Projecting Mark Appel
Last week, I wrote a piece about Derek Fisher, who was supposedly part of the package going back to Philly in exchange for super-reliever Ken Giles. Now that the dust has finally settled on that trade, we’ve learned that Fisher wasn’t actually involved. So I basically wrote about Derek Fisher for no reason in particular. Instead, the Astros included former first-overall pick Mark Appel. A couple of guys named Arauz — Harold and Jonathan, going to Philly and Houston, respectively — were also included.
It hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing for Appel since he went first overall back in June of 2013. Between 2013 and 2014, he pitched to a 5.93 ERA and 3.86 FIP over 121 innings, with most of his work coming in A-Ball. His ERA and FIP converged last season, when he put up a 4.45 ERA and 4.30 FIP between Double-A and Triple-A. All told, Appel’s struck out 20% of opposing batters, and has walked 8% over the past two and a half years — roughly the same as an average minor leaguer.
Those numbers aren’t terrible when taken at face value. But from a highly-touted college draftee, you almost always see a lot more a lot sooner. For comparison, Aaron Nola and Carlos Rodon were also recent college draftees, are over a year younger than Appel, and posted sub-4.00 ERAs in the big leagues last year. While Appel was putting up mediocre numbers in the minors, those guys were succeeding in the big leagues.
When KATOH looks at Appel, it sees a 24-year-old who’s been consistently mediocre in the minors. Every organization has several of those. So, as a result, KATOH pegs him for just 0.7 WAR through his age-28 season. Appel’s 2014 numbers yield a similar forecast of 1.1 WAR. Of course, stats aren’t everything. And Appel feels like one of those cases where the stats are missing out on some hidden upside. Appel has a mid-90s fastball, along with a plus slider and changeup. Many big league starters have succeeded with similar repertoires, while many more have succeeded with much less. But while Appel has the stuff of a front-line starter, he’s yet to parlay it into on-field performance.
I could just give you a list of Appel’s crappy statistical comps and call it a day. But that wouldn’t be very insightful. Aside from his unspectacular minor league numbers, Appel would have very little in common with most of the pitchers on that list. For example, James Houser would have been Appel’s top comp, and Houser topped out at 86 mph in his lone big league appearance. That’s a far cry from Appel, who can run it up to 95 or 96.
To weed out the James Housers of the world, I filtered the list to include only guys who appeared in Baseball America’s top 100 list at some point. So that leaves us with the pitchers who performed similarly to Appel, but whose stuff was still good enough to win over the folks at Baseball America. Mah Dist denotes Mahalanobis distance. A lower figure represents a more similar comp.
| Rank | Mah Dist | Name | 2015 Age | IP | WAR |
| 1 | 0.13 | John Maine | 34 | 593 | 5.7 |
| 2 | 0.18 | Clint Nageotte | 34 | 42 | -0.1 |
| 3 | 0.43 | Homer Bailey | 29 | 1,010 | 13.1 |
| 4 | 0.43 | Jesus Colome | 37 | 426 | -0.4 |
| 5 | 0.47 | Greg Gohr | 47 | 183 | 0.5 |
| 6 | 0.50 | Christian Friedrich | 27 | 167 | 1.1 |
| 7 | 0.55 | Jeff Granger | 43 | 32 | -0.7 |
| 8 | 0.57 | Mark Hutton | 45 | 190 | -0.2 |
| 9 | 0.61 | Ed Yarnall | 39 | 20 | 0.0 |
| 10 | 0.63 | Allen Webster | 25 | 120 | -1.1 |
| 11 | 0.63 | Julio Santana | 42 | 479 | 0.3 |
| 12 | 0.67 | Albie Lopez | 43 | 841 | 5.7 |
| 13 | 0.67 | Chuck Lofgren | 29 | 0 | 0.0 |
| 14 | 0.69 | Justin Miller | 37 | 376 | 0.9 |
| 15 | 0.70 | Aaron Myette | 37 | 154 | -0.3 |
| 16 | 0.70 | Wade Davis | 29 | 733 | 10.7 |
| 17 | 0.70 | Matt White | 36 | 0 | 0.0 |
| 18 | 0.77 | Jake Arrieta | 29 | 795 | 15.0 |
| 19 | 0.77 | Kyle Drabek | 27 | 178 | -0.3 |
| 20 | 0.78 | Wade Miller | 38 | 894 | 12.6 |
As these things always are, this list is a mixed bag. It includes guys like Clint Nagoette and Jesus Colome, who had good stuff but never quite pieced it all together in the big leagues. But there are also examples of pitchers who did find ways to make it work. Homer Bailey became one of the better pitchers in baseball. Wade Davis, Jake Arrieta and Wade Miller also didn’t look all that different from Appel in the high minors, and wound up pitching successfully in the show.
