Future Redbirds

The Rule V draft leaves Barton in a somewhat unusual position for me concerning his prospect status. In terms of major league experience (of which he has none), he still qualifies as a prospect. The only way we’ll see him in the minors, however, is a) via rehab from an injury or b) if the Cardinals decide they want to hold on to him but not at the major league level and work out a trade with the Indians. After seeing his ranking in BA’s list, I was curious what to make of him. Before we get there though, let’s run through the info –

The Draft

. . . . . . He wasn’t drafted . . . . .

After The Draft

Brian Barton’s academics precluded many teams from trying to lure him away from college. An aerospace engineer out of University of Miami (Florida), the Indians signed him for 100k plus 100k denoted for school expenses. The Cardinals have dipped into the Miami talent pool recently in the 2006 draft when they picked Chris Perez and Jon Jay. (Best player drafted from University of Miami? Greg Vaughn although I’d say Pat Burrell has a reasonable chance to steal that title). If Barton makes the team, I fully expect someone in the local media to write a “human interest” type of story that focuses on his degree. For whatever reason, a lot of people eat that sh!t up — and in this instance, I might be one of those people. I can’t fathom trying to get my engineering degree while juggling a college baseball schedule at the same time. Makes me wonder if he ever had time to just sit down and watch a movie. In any event, since he wasn’t drafted there’s not a lot of draft-time articles on him.

The Statistics & The Analysts

Barton started his minor league career in 2005 in A-ball at age 23. Given his later start, scouts and analysts inevitably equivocate about his performance because he’s “old for the level”. They’ll rave about his skillset in the next sentence after they’ve properly covered their a$$ in case he were to flame out. Let’s see what happened in 2005:

Quick, guess what I’m going to talk about first. . .

Huge fan of the plate discipline and, as we’ll see in subsequent years, it’s something he needs to get back to. Obviously those A-ball stats are padded by an unsustainable BABIP. The isolated power is nice for a centerfielder although not particularly spectacular. Given his combination of power and speed — a phrase you’ll hear a lot in connection with Barton — we can expect elevated BABIPs as he’s more likely to run out groundballs than, say, Yadier Molina. The numbers posted at high-A seem like a much more reasonable baseline for his performance that year.

2006 would follow up with solid, if unspectacular, results:

My initial reaction when seeing this line was that we shouldn’t be too concerned about the declining walkrate when he’s hitting .351 but again the BABIP gives me cause for concern. I’m still willing to extend the benefit of the doubt that when your average is that high, psychologically, you feel like there’s not much you can’t hit and you swing at pitches you otherwise might not. The BABIP combined with the batted ball data is even worse though. A rough estimate of his BABIP for AA would at least 100 points lower and probably closer to 130 points lower.

The batted ball data is ugly to say the least. You don’t want to see players driving that many balls into the ground. The ISO drop is in part attributable to his change in parks. The A+ ballclub plays in a park that inflates HR while the AA club suppresses them. His 2006 stats leave me with the feeling that there’s still work to be done with his swing so that he elevates the ball more. Baseball America placed him as the 16th best prospect in the Carolina League (A+) and the #5 prospect for the Indians after 2006 saying the following:

Barton has the rare combination of power (he led the league with a .515 slugging percentage) and speed that scouts dream of. He hit an opposite-field home run that caromed off the top of the scoreboard at Salem, a bomb that carried an estimated 500 feet away from home plate. Barton’s swing tends to get long at times, but he has tremendous bat speed that generates good carry and loft to all fields. A truer comparison for Barton is Mike Cameron, another wiry strong outfielder with above-average speed and solid instincts. He has enough range and arm strength to stay in center.

Mike Cameron is one of those players, in my opinion, that does a lot of things well but no single thing outstanding, which leads to them being undervalued in terms of their total impact on the game. His 2001 campaign is truly impressive given it was done in Seattle and accompanied by fantastic outfield defense in a park where outfield defense has a much more significant impact than say Wrigley. That said, I think that’s the perfect-world comparison as Kevin Goldstein would call it — “a multi-faceted starting outfielder” who ranked #5 in the Indians system as a 3-star prospect. (As an aside, I hate when people quote slugging percentage as representative of a player having power — that’s misleading when it’s accompanied by a high batting average as Barton’s was in this case. Yes, his power was good but it wasn’t great given the park.) And while I’m usually loathe to look at baserunning, Barton was 41-for-49 for an 84% stolen base rate.

