Top 30 Prospects, Part III: 16 -20
by Grant on Feb 8, 2010 1:11 PM PST
55 comments
Is Madison Bumgarner in this batch? Well, you'll just have to click the link to find out....
55 comments | 0 recs |
Top 30 Prospects, Part II: 21-25
by Grant on Feb 5, 2010 11:42 AM PST
460 comments
Pitchers, pitchers, pitchers. It's like a Mötley Crüe song for nerds.
460 comments | 0 recs |
Top 30 Prospects, Part I: 26-30
by Grant on Feb 4, 2010 12:59 PM PST
432 comments
By unpopular demand, the first installment of McCovey Chronicles’ Top 30 Prospects for 2010*:
432 comments | 0 recs |
Top 30 Prospects, Part I: Just Missed
by Grant on Feb 3, 2010 11:23 AM PST
922 comments
In the 2001 Baseball America Prospect Handbook, here were the prospects who made up #s 26-30:
26. A 24-year-old outfielder who had hit .272/.333/.402 in AA (Texas League)
27. An 18th-round draft-and-follow who had his contract voided due to elbow problems and sat out a year.
28. A 7th-round pick who threw hard, but had no professional experience yet.
29. A hacking 24-year-old who moved to catcher to attempt a career as a super-utility player
30. A 28-year-old soft-tossing lefty with a chance to be a LOOGY one day.
The names aren’t as important (Doug Clark, David Brous, Erick Threets, Edwards Guzman, and Chad Zerbe) as the descriptions. When trawling through the bottom end of a prospect list, all you have are descriptions, for the most part. A 24-year-old rightie with below-average stuff but above-average command. A 23-year-old with enormous power potential but substantial contact issues. Those are the kinds of descriptions that pepper the bottom of a prospect list.
And just going off those vague descriptions, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have ranked most of the 26-30 bunch from 2001 in the top 50 of this year’s crop, with the lone exception of Threets, who would probably be analogous to Matt Graham from this year’s list. Maybe that’s a little harsh -- four of the above five did make the majors for a brief time, with one of them even busting the record books -- but it’s a testimony to the improved depth of the system. I can’t speak to how this year’s depth stacks up with other teams around the league, but it sure beats the dregs from the bottoms of Giants’ prospect lists in the past.
This is all a long-winded introduction to the honorable mentions of my top-30 list. I’m not sure where these guys would rank if I stretched the list out to 40 or 50, but some of you value them enough that you might be expecting them to pop up from #10 to #20 when they don’t show up from #21 to #30. I’ll just kill the suspense here. And by "suspense," I mean "indifference." And by "kill the indifference," I mean, "feed the indifference until it grows stronger and more powerful, eventually morphing into hostile apathy."
Five guys who aren’t on the top-30 list:
922 comments | 0 recs |
Ranking Prospects
by Grant on Feb 2, 2010 7:00 AM PST
345 comments
Three years ago, Kevin Goldstein told the following to both of the readers of this site:
345 comments | 0 recs |
The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum announced today that Jon Miller, who has spent parts of five decades as the voice of five Major League Baseball teams and has been the voice of ESPN’s national Sunday Night Baseball telecasts for 20 years, has been selected as the 2010 recipient of the Ford C. Frick Award, presented annually for major contributions to baseball broadcasting. Miller will be honored during Hall of Fame Induction Ceremonies on Sunday, July 25, 2010 in Cooperstown, N.Y.
7 days ago
Grant
203 comments
3 recs
Former closer Kim, Giants agree to deal
Some of you might be too young to remember, but Byung-Hyung Kim used to be really good. Then he became a starting pitcher, lost six or seven miles off his fastball, and had all sorts of arm injuries, not necessarily in that order.
I'd give a spring training invite to Greg Minton if he wanted one. It's an no-risk, all-reward proposition, and I especially like when they're given to 31-year-old relievers with a history of past success. A distant, distant history, sure, but....
7 days ago
Grant
90 comments
0 recs
Thoughts on "calling a good game."
by Grant on Jan 29, 2010 7:00 AM PST
853 comments
From Lookout Landing....
We would expect better game-callers to post lower (CERAs), and we would expect worse game-callers to post higher CERAs. Adjusted for pitchers and opponents, of course. Obviously, if you're calling a better game, that means your pitchers are allowing fewer runs. And here's where it gets interesting. Catchers catch a lot of innings. There's nobody out there who's, say, a full CERA point better than average, but do you think a study could really pick up on a difference of 0.2? What about 0.1? With all the variables and all the adjustments, do you think that, if there were a spread from -0.1 to +0.1, any study would be able to catch it?
Over 900 innings - the average of the top 30 catchers in innings caught - a 0.1 CERA effect would be equal to ten runs. So if such a true-talent spread from -0.1 to +0.1 did exist, that would come out to a spread of 20 runs over a full season, or roughly two wins.
The implication being that, even given a spread that small, we could be talking about the best game-caller being two wins better than the worst game-caller over a full season by true talent, on game-calling alone.
This makes sense to my English major brain. Calling a good game might be a big deal, and it's not necessarily something that we can quantify just yet. Of course, that sets up this question: Does a catcher magically become a good game caller through experience, or can a lunkheaded ten-year veteran still be a lunkhead when it comes to baseball strategy? Because I've seen veteran catchers make unbelievably silly pitch calls -- a first pitch fastball to Vinny Castilla? Sure! Why not? -- so independent of any evidence, I'm not ready to assign pitch-calling bonus points to one catcher and demerits to another catcher just based on experience. That would be like assuming Bengie Molina would have better plate discipline than Buster Posey because of the disparity in major league at-bats.
But now I get how pitch-calling can make a huge difference. Until there's a way to quantify it, the choices are a) to use anecdotal evidence and personal observation when determining who calls a good game, or b) ignore it entirely because we can't properly quantify it yet. Both are pretty repugnant choices.
And I'd still like Posey to start, dang it...
853 comments | 0 recs |
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