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Minors_College
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Story:
No one here disputes the diminished stature of baseball in Puerto Rico, and most agree on the culprit: Major League Baseball’s decision, in 1990, to include Puerto Rico, a commonwealth of the United States, in its first-year player draft. This means Puerto Rican players must wait until they have completed high school to sign a professional contract, and then they are going up against players from the United States and Canada in the draft.
...
“What is the difference between 1980 and 2011? The draft,” David Bernier, Puerto Rico’s former secretary of sport and recreation, said in an interview in his office here. “Nothing has changed but the draft. Everything else is the same.”
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“From a socioeconomic standpoint, things have changed quite a bit in Puerto Rico,” [Sandy Alderson] said. “There are lots of other ways to spend your time. In the Dominican Republic, on the other hand, unfortunately, poor kids who are playing ball and who are from the lowest economic strata in that country, baseball is a way to escape, so there’s a greater concentration of players and effort. I think they’re just very different dynamics than Puerto Rico.”
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
I’d like to see the BB and K rate for all leagues around the world.
It turns out that you can, in fact, walk off the island. The league-wide walk rate is a robust 8.3% against a 17.9% K rate. In this tiny sample that means marginally more walks and fewer Ks than the big leagues in 2011.
Monday, January 23, 2012
Courtesy of the one and only John Sickels.
Sunday, January 01, 2012
Somewhere in this, I can easily find a common place to agree with Ron Polk. Take for example:
Here are a few examples of the ‘math’ complaints and the ‘baseball’ answers: Why one point deducted for a strikeout swinging and two points deducted for a strike out looking? They’re both one out.: A perfectly legitimate math complaint, but the two strikeouts are different to ballplayers. With two strikes the hitters is expected to expand his zone, stop being picky and try to get the ball in play. A strike out looking does not give the hitter or his team a chance and is considered by many coaches to be bad baseball.
One way to think about this (and really, the way to think about EVERYTHING) is inference. We don’t care about the results, when trying to figure out a player’s true talent level. An out is NOT an out, when you think of his talent level.
Now, is a caught looking strikeout somehow worse (or better) than a swinging strikeout? Well, this is what we have to research. What if most swinging strikeouts are on pitches outside the strikezone? I have more faith in Tony Gwynn having a strikeout swinging than Andres Galarraga. That is, a Tony Gwynn strikeout swinging is a better than for Big Cat, in terms of what it tells us about the hitters. Indeed, maybe Big Cat needs to have more caught looking strikeouts, because he swings at so many pitches outside the strikezone with two strikes.
Anyway, there’s definitely legitimate viewpoints here, and it’s just a matter of trying to synthesize it into “truths”.
There is NO reason to argue here as if there’s a final opinion that is somehow some assumption of fact. We are in the research and learning stage here.
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Patrick tries to come up with some value.
The one big hole in his valuation is that he keep IP constant. WAR per IP may remain constant in the lat 20s, but IP will go down. As a result, you need to drop a couple of wins in there.
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Fascinating, if not downright confusing. I applaud the creativity here at least. And you can see what it is they are trying to do. But it feels more like a patchwork, the kind of thing you’d expect from changes to the tax code. I’d expect the next CBA, or maybe the one after that, will have to streamline this whole process. Anyway, I like it. I just don’t love it.
So, there’s a lottery for six teams from a group of 10-20 predetermined teams, and they get to pick just before the 2nd round. And then another lottery of six more teams from the remaining group (plus more teams based on other criteria), and they pick right after the 2nd round. Lottery picks can be traded, but not the regular picks. (Obviously, a transitional-trial thing that will eventually lead to full trading.)
Finally, the interesting one. We already know about paying above your pool allocation. If Strasburg signed what he did, the Nationals would have not only paid around a 10MM$ fine, they’d also have to forfeit their first round picks in the next two seasons. Forfeiture of those picks ALSO goes into a lottery. I don’t know why they’d have to do that, instead of just moving everyone up 1.
And the whole lottery thing is all weighted based on some combination of winning percentage and market size, depending on which lottery we are talking about.
Like I said: love the creativity, like-not-love the implementation.
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Matt makes the point that even with the draft pick cap limits, baseball prospects in high school will still choose baseball, because it’s the best game in town. But, at what point would they actually start to leave? How low a signing bonus would you have until baseball is shunned as an option?
The idea of “signing bonuses” is interesting, because that doesn’t exist in the NHL. The reason you don’t need a signing bonus with NBA or NFL is that you are signing a major league contract right away and playing in the majors right away. The NHL is setup like MLB, with minor leagues. So, you are actually signing a two-way deal, like MLB would.
