Monday, February 20, 2012

College Corner: Batting Lines for Draftable Players

Victor Roache, OF, Georgia Southern: 4 for 10, 2 HR, 3 BB, HBP. (BTW, Chris Beck's pitching line was 6 IP, 3 H, 1 R, 1 BB, 8 K's.).

Brandon Thomas, OF, Georgia Tech: 2 for 15, 2 BB, 1 HBP.

Mike Zunino, C, Florida: 5 for 12, BB, SB.

Preston Tucker, 1B, Florida: 6 for 11, 2B, BB, SF.

Nolan Fontana, SS, Florida: 2 for 10, 2 BB, HBP.

Christian Walker, 1B, South Carolina: 4 for 11, BB.

Dan Gulbranson, OF, Jacksonville: 2 for 10, 2B, 3B, 3 BB, SB.

Adam Brett Walker, 1B, Jacksonville: 2 for 12, 2B, BB, SB.

Patrick Wisdom, 3B, St Mary's: 2 for 13, 3B, 5 BB, HBP.(4 games, looks like they might have been pitching around him.)

Kenny Diekroeger, 2B/SS, Stanford: 5 for 12, 2 BB, HBP.(not a great sign that Stanford seems to prefer Lonnie Kauppila at SS).

Stephen Piscotty, 3B, Stanford: 4 for 14, 2B, 2 HR, HBP.

Jake Stewart, OF, Stanford: 5 for 11, 2 2B, 2 BB, 2 HBP, SF. (Sleeper alert! Plus defensive CF). (BTW, Brett Mooneyham: 6 IP, 5 H, 3 R, 4 BB, 8 K's).

Peter O'Brien, C, Miami: 7 for 15, 2B, 2 HR, BB.

Kevin Plawecki, C, Purdue: 5 for 13, 2B, 3B, BB, HBP, SB.

Deven Marrero, SS, Arizona State; 3 for 11, SB.

Joey DeMichele, 3B, Arizona State: 3 for 9, 2B, SB.

Chadd Krist, C, Cal: 5 for 13, 3 2B.

Tony Renda, 2B, Cal: 6 for 11, 2B, 4 SB.

Jeremy Baltz, OF, St. John's: 2 for 11, 3B, HR.

Tyler Naquin, OF, Texas A&M: 6 for 11, 2 2B, 3 SB.(Naquin would fit the pattern of the last 2 Giants first round draft picks as would Travis Jankowski whose team(Stony Brook) did not play this weekend.

23 comments:

  1. Thanks DrB. I love these.

    Your site is awesome.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Stanford sure did pull out the whupping stick. I am enjoying rubbing salt in my Vandy buddies wounds on this. He refuses to acknowledge the Pac10 as a legitimate conference. SEC arrogance!

    The Giants will only have about 4MM and a bit of change to work with for the first 10 picks. BA has a breakdown of the slot money.

    I don't know how they would fit him in, but I really like Tony Renda. He's a huge reach in the first, and will be gone in the 2nd where the Giants pick. Having to sit out 60 picks takes a lot of patience.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. West Coast college baseball is disrespected for the same reason the NL West is disrespected. People love hitting and greatly devalue great pitching. The Pac 10 or 12 or 16 or whatever it is now always has unbelieveable pitching. Remember when they had Timmy, Brandon Morrow and Ian Kennedy all at the same time? Last year, they had Gerrit Cole, Trevor Bauer and Josh Osich all in the same conference. Long Beach State, CS Fullerton, UCI, Pepperdine, USF, all those schools in other west coast conferences have terrific pitching year in and year out too.

      Yeah, that slotting formula really penalizes teams drafting in the bottom third of the draft and who don't have supplemental picks. Agree Renda looks legit.

      Delete
    2. I wonder what would happen if almost every team just blew off their slot cap and forfeited the picks for the following year. Since very few teams would have first or second round picks, many first round quality prospects would just drop into the 3'rd round. OMG! I just realized that if I was an owner or GM, Bud Selig would absolutely hate my guts! I've already thought of two ways to game the new system. I'm guessing the big boys are two steps ahead of me and have already thought of a few more.

      Delete
  3. alex reporting that hembree impressed today....very good deal, with wilson's history of injury

    and i hate the new validation word thing....why does one have to be so hard to read?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ooh, I didn't know they were forcing you to validate on my site! LOL! Shows how much I know. I noticed the two word thing on OGC's blog and yeah, some of them are darn hard on the eyes! Sorry. It's not my fault!!

      Delete
    2. Saw Hembree pitch last year. Dude brings serious, serious heat. Did you see the video Alex linked to in his blog report?

      Delete
    3. New validation system is terrible. Lots of re-tries.

