Community Prospect List #32

You’re right, in my records I transposed Arnold’s senior year high school stats with last year’s JuCo stats. I show him throwing 72 innings during his 2009 HS season and then an extra 14+ innings in the postseason. Even with the transposition, Arnold threw 35 more innings than Gregorio last year.

Actually, I think that the VWL was the toughest Winter League this offseason, IMO. All of the other ones didn’t have the level of major league participation that the VWL did. That being said, there’s no way that Blanco is going to slug above .400 in a given major league season. If he gets major league playing time this year it will most likely be taking starts away from Schierholtz. If the Giants struggle again in the leadoff spot, I could see Blanco being tried there – with Pagan or Melky sliding over to RF and one of Pagan, Melky and Nate heading to the bench

As a prospect moves up through a system, I find it difficult to assume that they will continue to hit as well as they did. In some cases it’s likely, in most it’s unlikely, but there’s always a considerable degree of uncertainty. I don’t feel the same way about defense – if a player does well in rookie ball it’s just as likely he’ll do well in the majors. Crawford, for example, had a major-league ready glove in A+, and we saw that in SF – he didn’t show up only to reveal he had a plus glove for San Jose but wasn’t ready for the majors. Defense doesn’t work like that.

Once players reach the majors, of late it’s been a different story (in different time periods in baseball they lived with the bat if the glove was there) – if they hit they’ll play. Given the more certain nature of offensive sabremetrics, that’s a good policy – we can’t evaluate defensive contributions as well as offensive contributions, so we should go with the more certain way of getting value. There’s also an argument to be made that players simply can’t contribute as much on defense – the very best defensive players each year only contribute 20-25 runs while the best hitters add 50+, though that could be a function of the limitation of defensive metrics. However, that’s a different story than prospect evaluation – due to the nontrivial offensive differences between levels of the minors and the entire minors vs. the majors, players are progressively less likely to hit as they move up. So when ranking a player like Kelby Tomlinson, who is an unheralded mid-round pick with little experience at the lowest level, I find it unlikely he will continue to post .440 wOBAs as he rises. If he doesn’t have a glove, he needs to ride the bat, as the consistency of defense means his glove won’t get much better if it gets better at all. Therefore he’s in trouble without a glove – his pedigree does not suggest he will continue to hit, and if he can’t defend, there’s nothing there. But if he does have a glove, the bat can get worse (substantially worse, given how he hit in rookie ball, though that may depend on exactly how good he is defensively) as it should be expected to, without wiping him off the prospect map.

Once a player reaches the majors, things change. I brought up Dunn to show that players can fall off a cliff with little or no provocation (though I suppose that depends on how much you think the AL/DH impact a hitter), and jumping to a higher minor league level is a pretty big provocation.

This whole thing seems like a really roundabout way of saying “if Tomlinson is good defensively, that helps his prospect status”.

I thought you were being a lot less definitive about the defensive evaluation, and for the life of me can’t figure out why I thought that after re-reading it.

And shoots fireballs from his eyes, and bolts of lightning from his arse.

Fla with the jokes !