Archive for Minor Leagues

Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.

NOTE: In no way are the three players presented in this article meant to represent the three singular top performers of last month in the minor leagues. They are merely players who had clearly dominant Mays about whom I have especially relevant and novel information to add.

Summary
An excellent all-around catching prospect.

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Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.

Summary
Payano has two interesting pitches from the left side, but he’s been derailed by inconsistency his whole career.

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Quick: Who led minor league pitchers in FIP this year?* You might guess one of the top pitching prospects in baseball, such as Archie Bradley, Taijuan Walker, or Robert Stephenson. Or you might rack your brain thinking about 2013 breakout A-ball pitchers like C.J. Edwards, Tyler Glasnow, or Edwin Escobar. In either case, you’d be wrong, because the answer is little-known White Sox pitching prospect Tony Bucciferro.

*Minimum 80 IP. Giants relief prospect Derek Law had a lower FIP in 77 2/3, but I wanted to isolate starters.

Bucciferro’s 2013 numbers are certainly something to behold. Across three starts in the Rookie-Advanced Appalachian League and 13 outings (12 starts) in the Low-A South Atlantic League, he amassed 96 strikeouts, six walks, and a mere three homers allowed in 90 2/3 innings, good for a 1.74 FIP (2.48 ERA). Those numbers seem impossible to ignore, and yet Bucciferro registers barely a blip on the prospect radar. In this post, I will examine why he’s been successful, why he’s been ignored, and take a systematic look at how pitchers with this sort of statistical profile fare.

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Did you know the FanGraphs leaderboards — which already no doubt consume the majority of your time like they do mine — also carry updated minor league data? Yeah, right here:

Under the Leaders tab, yo!

Let us take a moment, you and I, to delve into the numbers of my favorite of the minor leagues, the International League.
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It wasn’t supposed to end like this. In 2000, Portland came on the scene as a possible relocation candidate for the Montreal Expos. But, on Monday, the Triple-A Portland Beavers played their last game at PGE Park, pushed out, not by MLB, but Major League Soccer. With the departure, Minor League Baseball’s largest market is now empty, a victim of MLS wanting a soccer-only facility, and a city that, like most of the nation, has placed education and services above stretching a double into a triple.

Merritt Paulson, the owner of the Beavers, also owns the USL Portland Timbers soccer club. Paulson made the successful bid for an MLS franchise in March of 2009, with MLS Commissioner Don Garber adding the caveat that he and the city retrofit PGE Park and make it a baseball-less facility (college football would be allowed), removing dugouts, adding bleacher seating where the dugouts and ivy covered outfield walls are now at the expense of the Beavers.

Paulson and the city now had not one, but two stadium funding issues on their hands.

Paulson was willing to pitch in money for a new stadium, but only so much given the amount he was going to pour into changing PGE Park over to an MLS facility. The city tried several times to gain funding for a new ballpark for the Beavers, first at Memorial Coliseum site – the “Glass Palace” the Trail Blazers used to call home – but war veterans and architects that saw the Coliseum as historically significant became vocal roadblocks in tearing it down for a minor league ballpark. With the Rose Garden Arena so close by, the Blazers were quietly opposed, as well.

With the Coliseum off the site list, the Lent’s District on the far Southeast outskirts of Portland was targeted, and then later in the suburb of Beaverton. Both had issues.

For Lents, it was a NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) contingent worried about traffic and noise, while Beaverton’s issue surrounded land use, namely the need for eminent domain seizure of property; a nasty proposition.

But, the reality was, those issues paled when compared to how to fund the project. The MLS retrofit to PGE Park came in at approx. $31 million, while the new minor league ballpark was projected at $55.1 million. Finding over $86 million for the two projects came down to a matter of triage.

Paulson, a smart businessman, understood that when push came to shove, soccer made better business sense than minor league baseball. With MLS successfully expanding into Seattle, and Vancouver, BC on-tap for 2011, as well, a regional “I-5”rivalry is sure to occur.

So, what happens to the Beavers and Portland?

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Say the words “performance-enhancing drugs” in a baseball discussion, and if there’s more than two people involved in it, chances are, you’re going to get strong opinions on the topic. For Major League Baseball, the issue is most often centered around its records and awards, most notably the Hall of Fame.

But, if you look at every drug suspension in baseball (see the All-Time Drug Suspension list), players in the majors that have been suspended make up a tiny fraction of the total. Whether it has been players being able to afford substances or trainers to administer them that avoid detection, or the way that the program, called the Joint Drug Agreement (JDA), has been collectively bargained, major league players coming up positive in testing, or being caught through non-testing means termed non-analytics, chances are slim that a player under the major league testing program is announced as being under suspension.

