1 – Pedro Alvarez
2 – Madison Bumgarner
3 – Kyle Drabek
4 – Carlos Santana
5 – Jesus Montero
6 – Dominic Brown
7 – Junichi Tazawa
8 – Wilson Ramos
9 – Michael Taylor
10 – Brad Lincoln
11 – Hector Rondon
12 – Josh Reddick
13 – Ike Davis
14 – Marc Rzepczynski
15 – Jose Tabata
16 – Scott Sizemore
17 – Jake Arrieta
18 – Nick Weglarz
19 – Zach McAllister
20 – Brandon Snyder

Noah Lowry

That’s the comp. Obviously, as some of you have noted Bond doesn’t have a chance to project power like Youkilis, but the real question is how much value is in his power versus his OBP and defense.

Bond has a career MiLB walk rate of 12%, while Youkilis had an amazing 23%. Their career MiLB SO rate is similar at 15%. Bond seems to be a slappy hitter as he’s never had a BABiP lower than .371 when having more than 100 AB’s, a trend he’ll probably have to maintain to keep that BA up. If he can keep his BB% up and SO% down and play average second base he may an unglamorous surprise. I would hope he’s a spring training invite at the very least.

I fired up an old minors-to-majors conversion program I used to use, with what I’d call decent success, some years back, and this is what it showed for Bond, using conservatively the league run environment rather than the Defenders’ team run environment (which, being lower, would project him yet higher):

           AB BB H 2B 3B HR
Raw: 450 67 150 21 5 1
MLE: 453 64 145 21 4 1

The method is a variation of the original Bill James method, as are most MLE calculators. For those interested in checking, the calculated m was 0.92638674998949, based on an MLB R/G of 4.896067415 and an EL R/G of 4.291519434 (the team’s R/G was 4.144366197).

As I say, this was a quick hack-up of the original PHP script, but I think it’s correct. The details, again for those who want to verify, are:

m = 0.812 x (MLBrperg/ELrperg) where the .812 is the skill differential betweeen the minors and the majors (81.2%). With m calculated, M is its square root. Then (working with the EL stats):

outs = AB – H

walks =walks x m
hits = hits x M x 0.98
doubles = doubles x M
triples = triples x m x 0.85
homeruns = homeruns x m
at-bats = hits + outs (MLE hits + EL outs)

And finally, the results are pro-rated to represent the same number of total plate appearances (based on AB and BB, with the lesser stats assumed comparable).

If there is nothing significantly wrong with all that (and I don’t think there is), the translations are quite remarkable: OBP of .404 and OPS of .795 (Freddy Sanchez’s career OPS is .751), which would put him in the top few for second basemen. (Especially since OPS has defects which over-value power and correspondingly under-vale OBP.)

The point is that even deflating those projections by quite a bit, he still comes out looking pretty good.

I mdean really WTF!!

One thing that I’m surprised hasn’t drawn comment is that there’s no Alderson in this list. He seems to have really plummeted in peoples minds and it’s going to be interesting just how far he drops when the rankings come out.