The Mishandling of Brandon Belt

They do.

This isn’t a moral question here; we’re not asking if the ends justify the means where the ends are world peace and the means are killing the entire human population. It’s practical. The best way to judge if a player is good or not is how they perform. These are the ends. Therefore whatever (okay, not WHATEVER; don’t think I’m saying that if the path involves mutilating kittens I’m okay with it) path the player took to get to being good was the right one. Or at least it’s hard to argue against it, since the player ended up good.

The problem with baseball is that nobody knows the right thing for every player. There’s a general system of belief on how to develop players, and it works a lot of the time, because by and large people are the same. But to argue that each person is exactly the same, so a team should treat them that way, is stupid. Hell, even the general system changes all the time because one player took a wonky development path and ended up great. Prospects are pretty damned hard to predict; just go look at the top prospect lists from ten years ago. Half those players ended up terrible. Or look at guys like Josh Hamilton or Andres Torres; weird development paths that ended up with two very good players. What worked for them wouldn’t work for a lot of players, and maybe what worked for a lot of players wouldn’t work for them.

There’s an argument that the weird development paths are worse than the normal ones even for players that took them and ended up good; they could have been better players. To that, I ask about the players who took the normal paths and ended up bad, or to prove that a player with a weird development would have been better with a normal one. It’s not so much that the argument is wrong, but that it’s impossible to prove it’s right, and with the knowledge that the weird path ended up in a good place I’m more inclined to say things went well overall.

Basically, I’m of the opinion that you can’t look at Josh Hamilton, AL MVP, and say that the franchises which developed him failed. Because they didn’t; he became one of the best baseball players alive. He got there in a weird way, but the important part is where he got to, not how he got there, so yeah, the ends justify the means.

But here you go:

Buster Posey needed two things toward the end of 2009: to experience a playoff atmosphere with no pressure, so he could get used to it without it getting to him (making him more comfortable in the future), and more developmental work behind the plate. Bringing him up in 2009 accomplished the first goal, and playing him would have not only put pressure on him – which they were trying to avoid – but hurt a team trying to make the postseason by putting his unready glove on the field. So he got called up and sat on the bench. They also couldn’t have waited until the beginning of 2010 (having him work on his defense through September 2009 instead of sitting on the bench in SF) because a) there is no playoff atmosphere in the first few months of the season and b) they couldn’t assume the team would be competitive; it probably would, but there’s no guarantee.

So he got called up for the last month of ’09 and then sent back down to start 2010 to work on his defense. A few months into the season, they deemed his glove ready and called him up. After some time at first to get used to actually playing in the majors instead of just being there, they traded Molina and installed him full-time behind the plate.

Again, I’m not saying this is how the thought process went. Maybe it was sloppy and illogical and they were just doing what felt right at the time. But it’s kind of hard to argue that they failed in developing him with that ROY and ring sitting on his mantlepiece.

IIRC, Posey was brought up in 2009 for no other reason than they were essentially playing with only one catcher on the roster because Molina was doing some serious malingering in the trainer’s office with a sustained minor injury and, it was rumored, simply refused to take the field for two or three days on end. The Posey move was either a) pragmatic — they needed a backup catcher; or b) a shot across Bengie’s bow.

Players need at least 200 or so consecutive PA’s before you know what you have.

Whenever I read something of this sort I’m reminded of something that Lorne Michaels used to say: the show doesn’t go on because it’s finished; it goes on because it’s 11:30 on Saturday night.

Which is to say that I can see, academically, the virtue of such a statement, but I wonder how often it really has a real world application. I know in my job, there’s probably never been a project that I’ve worked on the last 25 years that I didn’t have to jettison (for a whole host of reasons) some aspect that I really really wanted and thought would make the whole thing better, in some cases significantly better. It’s a shame but I understand why I have to make certain tradeoffs. 200 consecutive PA’s is a lot — it’s about a third of a season. And the thing I’d ask you to consider is: is it even possible to give every decent minor leaguer performer a third of a season consecutive starts to prove themselves — what would such a league even look like?

In Bowker’s case, I have to say I find your logic even more egregious because he not only DID get your required amount of PAs, he got nearly twice as much. So I have to assume that you’re saying, every guy coming up out of the minors needs to get a third of a season starting time, and then after being sent down and having made adjustments, he should get another third of a season starting time. Which makes the logistics of roster construction even more confusing.

Frankly, i’m not sure why people continue to believe that all of the professional player personnel evaluators for a number of different teams are all completely wrong in their assessment of this player. I really find that notion to lack credibility.

If I’m Sabean, and I have a 23 year old Nate Schierholtz mashing in AAA while showing strong RF defense, but my scouts tell me he has a hole in his swing on the pitch down and in (which seems to be his problem), I have two options:

1. Resign myself to the fact that he has a hole in his swing and he’s never going to be productive in the majors.
2. Do something to try and fix it, either by removing the hole somehow or teaching him to lay off the pitch down and in; since he can’t hit it, swinging definitely produces a strike, while not swinging only may produce a strike.

Seems pretty clear that (2) is a better choice. I don’t know for certain that that option wasn’t explored, and I wouldn’t assume the hole could be fixed, but it sure as hell doesn’t look like Nate was possessed with the ability to lay off the back foot breaking ball (he’s done a better job this year, and I heard they changed his swing a bit and opened him up, so maybe fixing the hole was possible). Even if the hole stays and Nate just lays off that pitch, pitchers aren’t going to be able to hit that spot every time; they will miss inside and low, leading to walks, or out over the plate where Nate can swing. Perhaps continuously pounding him inside would prevent him from posting great averages, but he’s shown pretty good power (which would be applied well to hanging breaking balls) and taking more pitches would increase his walk rate, probably making him a viable everyday player.

Like I said, I don’t know if any of this is possible, but it sure doesn’t seem like it’s been explored in depth. I feel like they just kind of said “Either Nate (and Bowker, really) will hit in the majors or they won’t, and there’s nothing we can do”. That may be true, but they should at least try, and I don’t feel that’s been the case.

I would argue that nothing ought to be said more often.

They don’t want to put him back on the 40 man.

don’t call a line of .192/.300/.269 “working out”.

The organization thinks that Belts main issue is mental and in order to ease his mind, they intend to incorporate him into the lineup slowly, or at least let his production dictate playing time. All of this may out the window now with the wrist injury, but I suspect that was the intent in bringing him up.

;-)

I hope he goes back down when Pablo and Fontenot return.

Part of me thinks that you should be able to edit, but that leaves the door open for people to “fix” their comments after the fact. I’ll take the current system; you can clarify in the unlikely event you’re actually unable to be understood, but you can’t take things back or act like you never said them.