THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Good stuff.  It might also be interesting to look at a list of where pitchers come from when they don’t start their minor league careers as pitchers.  For instance, Joe Nathan had 200+ AB as a shortstop in his first minor league season, after which he was converted to pitching.  It would probably be a little trickier to query that, but you would conceivably get a larger sample out of the deal.

Ron Mahay actually made it to the majors as an outfielder before turning to pitching.

I think Jose Arredondo started as a position player.  Troy Percival was a catcher, though that might have been in college, before he was drafted.  Warner Madrigal was an outfielder in the minors.  Wakefield played 1B.  I think Trevor Hoffman was an infielder as well.  Probably a lot more of these guys than I can think of. 

Hard to find as there isn’t a minor league database available to query.  Not yet at least.  If Sean Foreman and SABR ever make the database behind B-Ref’s minor league stats available, I’d pay a pretty penny for it.

Yeah, getting the minor league database seems like it would be the hard part. 

I’m pretty impressed with the expanding minor league stats section on Baseball-Reference.com.  Even without having straight access to their database (which as you mention would be worth some money), it sure beats the old days of dealing with thebaseballcube.com, which was an obnoxious site to visit.

Yeah, getting the minor league database seems like it would be the hard part. 

I’m pretty impressed with the expanding minor league stats section on Baseball-Reference.  Even without having straight access to their database (which as you mention would be worth some money), it sure beats the old days of dealing with thebaseballcube, which was an obnoxious site to visit.

FWIW, Cards reliever Jason Motte was a minor league catcher three years ago (536 PA as a C) and according stats from Fangraph site, his average fastball speed is 95.9 mph in the Majors.