This is all to say that it’s not too late for Appel to turn things around. The list above includes examples of pitchers who had good stuff, but mediocre minor league performance, and still succeeded in the majors. Pitchers are fickle creatures, and it’s not at all uncommon for breakouts to occur with little notice. As of this writing, though, we’re still waiting for Appel to break out. The Phillies are hoping this year’s the year it finally happens, and it very well might be. Maybe a change of scenery will help. But considering he turns 25 next summer, Appel’s running out of time.
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.
Incredible deal for the Phils.
Nevermind. It appears you beat me to it ^^^^^^
Calm down. J Arauz is 17. Bright future, but hardly a sure thing.
“Calm down. J Arauz is 17. Bright future, but hardly a sure thing”
Arauz will be 17 for most of next season where he will likely be playing in full season A-ball as the youngest player in the league.
Your perspective is exactly backwards.
Appel is trash that should be put out on the curb and eventually – after many seasons of failure in Philadelphia and with Phillies fans crying out “Why is Appel still here?” – he will be put out on the curb.
About the time Appel is put out on the curb Arauz will be establishing himself as a young star with the Astros.
I’m tired of this lunatic and his conspiracy theories.
I’m tired of this crazy conspiracy theories and I do.
my experience with lunatics like this guy on social media sites is, the more people openly despise them, the more they hang around. Don’t feed the trolls!
“JONATHAN ARAUZ was the Phillies third best prospect after Crawford and Cornelius Randolph.”
No.
They’re probably trying to save money so they can sign Kevin Maitan.
Yes the Phillies are located in a tiny one cop, two volunteer firemen town surrounded by a multimillion acre cornfield in the middle of nowhere.
It’s not like they have a $6 BILLION TV Deal.
Joke’s on you bitch… Philadelphia isn’t a real town. It’s a made up land that the psychiatric ward created to give mental midgets like you something to obsess over. Philly’s like Santa… it’s fake.
FREE AEC needs to resume his medications. I’m sure he doesn’t want to end up back in the slammer.
Holy Christ. For anyone who thinks Hollywood Hills is completely out of his mind, you don’t know the half of it. Just do a little research on this guy: I guarantee you will be amazed by the extent of his paranoia and by the depths of his rancor towards his home-town Phillies. It earned him four years in prison and will surely earn him several more down the line.
hopefully sooner rather than later. And hopefully he won’t have internet access.
There is absolutely no change whatsoever in how the Phillies are run.
Bill Giles put the ownership group together with people who think like him 35 years ago. Guess what? Bill Giles is still there. He took part in the hiring of MacPhail and Klentak both. He was at the press conference announcing the hiring of Klentak.
35 Years.
Jim Thome and Cliff Lee
That’s it.
35 Years.
Carlos Ruiz and Maikel Franco, the only two starting quality players signed out of Latin America. Ruiz was signed out of Panama for eight thousand dollars. Need that in numerical form? $8,000- Eight Stacks.
Maikel Franco was signed for $100,000- That’s one hundred thousand American dollars. One hundred Stacks.
The Red Sox paid $63 million to sign Yoan Moncada. The Phillies paid $108,000- to sign both Carlos Ruiz and Maikel Franco.
Two real free agents and two starting position players from Latin America signed for nothing.
The Phillies Way is unchanged. They will sit in the cellar until they collect enough free talent in the MLB Plantation Slave Auction held every June. These young slave/intern players will be exploited to the max by the Phillies bloodsucking ownership cabal. For seven years they will make these bloodsucking criminals massive profits. If a few become fan favorites and the crowds are still huge as they near free agency then they will be signed to short, team friendly deals. If any have slipped through their screening process and turn out to be normal players seeking long contracts they will be demonized and booted out the door.
The Phillies after telling lies to their fan base from 2012 onward finally admitted they were “rebuilding”. The truth of the matter is they are already planning their next rebuild as they conduct this one.
THAT is The Phillies Way.
Google: Kevin Maitan FREE_AEC
……..