2007 would be split across multiple levels again with some improvements and some concerns. Barton was interviewed by Chris Kline at BA during the 2007 season and the first question was concerning his knee and injuries sustained to it on opening day of the 2006 season:

Baseball America: First I guess let’s start with the knee problem. Is it a serious problem or is it something that’s kind of a day-to-day thing?

Brian Barton: For me, it is what it is. I try not to bring it up as much as possible just because I don’t want to use it—and I don’t want anyone else to use it as an excuse . . . especially after playing with it all year last year and having a pretty good year. I don’t want anyone to say, you know, X-Y-Z happened because of my knee. I feel like if I can play on it, I can give it 100 percent and should be able to perform. So it’s just a matter of being able to go out there on the field and give all I can give. Even if I can only give 85 percent I feel like my 85 percent is pretty good. My main priority is just to keep going out there and try to make it as less of a factor than what it really is.

Injuries are always difficult to deal with statistically because there’s little, if any, way to know exactly what impact they have on a player’s game. Was he playing at 60% the entire time, or 85%? Where some days better than others? etc. etc. I’ll leave that all up to you as a discerning reader to remember that there were injuries involved but the degree of their import is hard to tell.

The 100 plate appearances in AAA don’t tell us alot. I’m much more interested in the 463 PAs at AA. The GB rate is still higher than I’d like and the BABIP isn’t sustainable but the walk rate was better and the strikeout rate isn’t horrendous. The question I have is why the power outage? Is Barton being overpowered by more advanced pitchers? An 850 OPS from a CF isn’t bad but that AA line translates to .254/.341/.383 as a peak (the regular translation looks worse).

He just missed out on Goldstein’s Top 11 list for the Indians this year (when the system is weaker than it has been in the past) and he wasn’t on Baseball America’s list. He dropped a full letter grade for John Sickels from a B+ to a C+ and was #15 for the Indians in 2008.

The Rule V Draft

Goldstein’s comments on the pick:

Some people saw Barton as a possible number one pick, but he does have some health concerns, as there are whispers that a recent knee surgery was not entirely successful, and that he might be permanently affected by the injury. Unsigned out of college—most expected him to take a high-paying job at Boeing with his aerospace engineering degree—Barton is a career .317/.417/.476 hitter who does many things well, but few things very well.

Baseball America pre-draft preview:

Quiet and leading through example through his 2006 season, some scouts expressed concerns about Barton’s demeanor. “I loved him that first year in Double-A,” one scout from a National League club said. “But this past year, it was almost like he’d earned this elite status and you saw him have this lackadaisical approach to the game that wasn’t there before. Where he was playing with chips on both shoulders with something to prove initially, that part of his game was replaced by some sort of false bravado. He’s really tough to get a handle on, but the tools are very real.”

The Question

It’s odd that the question we hear for players like Daryl Jones or Tommy Pham at the low levels of the minors applies to Barton who is set to make a major league roster but can he put all the tools together? We’ve seen good plate discipline, speed, power and ability to make contact but we’ve yet to really see them all at the same time. If there was one thing I’d single out it’s that he simply hits too many groundballs. Change a few of those into linedrives and you’d see his power numbers and batting average improve rather than being propped up by high BABIPs.

The Future

Given the tools and his makeup, I can understand the ranking from Baseball America a little better now. Barton is probably interchangeable with any of the 6 pitchers after him as there isn’t anyone whose separated themselves from that second-tier pack of prospects in a serious fashion.

Brian Barton and the St. Louis Cardinals could not be a better fit for each other right now. The Cardinals are heavy on left-handed outfielders without good platoon mate options. Barton offers a little of everything and profiles well as a lead-off option if he can maintain the above average OBPs we saw in the minors. The declining power concerns me but I’d like to see what kind of response a new set of hitting instructors creates from Barton. This should be another test of the organizations direction. Barton is a more valuable piece to the club that Schumaker — no ifs, ands or buts about it. There isn’t a skill that Schumaker has that Barton can’t approximate from the right hand side of the plate.

Provided he’s healthy, Barton should make the Cardinals roster and stick around as a 4th outfielder/platoon parter for some of the lefty bats. In the long-term, there’s still some reason to believe that he can be an everyday player but the window for that opportunity is closing rapidly. The quotes from Barton make him sound very self-effacing and like someone who wants to re-establish themselves. Hopefully, Tony La Russa will both recognize and nuture those qualities to help Barton “put it all together”.