Future Redbirds

I recently asked Chris Constancio, one of the many talented writers for the Hardball Times if he’d let me pick his brain a bit, and he was happy to oblige me. For those of you who don’t know about Chris, he analyzes the minor leagues at FirstInning.com. First Inning is a great reference for minor league stat info, it goes beneath the surface of “baseball card” stats and really takes a in-depth look at minor league players. A lot of his writing at the Hardball Times is also geared towards the minor leagues/player development as well.

Erik: First of all, what drew you to start Firstinning.com?

Chris: It started as a personal project to satisfy my own curiosity. There was all this quality information available for major league players, but that covers less than one-fifth of professional ballplayers. Firstinning.com was the first-ever website to show split statistics, game logs, and batted ball rates for minor leaguers. It was the first to generate advanced statistics such as Base Runs Allowed and FIP-ERA for pitchers. Also, I was interested in the challenge of projecting minor league performances. That was something a few others were doing, but I thought I could do better.

Erik: So when you’re breaking down minor leaguers, what specific traits do you look for in identifying prospects?

Chris: First I try to contextualize a player’s performance by considering his experience, such as his age and number of games he has played at the college or professional level. Then, I look at performance. I tend to look at the component statistics rather than popular and widely-known statistics such as batting average, on-base percentage, and so on. When breaking down a hitter, I first look at his strikeout rate, walk rate, batted ball tendencies, and extra-base hits. For pitchers, I look at strikeout rate, walk rate, and batted ball tendencies. That’s an oversimplification, but you get the idea. Finally, I look at the player’s physical characteristics. If a 5-foot-9 player and a 6-foot-4 player are both hitting 20 doubles and 10 home runs in their first full season of baseball, I wouldn’t assume they are going to develop their power in similar ways over the next few years.

Erik: Your site is heavily geared towards stats. Do you ever feel that stats, particularly players in the lower minors can belie the players true ability? How do you decipher between those types of players and true prospects?

Chris: Sure, but it’s not the fault of the numbers - statistics at Class A are no better or worse than statistics at Triple-A. I just think most people are uncomfortable dealing with uncertainty and thinking probabilistically. In the lower minor leagues - especially in the short-season leagues - we only have access to a small sample of performances for most players. If a player performs very poorly or exceptionally well over a month or two, we usually don’t have a very strong sense of whether or not that is a fair representation of his abilities. As a result, a lot of people completely dismiss performances in the lower minor leagues while others read too much into far too little information.

Scouts do have an advantage for these players because much of the information they seek can be gathered by watching a player in a game or two regardless of the on-field results. For that reason, some fans simply trust scouts exclusively to understand players in the lower minor leagues rather than deal with the uncertainty of the performance information. That’s a fair decision, but it doesn’t have to be the case.

Beyond the lack of information issue, I think advanced analysis of performance can help address the problem of finding out who the real prospects are. I like to look beyond the basic rate statistics I mentioned earlier in such cases. For example, I don’t only count the number of a young player’s extra-base hits - I like to look at the distribution of those hits. Does the player rely exclusively on pull power? Are they able to hit to all fields? Or, if a player has a low strikeout rate, does that come at the expense of hitting the ball out of the infield? I think all of this information can be helpful.

Erik: With the exception of a few picks a year, the Cardinals draft’s are heavily geared towards college players. Something that has sort of bothered me is they lean heavily towards performance while at times ignore scouts, or it least thats how it strikes me. I think scouts and stats can be a perfect marriage verses the debate that it is now. It seems like often the Cardinals are willing to gamble on high performance college players like Jon Jay or Eddie Degerman who have quirks that turn off scouts. Not saying I didn’t like the picks, but the thought is there are things about their game that won’t translate well into the pros. I guess that was the roundabout way to ask, what do you feel is the best draft strategy, if there is such a thing? I guess maybe another way of asking the question is, how do teams like the D Backs or Dodgers seemingly stack such talent while the Cardinals are continually at the bottom of the pack?

Chris: Well, I agree performance analysis and scouting should be integrated. The “quirks” that might worry some scouts is valid information to consider, but I’m not sure anyone has a very precise idea of how an unorthodox pitching delivery or other quirks affect a player’s projected development. There’s a lot of folk wisdom out there with regard to these things, but very little publicly-available rigorous analysis. Baseball America does a wonderful job of covering the draft every year, and the BA writers will often share quotes from scouts who are worried about a recently-drafted players’ hitch in a swing or unorthodox approach at the plate. Oftentimes, these hitters seem to do just fine as they move up the rungs of professional baseball. On the other hand, I suspect that’s often not the case for guys with a “long swing.” So that’s the kind of research I’m starting to develop - how do we weigh the importance of all the observations that scouts are trained to make in projecting players’ growth trajectories? It shouldn’t be subjective or based on gut feelings,and there’s no reason that it has to be.

Erik: One thing that’s always sort of bothered me is when a player is criticized for being old for his league. I can understand that a player may be more physically developed then some of the other players on the same level, but how much should a guy be penalized for being “old for his league”? When is it safe to say he really is the possessor of the skills his stats show he has?

Chris: Right, there shouldn’t be a “penalty” - oftentimes players have no control over whether or not they’re playing in high Class A or Double-A, for example. Age does matter if you’re projecting future growth but even this can be oversimplified at times. I think rather than ‘age’ more people should talk about ‘experience.’ Will Venable, an outfielder in the Padres system, is 24 years old right now and just finished a full season of Class A baseball. However, he did not give baseball his full attention when he was in college, so I don’t look at his Class A performance and think he has little room for growth because he’s only 24 years old.