      I really like Hembree.

      Delete
    4. Yeah, I hate the double validation system too, but that is what blogger uses right now, unfortunately. I also have problems posting there, so I feel everyone's pain.

      When I have time, I'll see what I can do, but the problem is then that I would have to remove a whole lot of spam off my blog as well, and that sucks too.

      Delete
  4. ya....saw the vid.....last season

    figured everyone had seen it so i didnt link it here...sorry

    kid says he has secondary pitches, but was told to stick with the heat...whatever

    if he does have a secondary pitch that just needs fine tuning, hate to say this, but wilson is not gonna be a giant past the final year of his contract...love brian, but he is gonna be too expensive to keep

    i really like alex being stoked about joseph and susac...

    hope you watched the vids on the giants main page...the guys have interesting things to say, outside of the patented baseball answers...even nate comes out of his shell and actually cracks a smile

    and what is it with this org and injuries to the mi guys? culberson broke his finger

    gonna be a very interesting spring and could shape up to be an interesting season, even though i hate that they are starting a week late

    in regards to the slotting stuff, didnt they say they were doing away with it, cuz it didnt work, but were going to add some penalty for overspending?

    what are they gonna do....penalize the cubs for giving the son of a cubbie icon, way too much money? its absurd

    maybe if the mlb finally changed the way the minors were run, so that teams actually had to really invest in development, you would see some of the draft bonus numbers go down

    but selig wont do that...and he is never gonna retire

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Fla-Giant figures the Giants would have lost both their first and second round picks in 2012 for what they gave their top 10 picks in 2011, and they didn't even go very much over slot. In fact, I think Panik was slightly under slot. Now THAT is messed up!

      I think we could see all kinds of shenanigans with the new rules that are way more outrageous than spending over slot. Things like spending the entire slot pool on the first rounder and not signing picks 2-10 at all. Pre-draft deals as low as half slot for high first rounders then modestly over-slot deals in rounds 2-10.

      Credit to OGC here. If you believe his research, and it pretty much agrees with what I know to be true, teams would be better off taking the best player they can draft in round 1, go way over slot and then just blow off rounds 2-10. Then go bargain hunting in rounds 11-40.

      Hey, here's another one! Does the CBA cover spending on undrafted FA's? What if agents put out ridiculous demands causing their clients to not be drafted at all then sign for whatever they can get as undrafted FA's?

      Agree about the development stuff. I mean, what if teams put the money they would spend over slot, maybe as little as $1 M which is really chicken feed into their player development? I bet that alone would produce at least 1 extra major leaguer a year which would be a HUGE competitive advantage.

      Delete
    2. To be honest, I'm not that wild about some of those bullpen arms the Giants took in the single digit rounds last year. I think they did just as well or better in the later rounds. They might be just as well off to blow off a Bandilla, Ray Black, Jean Delgado and Kentrell Hill, use those player's slot money on Crick, Susac and Oropesa, then pay $100 K to a bunch of guys in rounds 10-40. I like Blackburn, Cody Hall, Demondre Arnold, Christian Otero and Shawn Payne as well or better than the single digit guys, Merganthaler too.

      Delete
    3. Speaking of player development, there's a fascinating piece on The Hardball Times linked over on Fangraphs about a 39 yo dude who is working with Kyle Boddy from Driveline Mechanics. Now, Boddy is a bit full of himself too, but what he says makes a lot of sense. I think he's with the same outfit that worked with that big dude the Giants signed a few years ago, can't think of his name right now.

      The most interesting, and saddest part was how neglected prospects were in the Cleveland system. I think that's pretty much par for the course too.

      Delete
    4. After reading some of his stuff, at drivelinebaseball.com, I would think Barry Zito should pay him a visit. I mean, he doesn't really have anything to lose by trying it. There is a mention of Tom House on the site and I think that's who Zeets worked with this winter, so may Zito is on that track already.

      Delete
    5. You got it, Zito worked with Tom House. Worked on his delivery tunnel. Now lets hope like hell for some velocity to go along with it.

      Delete
    6. I love that strategy of blowing off 2-10. But Darth Seligilia closed that loophole (H/T Fla-Giant): If a team fails to sign a draftee in the first 10 rounds then the slot amount asssigned by the MLB draft office for that pick is subtracted from the team’s overall cap total for that year’s draft. For example, let’s say that the Giants draft a hard-to-sign high school kid with their 2nd round pick, but end up not being able to sign him. Let’s also assume that the slot number for that pick was set at $500K. That means that the Giants new signing bonus cap limit would drop from:
      $4,076,400 to $3,576,

      Agreed completely about minor league development. Its a total shame.

