THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

If my memory serves me correctly Ortiz complained about the small-ball direction the Twins organization pushed their players.  Sounds like they still have the same line of thinking when it comes to developing players.

From reading Aaron Gleeman’s blog over the years, it seems like this is a common occurrence with the Twins. See Ortiz, David.

I believe that the Braves also tend to mettle with guys too much sometimes. Bobby Cox likes aggressive hitters who go up to the plate swinging. He figures he can teach such a player to be more selective. He’s said as much in the media. The poster boy for this approach is Jeff Francoeur. Until the Braves finally decided that they couldn’t refine his approach, he was out there in right field every day, no matter how much he struggled. Kelly Johnson, on the other hand, was a guy who liked to take a lot of pitches. The Braves kept urging him to swing more, especially earlier in the count. He tried changing his approach, but without much success. Every time he’d hit a slump, Cox would sit him down. I believe that the Braves messed him up, and I’m looking forward to seeing what he can do the next couple of seasons now that he’s out of Atlanta.

As a coda to this, earlier this season, when rookie Jason Heyward hit a little slump, Cox commented that he was taking too many pitches. Fortunately for Heyward, he’s so ferociously talented that I don’t think anyone’s going to mess with his approach much.

In a BBBA article I wrote around 1999 or so, I noticed that the Twins, since 1987, were above league average in home runs hit ones, the 1991 Twins, who were like a half a home run above what we would have expected or something. I think that the organization too the criticism of the 1980s that the Twins don’t do anything but hit home runs a little too much to heart.

I can kinda understand turning Span into a slap-hitter due to his size...but Ortiz?  That doesn’t make sense at all.

They didn’t try to turn Ortiz into a slap hitter.  They encouraged him sending the ball the other way to move the runner over as opposed to trying to pull the ball and send it over the fence.

Steve, Ortiz is a lefty.  If he’s going to move a runner over with an out he has to pull the ball.

I read an article with Jim Rantz, director of the Twins minor leagues, where he said the Twins believe that it is important to work on being a good hitter first and that power can come latter.  That certainly would fit with the article and Span’s desire to have a good batting average.

I think it is a fallacy to say that Ortiz or Span would have been better if they had been in a different organization.  A player’s skill is some combination of their natural talent and experience.  How can you know that those years of development were wasted?  Maybe all that hitting the other way closed a hole in Ortiz’s swing that allowed him to be “Big Papi” later on.

On a related issue, Dr. Mike Marshall has described parts of his career on his website. The Tigers didn’t want him messing around with a screwball. He was a fastball/slider pitcher with them but he knew lefthanded hitters gave him trouble. Marshall essentially refused to accept the role the Tigers had him slotted for, kept working on a screwball, and was sent back to AAA. After a stint with the Pilots he was acquired by the Astros, who also forbade him from throwing the screwball, leading to another trade. Finally with the Expos, under Gene Mauch, Marshall was allowed the freedom to develop and use the screwball without interference from management.

You have to wonder how many careers have been screwed up by management imposing their own biases on player development.

I’m watching it on a nightly basis.  The Angels have tried to get Brandon Wood to shorten his swing and strike out less.  The result is a messed up hitter who still strikes out, and doesn’t hit the ball that hard when he does connect.  He’s having a hard enough time adjusting to MLB pitching without working on a hitting style that doesn’t come natural to him.

I think at this point they’d be better off letting him do what comes naturally, and hope he can be a Mark Reynolds.

If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it.

The problem is that most organizations do not believe in proper sample sizes.  When Pedroia first came up he was terrible.  He was this little second baseman taking huge cuts at the plate.  The Sox management allowed him to do his thing for months while the Boston media wanted Pedroia to shorten his swing and not try to tear the cover off the ball (turn him into Eckstein).  In his own words ...

“What happened. Laser show. Relax.”

same thing happened a couple years back when gibbons and his hitting coach made the blue jays player sit on pitches and go the other way. credit les expos’ farm directors for seeing that what vlad was doing was working and letting him run with it. maybe if he had a bigger bonus they would have stepped in, but that coupled with the marshall anecdote ...

Jack Cust springs to mind as well, in a few different instances of his career.  Both his early days, in other organizations, and then last year as well, when Bob Geren (allegedly) asked him to make an effort to cover more of the plate, and his power numbers evaporated.

There was some talk about the Mets doing this in recent years with their minor league system, and it become a fairly big story this spring because they supposedly started stretching that same philosophy to their Major League hitters last year.  Obviously, the drop in power was pretty evident, even considering the new park.  THT had an article by John Walsh showing that the Mets’ regulars showed a marked increase in percentage of balls hit to the opposite field (link in my name).  This was looking into the story when it was reported that the organization had started pushing the minor league contact/opposite-field hitting approach on its Major League hitters.

If you can potentially screw up David Wright, et al by trying to pigeonhole their approach, I can’t imagine what they did to some of their minor leaguers.

My last post on the Mets go flagged, so I’ll repost the THT article here for now.

Posting again because I followed the link there to the original story from the Daily News, and it was pretty fitting here.

Sources say Bernazard, who oversaw minor-league development, was so insistent on players hitting the ball to the opposite field that minor leaguers were scolded for pulling the ball, sometimes even when they got a hit.

...

“At one point,” Francouer recalled, “I remember Jerry (Manuel) telling me, ‘Wait until we get to spring training and you’re hitting 80 balls the other way (reference to a drill mentioned earlier in the article where hitters face 80 curve balls off a machine and try to take them all the other way).’

“And I’m thinking, ‘Jeez, in that case I might not report until about March 2.’”

Bernazard was the guy who got fired for ripping off his shirt and challenging minor league players to fight him.  The article also mentions that once he was gone, at least at the Major League level the hitting coach convinced the club to let them go back to their more natural approach a bit more.