What Do Minor League Walk and Strikeout Rates Tell Us About Prospects? Single A Edition

By Chris St. John


Introduction
A few months ago, I created a database that includes all of the prospect rankings from Baseball America, Keith Law and Kevin Goldstein. I didn't have a direct purpose for it, I'm just the type of person who likes to accumulate as much data as possible. So it sat around on my computer until I found a good use for it. Well, thanks to fantasy baseball and Starling Marte's horrible 3.8% walk rate in AA last season, I have. Marte is a possible target in my dynasty minor league draft and I wanted to see what other prospects had poor walk rates and how successful they were in their careers.

Method
In interest of saving digital space (and your scrolling finger), I will only post the full method on the Rookie and Low-A edition of this series.

I have added a new feature, which includes 2007-2012 prospects. I followed exactly the same procedure as before in determining the very low to very high categories for current prospects or younger players. I listed only the top 10 or so for each category, instead of all players who fit that description.

History
Rookie and Low-A

Single-A
285 of the 480 prospects in this dataset accumulated at least 150 plate appearances in Single-A. This is quite a leap from the 111 number in Low-A, so the overall numbers here are a bit more interesting. 19% were successful, 20% were average and 61% were busts. This is much closer to the overall 21/21/58 trend for all prospects.

Walks

Jamie Moyer's Potential Firsts

By Bill


I just wrote about Moyer right around a month ago. But he's taking the field now, stirrups and all, and, well, I can't help it. I'm excited about it. I still don't expect him to make an appearance in the big leagues this year, but just the fact that he might is so freaking cool.

So, quickly. If he does make the majors this year, here are some records he can set:

- First pitcher age 49 or older ever to earn a win. The only two 49 year olds ever to pitch in the major leagues were Hoyt Wilhelm and Jack Quinn; both pitched exclusively in relief, totaling 41 innings, and each had one loss and one save, but no wins. The only pitcher older than 49 was Satchel Paige, who made his one novelty start for the Kansas City Athletics at age 58 (at least) in 1965, but lasted only three innings.

Scott Miller's Childish Faith of a Child

By The Common Man

Look, at some point in our lives, almost all of us have idolized a baseball player or two.  They're on TV a lot, they do seemingly heroic things, and they're talked about in such glowing terms by broadcasters and sportswriters alike that it's easy for fans to fall for the narratives.

This happened to The Common Man with Kirby Puckett, a dumpy, perpetually smiling highlight reel with a funny name and who looked fairly ridiculous at the plate until he'd hit a baseball really, really hard, and who seemed to handle the abrupt end of his career with grace and dignity.  It turned out that Kirby Puckett wasn't nearly as nice as he was portrayed on TV, in magazines, in newspapers, and in his autobiography (which The Common Man owns in both its adult and children's editions).  It turns out that Kirby Puckett, in addition to being a really good baseball player who loved to play the game and smile a lot was also a womanizer and allegedly a sex offender.

This is not to pile on to Puckett, who The Common Man is absolutely incapable of viewing rationally as either a ballplayer or a human being, given how hard he rooted for him in real life and how much of a part of TCM's childhood Puckett was.  Puckett helped make The Common Man a baseball fan, and TCM will always be grateful for that, and for Puckett's incredible performances in the clutch that helped the Twins win two World Championships.

What Do Minor League Walk and Strikeout Rates Tell Us About Prospects? Rookie League and Low A Edition

By Chris St. John


Introduction
A few months ago, I created a database that includes all of the prospect rankings from Baseball America, Keith Law and Kevin Goldstein. I didn't have a direct purpose for it, I'm just the type of person who likes to accumulate as much data as possible. So it sat around on my computer until I found a good use for it. Well, thanks to fantasy baseball and Starling Marte's horrible 3.8% walk rate in AA last season, I have. Marte is a possible target in my dynasty minor league draft and I wanted to see what other prospects had poor walk rates and how successful they were in their careers.