      The Giants might have been over last year, but they obviously wouldn't have committed that money with the new rules. Most likely what happens is they just go more conservative. I think some of the college OFs might provide good value actually, including the sleepers such as Jake Stewart or Dan Gulbransen.

      Delete
    7. Thanks DrB, but I think you credit me with more than I deserve. You list a lot of good ideas for getting around the rules of the new CBA, I definitely give you credit for those. As I was just watching on the movie, Freakonomics, based on the best selling books, humans are just hardwired to game the systems, based on the incentive system.

      The cute example he gave regarded his daughter. She suddenly decided that being potty trained was not something she wanted to participate in any more, which drove his wife crazy. Him being an economist told her, no problem, I'll just use my economics knowledge to incent their daughter properly.

      He offered her a bag of M&M's, her fave, every time she did her business in the potty. She immediately started going potty and Dad was a genius. Then she figured out that if she can just go a little at a time, she could rack up many bags of M&M's. Economics experiment: over...

      So he concluded, if a 3 year old can figure out in three days to get around an Econ professor's incentive system and game it, any other incentive system with adults studying it will game it eventually, given enough time. Final Conclusion: you can never know beforehand how successful an incentive system is until you put it into action and people are incented to violate it in some way. People are just that creative.

      Delete
    8. About unsigned free agents, I believe that all the prospects under one draft are covered by that draft's total slot allowance, and thus free agents would fall under that, thus the penalties are probably as bad as any that could be levied on later round picks.

      Delete
    9. I saw the Zito-House tutelage mentioned in the news too.

      This actually jives with research I saw a few years ago about when Zito started going downward in performance. When he made the majors, he basically had the fastball and beautiful curve, which no hitter could hit, as both came out of the same arm slot. But in order to improve his repertoire, he added another pitch, which I can't remember right now (slider I think, but maybe changeup), which required him to throw out of another slot with his arm.

      I can't remember the logic used in that research, but either because he was telegraphing by throwing from another slot, or that his arm, not being as accomplished with the new slot, didn't do as well with that, hitters started taking better swings on him. In any case, by throwing another pitch, but from another arm slot, that hurt the advantage he had when he first came up. It was suggested that he drop this pitch from the other slot and concentrate on his fastball/curve combo.

      This "tunnel" delivery seems to follow the same logic, so hopefully that works. As we all know, velocity is not always required to be effective in getting hitters out, it is the difference that contributes to a pitcher's advantage. And especially so if he throws from the same arm slot no matter what.

      We don't need Zito to be a top of rotation guy, as long as he's steady and reliable in the #5 spot (and my bet is that he'll be #4 (LBCZV) in order to alternate arms like before) he should be fine within the context of our rotation. He'll always be overpaid, but at least he can be more useful to us than any cheap free agent.

      Delete
    10. Shankbone, I think DrB's blowoff could still work if they under draft and sign a bunch of guys under slot in 2-10 in order to pay for the guy they really want with #1.

      Delete
    11. That might work. I imagine you have to pay each pick a minimum of 50K, so round it to 500K. Then you have 3.5MM and a bit of change instead of 1.5MM. So is the extra 2MM going to get somebody over the bump? The only problem I see is finding 9 guys who would agree to be lame duck draft picks. It seems like a lot of coordination and manipulation, which isn't exactly Sabey Sabes and the Brain Trust's strong suit. But its a cool idea for sure.

      I agree with the Zito and our needs. If this tunnel thing works we are business. I was always on board the theory that Zito is worth at least 10MM, it isn't worth chasing another pitcher for the additional money he's being paid. When he fell off on the velocity it became a different story. Here's to hoping like hell Tom House got some results!

      I laughed very loudly at your M&M analogy. My 4 year old is a lawyer in training. I'm trying to turn him into a ballplayer I thought. Way too much negotiation in the Shankbone household.

      Prepare for a whole lot of Zimmer hype DrB - he hit 98 on the gun. And people thought Klima was getting a big head already, wait until he climbs up the draft boards!

      Delete
  5. Bacci, they don't "force" you to slot sign draftees, but by forcing teams to a max total sum of bonuses, based on slots, they basically enforce a slot system, with some give before the penalties kick in, but not that much. That basically enforces a slot system while "not forcing" a slot system.

    I love DrB's idea he brought up before, by signing someone under slot with their first pick, they are then allowed to go over slot in later picks, allowing them to pick up guys who might have fallen.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yup, if you lose your slot money if you fail to sign the pick, the best way to "game it" is to sign your top pick for way underslot and then use the extra $$$ to go over slot in subsequent rounds. Obviously this is more likely to work if you are holding a top 5 pick than if you only have $1.5-$1.8 to work with like the Giants at #20.

      Delete