ll use total attendance. Let’s divide number of affect words by the yearly attendance last year to see of Mets fans are truly dedicated in their misery.

Yup. Mets fans feel. They feel a lot, at least on Reddit. More than any team in baseball, perhaps. For better or for worse.

Winter ball in Puerto Rico wrapped up at the end of January, with Javier Baez attempting to improve his plate discipline problems after a short stint in the majors at the end of 2014. That stint, as most of us are aware, featured him striking out 41% of the time he came to the plate. Unfortunately, Baez didn’t seem to improve that aspect of his game very much while playing for the Cangrejeros de Santurce, as he went 11-43 with five walks and 21 strikeouts during the regular winter season. For those without a calculator handy, that’s a 44% strikeout rate. His walk rate improved to 10% (6.6% in 2014 MLB), so we can say there was some positive news to be claimed from his time there.

We have barely enough plate appearances for Baez from the winter league to know whether these rate statistics actually hold water, and it certainly doesn’t bode well that Baez struck out so often in Puerto Rico against the quasi-equivalent of AAA pitching talent. He managed to strike out less often in the winter league playoff games, going 13-64 with four walks and 18 strikeouts – a 26% strikeout rate that again is from a small sample size, and still not great, but an improvement. The Cubs decided to pull the plug on him in winter ball after the playoffs, preventing him from playing in the Caribbean Series after Santurce won the Puerto Rican Championship. If we combine the regular winter season and playoffs, we get this line for Baez:

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It’s prospect season. Over at FanGraphs, we released our Top 200 Prospects list yesterday; last week, Rob wrote about flipping through the recently released Prospect Handbook from Baseball America. It seems like everyone is currently in the process of ranking and grading minor leaguers, speculating about which ones are going to become the stars of tomorrow.

But as Rob pointed out last week, most of the guys we’re so excited about now are never going to pan out. Quoting his piece, which in turn quotes BA’s Handbook.

“In the 2011 Prospect Handbook, we detailed the depth of the Royals’ top-ranked farm system, which we also featured on the cover of the March 2011 issue of Baseball America magazine. No team had ever placed nine players in Baseball America’s Top 100 prospects before, and group – both as big leaguers and through trades – helped form the core of the Royals’ 2014 American League pennant winners.

Turning a losing franchise into a winner – that’s why prospects matter.”

Here are those nine guys who made the Top 100 list: Eric Hosmer, Wil Myers, Mike Moustakas, John Lamb, Mike Montgomery, Christian Colon, Danny Duffy, Chris Dwyer, Aaron Crow.

I will pardon you for being underwhelmed.

Rob is right; the Royals had one of the most celebrated farm systems of all time, and a majority of their prospects haven’t done jack squat in the big leagues. Some of the guys who weren’t as highly heralded have become stars, and the Royals are absolutely an example of why prospect development can help turn a franchise around, but even in boasting of a clear success story, there are examples of failure everywhere.

In fact, according to most of the research done on prospect rankings, the failure rate for players ranked within Baseball America’s Top 100 approaches 70%. Even selecting the cream of the crop, theoretically the guys we should have the best information on, seven in ten fail to become significant big league contributors.

This seems like a lousy success rate, and it’s one of the reasons why there is significant pushback against the rising valuations teams are putting on minor league players with no big league track record. For example, the Phillies have been frustrated by the market’s unwillingness to surrender the kinds of talent they believe Cole Hamels is worth, and likely the kind of return he would have brought even a few years ago. The relative values teams are placing on on big league stars and minor league prospects has shifted towards the young kids, even as most of them continue to fail.

Even JABO’s own Ken Rosenthal has argued strongly that prospects are currently being overvalued in trade negotiations, and that teams should not be so afraid to part with their best young talents. That 70% failure rate supports these suggestions; why be so attached to an asset that is more likely than not going to lose all of its value?

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.