Method
I decided to only look at hitting prospects who appeared on a Baseball America list from 1990 to 2006, a total of 480 players. This provides an ample amount of time for us to know how the prospect fared in his career. Then, I took minor league plate appearance, walk and strikeout data from 1987 to 2011 from Baseball Prospectus. The Rookie league data may not be complete, but should be extremely close. Then I added Fangraphs WAR and other assorted Major League offensive metrics for each prospect.

I removed all minor league data after a player accumulated 100 Major League PAs, removing rehab and non-prospect years. Then I created level average metrics by year: BB/lvlBB*100 and SO/lvlSO*100. This doesn't account for the various leagues (International versus Pacific in AAA) but it's better than nothing. I calculated a weighted average for players who spent multiple years in the same level.

Next, I wanted to account for small sample sizes, so I only looked at players who accumulated more than 150 total plate appearances per level. Then I calculated a variance for each player from the average for qualified players at each level for both walk and strikeout rate: (BB/PA+ - average BB/PA+ for qualified players)/Standard deviation BB/PA+. Finally, I split players into categories of Very Low, Low, Average, High and Very High, based on this variance.

Gary Carter's Best Day in Baseball

By Bill


I imagine that Gary Carter, who passed away yesterday at just 57 years of age, would've told you his best day involved a lot of time spent with his wife, children and/or grandchildren. I'm just as sure that he'd have his own idea of what his best day in baseball was -- his two-homer game in the World Series would be a good bet, or the time he caught Charlie Lea's no-hitter. (Odd, sad side note: Lea, two and a half years younger than Carter, died after a heart attack just three months ago.) Here, I'm going to focus on the regular season, and mostly on hitting. What was the single greatest game of Carter's career?

There's a lot to choose from, obviously. Carter was a Hall of Famer (and a more than deserving one) who appeared in 2,296 games, and 2,056 of them as catcher -- fourth most all-time. He had twenty-eight career multi-homer games,  105 games with at least three hits, 42 with four or more RBI [edit: I was looking at incomplete data, so had to fix the numbers]. But here, subjectively selected and ordered, are what might be his five best:

Ray Ratto stretches and stretches

by Jason Wojciechowski

So studly
Photo by Jeffrey Beall

Ray Ratto is not the most rigorous of thinkers you'll encounter in your everyday baseball-fan life, but I was still a little surprised to see this headline on a piece yesterday morning: "Is Cespedes Oakland's Lin?"

First thought: "Oh, this is exciting. It'll be a one-word column ('No') and we can get on with our lives!"

Second thought: "First thought was delusional."

You can guess, without even clicking the link, who was right.

Ratto's argument, in bullets:

1. Baseball needs a Tebow/Lin.¹

Pteromerhanophobia, AJ Burnett, and Jackie Jensen

By The Common Man

This morning, we learned that AJ Burnett has officially rejected a trade to the Angels, citing his desire to play on the East Coast. On the surface, it seems ridiculous. Burnett is clearly not wanted in The Bronx anymore, by either the Yankees or the fans, and the Angels have a low-pressure rotation spot that he’d be ideal for as he seeks to right his career. So why…why on Earth, would AJ Burnett refuse the trade?

According to a commenter on one of Rob Neyer’s latest posts (h/t to Rob's Tweet) there is speculation that Burnett’s committed to staying on the East Coast for family reasons. Burnett lives in Maryland in the offseason and, based on some of the provisions of his contracts with the Blue Jays, the team paid for limousine service for Burnett’s wife and children to drive the 8 hours from Baltimore to Toronto several times during his stint there. The speculation is that Burnett’s wife may be deathly afraid of flying, and playing on the East Coast allows him to get back to see his family more regularly, since they can’t come extreme distances to him. The Common Man has no idea whether this is true, nor if it is does he think that anyone in the Burnett family deserves any measure of criticism for their decisions.

What interests The Common Man is that this is in no way the first time that a fear of flying has potentially derailed a promising baseball career.