Lots o chats happening today, but this was one question posed at BP I definitely wanted to pass along.
wily mo (wily motown): hey, what about allen craig? once you realize he was in the FSL, that was probably one of the better hitting seasons in high-A (by a prospect-aged human). and he was a shortstop in college, so he has to be able to play defense *somewhere*. but nobody really talks about him. is he a real prospect? what’s wes hodges got that he hasn’t got?
Kevin Goldstein: He’s a semi-real prospect, but I wouldn’t get too worked up about him. OK, I might as a Cardinal fan, because they don’t have many hitters in the system. That said, he’s a pretty bad third baseman with an aggressive approach at the plate who doesn’t have a whole lot of big-time believers among scouts. Hodges has a better glove, faster bat, better approach and more power potential.
I salute Wily for his Borowsky-ish typing skills. As a Cardinal fan, I am getting a bit more worked up about him and frankly am bummed that he doesn’t have those big time believers. I sort of confused about how Hodges is better, mainly because Goldstein sees and hears from scouts and managers, I mostly see stat pages. And the stat pages tell me Craig hit for more power, struck out less and hit more line drives, all in a more pitcher friendly league. The plate discipline issue is a valid point, but his walk rate steadily improved throughout the season. Craig is a year older. I respect Goldstein…a lot, and if that’s the word he’s hearing then I believe him. Darn it.
BA also had their chat about the NY Penn leaguers, and there were many question about Cardinal farmhands, but this one in particular I felt was worth passing it along.
Dan from St. Louis asks:
Clayton Mortensen was a surprise pick early in the supplemental round, but you said he would have been a top 10 prospect in the league if he had pitched enough. What type of stuff was he showing in his brief stint in the league?Aaron Fitt: Mortensen is a sinker-slider guy with a ton of movement on his low-90s sinking fastball and a good, hard major league slider. He has some rough edges to polish (his delivery is not the smoothest, though it lends him some deception) and he needs to improve his changeup to stick as a starter.
Again, I really respect Aaron’s perspective but tell me if you haven’t heard this 1000 times before? I read this stuff in my annual of BA over and over. “If so and so could catch a magic wish granting stag to grant him a change he’ll take off”. Nonsense. Chris Carpenter won a Cy Young with two or three variations of a fastball and a curve. The next spring training he was talking about working on getting a changeup. There are thousands of major league pitchers, and many of them successful who also wish they could’ve honed a decent change. To me, I don’t care if Mort gets a change or not. If he can keep throwing strikes and inducing ground balls, he should make fine pitcher in the show. Let’s not relegate every pitcher that hasn’t learned to throw a change to the middle of some team’s bullpen. That’s not to say they didn’t like Mortensen, they would’ve ranked him in their top 10 had he pitched a few more innings.
Filed under: Allen Craig, Clayton Mortensen
erik
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roarke49
theredbaaron
wow, i got my morty question and my dew question answered.
as for mortensen, he looked like he had a decent changeup in his scouting video and luhnow said he liked his change, but even if it isn’t very good his sinker/slider combo seem to be enough to be an effective major league starter. look at brandon webb, he won a cy young with pretty much just a sinker.
I’m really starting to get pretty excited about Mortenson. I liked him a little bit when they drafted him, and he’s done nothing but produce, big time, since turning pro. I’m really hoping to get to see him in person next season somewhere. I agree with your point, erik; I’ve been buying the BA prospect handbook for close to ten years now, and probably 70% of the pitchers reviewed have “improving his changeup” listed in the write up. I know a changeup is a valuable part of a pitcher’s repertoire, particularly as a starter, but those guys at BA love the changeup like a fat kid loves cake.
As far as Todd, I think it’s far too early to write him off as a starter. Too much is made of the physical size of pitchers, in my mind. Roy Oswalt is listed at 6′, he’s really more like 5′10″, and pitches 220 innings a year, every year. There are plenty of pitchers who aren’t six five and still manage to be pretty good, and pretty durable. (There’s a guy in Minnesota, about six even, that isn’t too bad.) You go back in history, all those guys that threw 300+ innings, very few of them topped 6′ or so. To me, the quality of a guy’s mechanics, specifically how well he uses his body to throw, instead of just his arm, has much more to do with how durable a guy will ultimately prove to be, rather than how big he is. I have to say, though, there seems to be an awful lot of this in the game today. Teams in general seem to focus on the wrong things when assessing talent. I just don’t get it.
Shit. I just realized I posted about Todd, even though he wasn’t a subject of this post. I was combining the previous post, where Todd’s size was referenced, with this one. Sorry everybody.
All Mortensen really needs is a sinker in this organization.
I would think a change up would be more important if your game was based on making people miss. Maybe less important if your strength is getting them to hit the ball on the ground.
I’d guess BA is subject to “groupthink” as much as any other organization. Once you start thinking people have to have a changeup, it’s likely no one has a good enough one. So they should be working on it, in their view.
Personally, I’d much rather see Mortensen improve the sinker-slider combo as much as possible rather than spend time working on a change.
I’m shooting lower than any of you guys: I just want to see a pitcher developed within our organization whose strengths and potential are understood and exploited by management.
The last guy who met that description was probably Matt Morris. I hope Wainwright is the next, with the obvious caveat that he was drafted and partially developed by Atlanta.
I don’t want to come off like some crank who’s still bitching about the Steve Carlton trade (although it did suck), but I have to think that there was a serious misjudgment of Danny Haren. No matter how much they liked Mulder, the only way they made that trade is if they thought Haren would never be more than a middle-of-the-rotation innings-eater.
I could understand Barton and Calero for Mulder, since Barton’s skill set would work better in the Oakland system than in ours. But you don’t give up those two guys plus a major-league starter if you have any inkling that the starter has top-of-the-rotation potential.
So it doesn’t matter much to me if Mortensen masters a changeup or Ottavino gets the hang of the two-seam fastball. Right now, I just don’t have much confidence in the way our management assesses pitching potential.
Amen Lou! Keep rockin’ it for the Lord!
Oh by the way, not that I think it will sell much but I was going draw a future rebirds logo/tshirt. I was thinking along the lines of a bird with a Dolorian.
BJM…i would like to see that t-shirt design.
Erik-
Give me a couple weeks. I am not sure who saw the proposals I did for VEB. A couple of them had some support, but it is difficult there because the site name refers to a charater.
I still find it fascinating that Duncan wanted to keep Haren and TLR didn’t. If you were ever going to listen to your pitching coach, that would have been a good time.
C70, do we know that’s how it happened? I know Duncan said that this summer, but I’d never before read that Duncan saw that kind of potential in Haren.
Honestly, I read that quote with some cynicism. I figured Duncan was retrospectively shifting his opinion of Haren to match Haren’s post-trade performance.
If what Duncan said is true, and he really thought Haren had top-of-the-rotation potential at the time of the trade, then I wonder how often this happens. I mean, was he really enthusiastic about Kip Wells, or did he just say he was to cover for his bosses?
Enough about Haren/Mulder! What’s done is done!
Paul - there’s a legitimate discussion to be had here about whether the Mulder-Haren trade is symptomatic of the organizations a) internal hierarchy and b) their ability to evaluate emerging pitching. Haren was a huge miss for the organization and while I can’t come down on them personally (I understood, if not liked, the trade at the time) it’s a valid topic.