THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Wednesday, February 02, 2011

Baseball America on 17yr old Felix

This is why scouting is critical:

Strengths: Hernandez has scary upside. He’ll open this season as a 17-year-old and he doesn’t need to develop any more stuff. The only guy in the organization with a comparable arm is big leaguer Rafael Soriano. Hernandez has the best fastball in the system and commands his mid-90s heat well. He regularly touches 97 and could reach triple digits as his skinny frame fills out. Hernandez’ curveball is also unparalleled among Mariners farmhands and gives him the possibility for two 70 pitches on the 20-80 scouting scale. Though he’s young and can easily overpower hitters at the lower levels, he understands the value of a changeup and is developing a good one. He can pitch down in the strike zone or blow the ball by hitters upstairs. He has poise and mound presence beyond his years.

Weaknesses: Hernandez just has to learn how to pitch. He needs to tweak his command and refine his pitches. Typical of a teenager with a lightning arm, he’ll overthrow at times but should grow out of that. Arm problems would appear to be the only thing that could derail him from stardom, and Hernandez has been perfectly healthy so far. The Mariners will go to great lengths to make sure he isn’t overworked in the minors.

The Future: Seattle wants to move Hernandez slowly, but he may not let that happen. He’s not going to need to spend a full season at each level and might need just two more years in the minors. He’ll probably start 2004 back at low Class A Wisconsin—the Mariners concede he could have spent all of last season there—and could be bucking for a promotion to high Class A Inland Empire by midseason. It’s easy to get overexcited about young pitchers, but Hernandez has the legitimate potential to become the best pitcher ever developed by the Mariners.

Put simply: if you only look at performance outcome results, you can’t get a report to read like that.  That’s because with limited performance data and against competition that is unlike MLB, you are going to heavily regress.  That’s why PITCHf/x is the goldmine, as it’s the one thing that can merge scouting observations with performance results.

At the same time, I can’t just look after-the-fact of this fantastically glowing report, see that Felix exceeed expectations, and determine that scouting “is all that”.  You have to look at ALL the glowing reports of 17yr old pitchers and see how often they hit and how often they missed.  Then we can say how much impact scouting can have.

This is similar to a statistical-only analysis of saying “hey look, I nailed [whoever… Latos, Strasburg, Weaver, Gooden, etc]”, but then ignoring all the others you ranked highly but didn’t nail.  You can get great forecasts for these pitchers by regressing only a little, but then that simply means you are going to include alot of pitchers that shouldn’t be there to begin with (and you’ll be saved by having the MLB managers not pitch those guys and thereby removing them from the sample!).

That’s why Marcel does so well by simply saying: “all minor leaguers will perform at league average”.  Because historically, this is close to true (90% of league average or so).  But, that’s an after-the-fact view, because managers have selected which players they think will perform the best based on in part, you guessed it, scouting reports.

PITCHf/x, FIELDf/x, HITf/x will eventually remove all this doubt, and finally put us in a position where scouting and statistics can converge to a single common point.  Just a matter of time until MLB will create its own academy league so that they can put in the f/x system in parks all across the country.