Indeed, this year, there has been exactly one drug suspension under the major league policy (Edinson Volquez of the Reds on April 20), and last season there were just two (Kelvin Pichardo of the Giants, and the most high profile player to be suspended for PEDs since 2004, Manny Ramirez of the Dodgers).

The minor league testing policy, however, is a different animal. The number of players suspended each year is much higher, with the reasons being an incredibly complicated mix. There are young players in the Dominican and Venezuelan Summer Leagues that make up a large percentage of players that test positive each year. That ties into everything from players coming from desperate poverty to the buscóns– unlicensed managers/agents that work with some of the youngest prospects baseball has to offer. These young players, often times desperate, will do whatever a buscón will tell them. “Take this. Drink that,” without knowing whether what they are consuming is a vitamin or a possible banned substance. Throw in players from North America that are looking for any advantage that can get them into the majors, players using nutritional supplements that can be tainted with banned substances, plus drugs of abuse such as marijuana, etc. and, as mentioned, it gets complicated. (For more on the buscón culture, I highly recommend reading Sean Gregory’s Baseball Dreams: Striking Out in the Dominican Republic on TIME.com)

For MLB, the minor league testing program allows them to move unfettered by the MLBPA. Without being challenged by the union for the players, everything from the levels of a substance within the body, the ability to increase testing as the league sees fit, to the recent addition of hGH testing, are green lighted depending on the direction that the league wishes to go.

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One of my favorite features here at Fangraphs is the data on minor leage players. With the recently added “items on screen” drop down we can now easily update and maintain our own minor league database. Delving into the statistics I decided to look at the top hitters and pitchers in both the International and Pacific League; both contain AAA affiliates. This is not to suggest these players deserve promotions or that their major league counterparts should be demoted, but rather just a simple scan of who has been producing at a high level in areas many of us tend not to follow.

International League Hitters
Mike Hessman, Det, 1B: .308/.392/.747, 1.138 OPS, 17 HR-30 RBI
Brad Eldred, CHW, 1B: .298/.348/.672, 1.019 OPS, 12 HR-36 RBI
Dewayne Wise, CHW, OF: .351/.396/.613, 1.011 OPS, 7 HR-15 RBI, 12 SB
Jay Bruce, Cin, OF: .352/.391/.613, 1.004 OPS, 7 HR-30 RBI
Darnell McDonald, Min, OF: .336/.392/.600, .992 OPS, 4 HR-26 RBI

International League Pitchers
Dan Giese, NYY: 2.27 FIP, 39.2 IP, 9 BB, 35 K
Charlie Morton, Atl: 2.58 FIP, 48.0 IP, 15 BB, 39 K
David Purcey, Tor: 2.82 FIP, 44.2 IP, 16 BB, 52 K
Matt Maloney, Cin: 2.96 FIP, 41.1 IP, 13 BB, 37 K
Eddie Bonine, Det: 2.97 FIP, 48.1 IP, 6 BB, 29 K, 7-0 W-L

Pacific League Hitters
Nelson Cruz, Tex, OF: .336/.471/.700, 1.171 OPS, 11 HR-32 RBI, 11 SB
Matt Brown, LAA, 3B: .365/.416/.679, 1.095 OPS, 8 HR-28 RBI
Terry Tiffee, LAD, 3B: .430/.474/.620, 1.094 OPS, 3 HR-33 RBI
Russell Branyan, Mil, OF: .54/.434/.638, 1.072 OPS, 8 HR-26 RBI
James D’Antona, Ari, 3B: .421/.430/.627, 1.057 OPS, 4 HR-22 RBI

Pacific League Pitchers
Brian Stokes, NYM: 2.65 FIP, 38.0 IP, 14 BB, 38 K, 5.68 ERA
Mike Burns, CHC: 2.69 FIP, 35.0 IP, 6 BB, 34 K
Carlos Alvarado, LAA: 2.86 FIP, 38.2 IP, 14 BB, 37 K
Ryan Feierabend, Sea: 3.11 FIP, 43.0 IP, 10 BB, 30 K
RA Dickey, Sea: 3.20 FIP, 42.2 IP, 6 BB, 25 K

The most intriguing player here is Jay Bruce, who has been performing at a very high level; you might remember the dismay of many fans in Cincinnati when news broke of Dusty Baker’s decision to send Bruce to the minors in favor of Corey Patterson. Some of the others here, such as Cruz, Hessman, Eldred, and Wise, have seemingly been given the AAAA tag; they may get chances here and there but are likely to maintain tremendous production in the minors and below average production in the majors.

We’ll have to wait and see what happens but I would not be surprised if any of these players is called up to the big club at some point in the near future due to poor production or injuries.