The NHL has a rookie cap at just under a million$, and is stuck there at 3 years (so the most you can sign is a 3 year 3MM$ deal from your draft, as long as you make it to the pros, with some bonuses, that used to be easy to attain, but they clamped down on that). NHL 18-yr old prospects also have nowhere else to go. There’s no such thing as a big-business college hockey, and the cost of education in Canada is far lower than it is in USA, so scholarships don’t have as much value.
So, signing bonuses exist in MLB as some sort of incentive to push you toward MLB, and away from college. But the reality is that MLB can have no signing bonuses whatsoever, effectively making all the high school players choose college instead, and wait to draft players after college… and then have no signing bonuses at all… just like the NHL.
What would happen here? Would Bryce Harper and the Upton boys choose football instead? And when they graduate college, prefer NFL to MLB?
And even if all that did happen, how many players are we talking about? 1% of the star players? 5% even? No one is going to notice that MLB doesn’t have all the best players in North America if 5% of them intentionally “pre-retire”.
So, why not simply do away with signing bonuses completely?
Let’s go even further. We’ve established that a 1MM$ or 2MM$ signing bonus, or no signing bonus at all, will barely affect the talent pool eventually entering MLB. What if the prospects themselves have to PAY TO GET INTO MLB?
If MLB provides access to so much future money to these players, and if these players really have nowhere else to go, how much would they be willing to pay to register to get drafted? It’s no different from college, right? I had to pay to go to school, as it was a gateway to getting a job in the real world.
What if MLB had baseball academies that you had to pay to get into? (That is basically what each team’s minor league is.)
And you can go even further: what if a player, rather than paying, agrees to give up 50% of his first year salary (if he makes it that far), or 5% of his lifetime earnings?
Here’s my challenge to you: start with a clean slate. Blow up everything you even thought of regarding MLB and its draft. Explain to me the impact of having no signing bonuses at all (like NHL). And explain to me the impact of making players pay (like NBA and NFL effectively are making them do by making them go to college).
Teach me.
I like the idea of having a pool of money for each team, based on where they draft. But apparently, that pool of money is only for players you actually sign.
So, if you had 10MM$ allocated to you, and you only sign your #1 pick, but don’t sign your picks 2 through 10, then what you are actually allocated is only say 3MM$. (Your allocation is based on where the player was selected, and if he signed.)
What’s the unintended consequence here? Well, if you really really want a guy, and you are afraid he will go to college instead, you will intentionally tank the draft of picks 2 through 10, signing guys to 100,000$ deals, and taking the extra money allocated to those picks and putting them into your #1 pick. So, you underslot picks 2 through 10 so you can overslot pick #1.
Now, the idea of underslotting and overslotting was always the idea here, so there was some wiggle room, but it wasn’t the idea that you would underslot to such an extent.
In the end, a team that makes a good-faith effort to draft a quality player that they can’t sign ends up losing the allocation money, but a team that makes a bad-faith effort to draft a subpar player that they do sign ends up gaining the remaining allocation money.
When you put in these kinds of artificial controls that goes against a free market, unintended consequences will rear its ugly head.
It’s sort of what Billy Beane was doing as detailed in Moneyball: drafting guys he knew he could sign. So, if he knows he can’t sign the best player available at 3MM$, then he’ll go find a guy who will sign at 1MM$. Every other team would have loved to get that guy at say 1.1MM$, but they’re still in the part of the draft where there are plenty of better players. So, Beane gets assurances that the guy will sign for 1MM$ and drafts him in the first round.
Tuesday, November 01, 2011
And not anyone else that happens to be Japanese. Presumably, we wouldn’t mistake Tom Glavine and Randy Johnson either.
While the white speed limit signs are “regulatory”, the yellow speed limit signs are “warning”. That is, if you go faster than the warning speed limit, you won’t get pulled over. (At least, that’s how I think it works.)
It seems that Selig’s slot limits act the same way:
How much money each team spent in the first 10 rounds of the 2011 draft, and how that compares to its estimated slot allowance in those rounds from the commissioner’s office:
Team Picks Signed Bonus Total Slot Total Slot Spent
Pirates 10 10 $16,445,700 $6,134,200 268%
Royals 10 9 $11,405,000 $4,579,500 249%
Nationals 11 11 $14,551,100 $6,005,100 242%
Basically, teams are paying 2.5 times the slot “recommendations”.
Friday, October 14, 2011
Rany:
(If you want the technical details: “Very Young” players were less than 17 years, 296 days old on draft day; “Young” players were between 17 years, 296 days and 18 years, 38 days; “Average” players were between 18 years, 38 days and 18 years, 120 days; “Old” players were between 18 years, 120 days and 18 years, 200 days; “Very Old” players were more than 18 years, 200 days old.)
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I have a draft database with WAR all setup from my previous threads. If I get a chance, I’ll try to perform some analysis as well.
