Future Redbirds

Over at minorleaguesplits.com they have batted ball data, and I was curious to see how some of the Cardinal hitting prospects did. I killed some of my Christmas break time to break down the percentages. Anyway, here it is, sorry for doing it ugly with the cut and paste from excel. The left is the players’ numbers, the middle numbers with ‘L’s in front is for league averages. The total numbers of balls in play are in red. I also included homeruns as a percentage to fly balls to see who’s been hitting the ball hard. (See Greene, Tyler)

A few things that really stick out to me-

• A big reason Jon Jay hit .342 last season without a doubt is that high line drive rate. While not all line drives are the same, they do fall for hits 75% of the time in the majors, I’d imagine it isn’t much different in the minors.
• I see why Haerther’s power/average numbers were considerably down with him putting the ball on the ground half the time he puts it in play.
• Tyler Greene really showed some nice power at QC. I’ve been skeptical of Greene with his free-swinging nature and all, but with that sort of power and speed combo (33 stolen bases in 36 attempts) coming from the shortstop position,  I’ve probably undervalued him a bit.
• There’s just so much to like about Rasmus. He hit a lot less grounders and a lot more fly balls then the average player. And according to a free article at Scout.com, he’s put on 20 pounds this winter so far, so expect his fly balls to turn into more and more homeruns.
• Stavinoha hit 7 homeruns in August after only hitting 5 all year previously. He hurt his ankle early in the season, it may have hampered him for a for much of the season. But for August his HR/F was 17%, maybe more about what we should expect from Stavy in terms of power.
• Hamilton was hammering NY Penn League pitchers, but had a tougher time adjusting to the Midwest League. Still pretty intriguing power from the Tulane product.

Of course a lot of these are pretty small samples, but I found it pretty interesting to look at. Minor League Splits really is a great resource, it’ll be interesting how some of these trends will change for some of the players this upcoming season, and how much of it will remain the same for others. [edit]-I just realized I missed a player I should not have overlooked-Mark Shorey of Johnson City.

GB% 49%-LD% 15%-FB%-33%-PU%-4% HR 13- HR/F% -28%. Pretty impressive pop.