Erik: You have a projection system called FIPro. What factors go into it?

Chris: There’s a lot that goes into it, but it can be described as two basic steps. First, I do everything I can do to generate a fair or accurate representation of each player’s present skills. I use league adjustments and very fine-grained park factors to do this, but I’m also a bit obsessive and am also accounting for quality of competition and weather conditions in breaking down past performances. The second step is generating a growth curve for each player. I look at age, physical characteristics, pedigree (eg, were they an early draft pick?), and all sorts of performance indicators to generate a unique growth curve for different aspects of each player’s performance. This is also where I generate a list of ‘comparison players’ to inform the projection, though that matters a lot less than most people think.

Erik: In your article in the THT 2007 Annual, you are very high on Colby Rasmus, higher then most. What do you feel his ceiling is and who are his closest comparisons?

Chris: He could be an all-star, a suitable replacement for Jim Edmonds. I have this idea about .18 being a magic number for teenagers… if a teenager can strike out in fewer than .18 of his plate appearances and also have an isolated power (slugging percentage - batting average) above .18, then he’s a relatively safe bet to be a productive major leaguer. Here are the last five teenagers to qualify with those kind of rates in the Midwest League over at least half a season:

2006 Colby Rasmus
2005 Carlos Gonzalez
2004 Daric Barton
2003 Prince Fielder
2000 Chris Snelling
1999 Jeff Goldbach
1999 Corey Patterson

That’s pretty good company, no? If you go further back, you’ll see future stars such as Vlad Guerrero and A-Rod also met those target rates when they were teenagers playing Class A ball. So I think Rasmus is in a top class of prospects. The reason why I ranked him higher than many of the other good young outfielders in the game today is because I think Rasmus will stick in center field. A premium bat at that position is much more valuable than similar production in a corner outfield spot.

Erik: According to PECOTA, catcher Bryan Anderson drew comps to some great catchers, the top one being Brian McCann and one of the others being Joe Mauer. While I don’t think he’ll become Joe Mauer, he is like 1 in a billion, do you feel McCann is a fair comp? Who did Anderson have the highest similarity score in FIPro?

Chris: Really? That’s strange - McCann was a very different type of hitter at Anderson’s age. Chad Spann and Tony Torcato are among Anderson’s top comparison players in my system. Notice that those guys are not catchers? One of the surprising things I have learned in my research is that player position plays a small or non-significant role in helping project hitters. While it’s true that catchers and center fielders are usually built differently, you can account for that by using height and weight information. That’s what I do. So I can see why the McCann comparison could make sense on a superficial level, but he was bigger than Anderson and was hitting a lot more extra-base hits at that stage of his career. He also wasn’t as patient of a hitter as Anderson is right now. It’s not a meaningful comparison, in my opinion.

Erik: Every year you rank each team’s prospects, could you provide a sneak preview for us Cardinal fans on those Redbirds who made the cut and perhaps a few thoughts on some of those players?

Chris: I’m actually going to stop doing that this year. I think I’ve decided that rankings do more harm than good in the long run. I will, however, compile a frequently-updated list of 30+ prospects in each organization so that people have a general ‘directory’ to help find information about each organization’s top prospects. I think lists can be helpful for that purpose.

Erik:Any sleepers in the system?

Chris: Does Jaime Garcia count as a sleeper? I’m sure your readers know all about him, but he strikes me as one of the most under appreciated prospects in baseball right now. O.K., more seriously how about Jose Martinez? He can hit and plays a premium defensive position. I don’t think he’s going to be a star or anything, but I think his skills will take him to he major leagues if he stays healthy.

Erik: Here’s one for you. Tyler Greene=Brandon Wood. OK, so Greene didn’t hit 100 extra base hits at Class A like Wood, but am I crazy in thinking they could be more similar then we think?

Chris: Well, maybe they’re more similar than most people think, but they’re not that similar. They’re both strikeout-prone guys with power who need a position change to reach the major leagues, so I see why the comparison might be made. But Wood is much younger than Greene and has already collected 170 extra-base hits over the past two years at higher levels than Greene. I think Jeff Deardorff was the first comparison player that came up when I ran Tyler Greene’s most recent projection.

Erik: OK, last Cardinal question…one that will either draw interest or groans from the readers…Rick Ankiel, can he make it back to the Show as an OF?

Chris: Yes, it’s definitely possible. Ankiel has significant power at plate. His batting average and so on did not look particularly impressive in 2005, but the underlying components of his performance seem good enough to suggest he could become a backup outfielder or perhaps a platoon option versus right-handed pitching like Chris Duncan in a best-case scenario.

Erik: Anything new coming to Firstinning.com or from THT you’d like to share with us?

Chris: Glad you asked - there’s lots of new stuff on both fronts! First, David Gassko and I recently collaborated on developing very advanced three-year projections for all major leaguers and some minor leaguers. This information is ongoing to be published in the first-ever THT 2007 Season preview. But the book is much more than that. We asked baseball bloggers - real dedicated fans of every team - to write a preview for every major league organization. And there are a couple of other articles, including my take on the 30 rookies most likely to make an impact on the 2007 season. It’s an exciting project, and I believe the book will be available in e-book or paperback formats during the first week of March.

At FirstInning.com, I’m unveiling a bunch of positive changes during the last week of March. I can’t talk about everything yet, but there will be a new look, new stats to play with, and the FIPro projections are going to be updated on a monthly basis.