Monday, October 10, 2011
John Sickels tries to explain it.
It was pointed out yesterday that through 16 years of prospect analysis, I have never given anyone a Grade A+. Commentators wondered if Alex Rodriguez or Andruw Jones would have been worthy of such a grade, and if not them, who?
Star-divide
To me, a Grade A+ hitting prospect would be a player with 80 ratings in every traditional scouting category, as well as outstanding plate discipline, terrific makeup factors, and flawless statistics. He would be very young for his levels, and already playing a premium defensive position with present Gold-Glove caliber defense. I have never see a prospect like that.
A Grade A+ pitching prospect would have four plus-plus pitches, exceptional command and control, a great body, perfect mechanics, no injury history, outstanding makeup, and a brilliant performance record. Again, I’ve never seen anyone like that. There is always some flaw somewhere, no matter how minor.
Maybe that is just an impossible standard, but to me an A+ would mean “this player has no discernable problems or issues to work on at all.” A Grade A+ prospect would be a Platonic ideal.
I wonder what he would say about Wayne Gretzky or Magic Johnson? Gretzky would have some “hole” that would you could theoretically expose I guess. But, man, if you simply outright say that it’s a one in a billion shot to be an A+, then your letter grade of A becomes the defacto highest possible grade. And if you do that, I can bet you that there’s some A players that are better than others, and that you’d really want to move some of them to A+.
Wednesday, October 05, 2011
Age and name alterations:
“They don’t pay big bucks for 17; they pay big bucks for 16,” Robles says. “The difference can be hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
BPro rolled it out. Check back a little later, as I wasn’t able to get any data yet.
Monday, August 15, 2011
I thought this was interesting:
When the Rockies’ first offer came in at $2.2 million…
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In August, two months after the draft and after numerous offers and counteroffers between Tanzer and the Rockies, Harrington was finally offered $4.9 million, but there were conditions: The offer was no longer a bonus but instead a salary to be spread out over eight years, plus Matt had to forgo three years of arbitration.
So, the choice for Harrington at the time was a 2.2MM$ signing bonus, or a, basically, 2.2MM$ signing bonus, and 2.7MM$ contract over his non-free agency years. Felix or Weaver or JJ or Verlander would earn about 25MM$ in their pre-FA years. Basically, it sets the odds of Harrington matching their level at only 10% (or if you include the signing bonus, at 20%).
It’s an interesting actuarial calculation they made. I’ll leave it to you guys to make that calculation.
The writer of the piece by the way was Amy K. Nelson, so big kudos to her. I never really heard of her before the Bautista/Jays thing, so props to her on a terrific article.
With teams being given a compensation in next year’s draft for not signing a draft pick, it’s an interesting look by Larry Stone on what’s happened in the last few years.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Story:
“Pretty sad seeing 12 year olds pimp home runs and throwing all curve balls. Times have changed…” the 23-year-old former No. 1 draft pick, who is rehabbing from Tommy John surgery, tweeted at about the time of the blast.
Garcia’s father, Steven, an Altamont assistant coach, said his kid was doing no more than mimicking his favorite baseball player, the Yankees’ Robinson Cano, and, “it’s crazy that a pro baseball player would tweet hateful stuff.”
Meanwhile Caesar, who turned 13 last month, didn’t seem to mind Strasburg’s critique, posting on his own (very accessible to the public) Facebook page, “(A)nd strasburg tweeted about me pimpin my home run!!!!!… blahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh epicness”
Caesar’s 15 minutes of fame extended into prime time Tuesday. SportsCenter showed how his “pimpin” was modeled after Cano. It did a split screen comparing the two. Caesar’s Facebook profile took comments from all over the country. In general, the girls were impressed, the guys were not.
Unwritten (some would say archaic) rules of baseball dictate that home-run hitters don’t react in any way except putting their head down and running the bases briskly. Anything more — standing and admiring the shot, for example — is frowned upon and subject to retribution.
Readers’ reaction to the Journal noted just that. “Just because your hero is in the bigs doesn’t mean he always acts professionally. Hopefully someone will teach you class someday. At the next level you’ll wear the next pitch,” wrote a contributor called “34yo Baseball Tradionalist.”
Another, : “I looked as his Facebook comments and they are embarrassing. He’s 12 years old, he’s cocky and he thinks he’s bigger than the game and better than his teammates. He’ll learn.”
Steven Garcia agrees that there is a learning opportunity for his son. He said he told Caesar that “in high school, college and pros, it would be handled in a certain way. … We had that conversation all the way home.”
Tuesday, August 02, 2011
Interesting article by Dave.
Shades of Prior v Mauer?
Monday, June 27, 2011
On ESPN.
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Yup.
from Amazon
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