When do we see that one dude spam the board with his post about the cheap Phillies owner not paying for a prospect? This article is like tossing bait out into the water
See above, he’s already made his appearance. Just let him have this, he spent a few years in the slammer for harassing Philly media members a few years ago, now’s he just harassing comment sections.
I know the pitcher vs batter splits aren’t very good to use because of the small sample size, but could you group pitchers together like you do with the Mahalanobis distance and see how a batter does against a number of similar pitchers?
Oh no…the dreaded Christian Friedrich comp… PECOTA used to spit that out for every 6’2″-6’5″ pitcher who wasn’t that young or that good in the minors.
Sadly it was like 80% accurate that the player would be meh too…
Thanks I enjoyed reading the article. I don’t mind the usage of more advanced statistical techniques, and, as I noted, rather enjoyed reading it, I found it raised more questions than it answered.
I looked at the Wikipost: “In order to use the Mahalanobis distance to classify a test point as belonging to one of N classes, one first estimates the covariance matrix of each class, usually based on samples known to belong to each class. Then, given a test sample, one computes the Mahalanobis distance to each class, and classifies the test point as belonging to that class for which the Mahalanobis distance is minimal.”
Seems like this is good for clustering, and my assumption is that is what the table is for. So is it like standard deviation, where a Mah Dist of under 1.0 is considered close enough? That is not made clear in the article nor on Wikipost.
“Mahalanobis distance and leverage are often used to detect outliers, especially in the development of linear regression models.”
Is that what you are trying to do here, show how Appel might be an outlier? If so, I missed it.
Here is what I see, from a layman’s view of this article, using 30 year old knowledge of introductory stats class. The two strongest comparisons are 34 YO pitchers who have done much in the majors and likely won’t. Then you have another cluster where all but one has not been valuable (Bailey the one out of six). Next cluster, one of nine (Wade Davis). Then the last grouping including Arrieta and Wade Miller. My get from this is that he’s most likely to turn out to be nothing, like his two closest, and then 1 of 6, and 1 of 9, with an outside chance to be very successful. Which is basically true of any prospect who has some prospect cred but just hasn’t really delivered so far.
Am I reading this right? Where did I go wrong?
Lastly, the Wikipost noted the use of testing using normalized distribution. That would have been helpful to see comparing him to the successful players noted. Was there a reason you did not do that in your article? Was it not appropriate given the data distribution?
Thanks again.
You are correct in your understanding of Mahalanobis distance. Essentially, I took all historical minor league players, and found the ones who were most similar to Appel, regardless of what they did in the majors. So if Appel were the center of the cluster, the players listed would be his closest neighbors within that cluster. The Mahalanobis distance figure tells you how close they were. I hope that helps!
Thanks! Keep up the good work, look forward to reading your works!
Happy Holidays!
Played with Appel in HS. He was nowhere close to what he is now — he was only a soph i think — but his slider and changeup were already great. He didn’t throw hard yet, but his fb did have some rise as is normal from a guy that tall. That’s what makes the 12-6 slider so killer. But when you throw that hard, that rise can turn a lot of FBs into HRs, and I do wonder if he could benefit from adding something with more horizontal movement, whether that’s a cut fastball or a different slider or more reliance on a 2-seam, which he doesn’t appear to throw too much. I also wonder whether the splitter and 12-6 slider are too similar. Looks like at the end of the year he threw a couple of what Brooks is calling “sinkers,” so that’s something to keep an eye on. Anyway, rooting for him.
Hopefully this new team he’s going to has coaches. Hopefully those professional coaches are as knowledgeable as former high school baseball players.
If professional baseball coaches were all-seeing and all-knowing, you would not have things like Johan Santana, Ryan Vogelsong, or Jake Arrieta happening, where their previous team(s) just didn’t see “it” yet, and then finally one team helps to put it all together (or finally see it).
Or trades like Kazmir for Zambrano.
Or analysis like Law saying that Panik would at best be a utility player.
It does happen, more than fans would hope.
And maybe the HS pitcher wanted more for his life than spending his life as an indentured slave as a minor leaguer or low paying job as a traveling scout or coaching. That takes a big toll on your personal life unless you have a very understanding significant other. I see a lot of good commentary on players by fans on-line, and they aren’t professional scouts. I would trust pro scouts more, yes, but that does not mean that someone who spent all that time with the player can’t have cogent comments to make on that player.
This trade just got Arauzed.