Earlier comment reminded me to check in on Jesus Aguilar. He’s doing about what was expected… showing power and striking out a ton. Kind of feels like he won’t make it unless he can get the K-rate down.

Other notes on guys:

Junior Lake — isn’t supposed to stick at SS, right? How do you like him as a center fielder?
Roman Mendez — walk rate is creeping up last few starts
Barret Loux — adjusting to AA well, since the questions with him are about durability it’s too early to know if they are answered until we see him go longer into games or at least last a full season without injury. Otherwise he’s a bullpen arm.
John Gast — I picked him up after the first 2-3 starts, seems to have come from nowhere. Notice he’s a lefty, they often succeed against minor leaguers on finesse and guile and it doesn’t necessarily translate to the major leagues. Not saying that’s the case with Gast, I really don’t know.
Steven Wright — love his stand-up.

Also a pitcher to check out is A.J. Griffin, started the year pretty well and has just graduated AA and thrown into the fire in the PCL. He’s in the Oakland system so you have to like the home park if he can make the show.

You cannot have a (GO/AO)/(HR/9). You need convert the ratio to a rate, or the rate to a ratio. I’ll let you guess which one is which. It’s pretty simple to convert a rate to a ratio, and for a ratio to a rate you are going to need to use a natural log(ln). In the nicest possible way of saying this, there is nothing concrete to take from (GO/AO)/(HR/9)

To take it a step further in simple terms, GO/AO only accounts for outs, while HR/9 accounts for more than outs. You should use a coefficient. The 2008 and 2011 values are consistent, but you are comparing a rate and a ratio…to make a new rate or ratio?

I’m guessing from your work you are trying to compare the flyball rate to the HR rate? You can work from actual tables, or get it quick and dirty converting GO/AO to GBrate*

*not the actual groundball percentage.

100-[(go/ao)/((go/ao)+1)]=FBpercentage*

*notactual

So now you have a Flyball Percent*, and Home Runs per 9. You just have to convert per 100 to per 9 innings, or vice versa.

This is the same problem with OPS. It sounds neat, but slugging is a ratio, added to On Base…Percentage. It’s a very common mistake.

Edwar needs more deception. His offspeed location isn’t enough to get past AA hitters. We’ll see if he adjusts.

Thanks for this! I’d be interested to see the same type of analysis with players like Tropeano, Heckathorn, Rosenbaum, Loux, Brennan Smith. I think there is a wave of pitchers here that will be the next cohort to break into deep league consciousness… fantasy-wise, some solid 3P, maybe even one or two 2Ps in the bunch…

Good luck with your stats exam tomorrow – its been awhile since I took a stats class, but stuff like between-group analysis of variance, regression analyses, etc remain useful skills well beyond the classroom

Cheers!
Brian

I like to look at the game by game breakdowns and then down at the bottom where it covers each of his seasons.

Just looking at the numbers quickly one big observation I made (to practice for my AP Stats exam tomorrow):

Just put all his data into an excel sheet and started fooling around with some Formulas and dividing stats by others to see what could produce a nice trend.

Essentially what I found was that 2011 and 2008 were essentially close to the same season, stats wise.

2008:
K/9 = 12.93
BB/9 = 3.78
HR/9 = 0.92
GO/AO = 1.15
(GO/AO)/(HR/9) = 1.26

2011:
K/9 = 11.70
BB/9 = 2.21
HR/9 = 0.97
GO/AO = 1.2
(GO/AO)/(HR/9) = 1.24

The last stat is very interesting to me because it was so consistent. When he is able to get the GO/AO of around 1.2 or better, he’s able to limit the long ball to less than 1 per inning. This was evident in 2008, 2010, and 2011. 2009 I don’t think should count because he played in the DSL for the most part and was above the competition level (you can’t take stats from there seriously).

So here’s the issue so far:

This year he’s got a GO/AO of 0.83, and therefore is letting HRs come at a near 2.0/9IP clip, which is very very high. I think the HR rate is alarming for two reasons:

1. His GO/AO rate is low, which will NOT play in Coors. He will be pounded in Coors even harder if he keeps letting the balls take flight like he is.

2. His K/9 isn’t where it used to be. In his 4 earlier minor league seasons, his lowest K/9 was 2010 when he had a 10.68 K/9. Right now, he’s striking out 7.10 per 9 innings. Yes, he is walking less, but I’m almost at the point that he should sacrifice a walk more an inning (he’s only walking 1.78/9IP) to get his K/9 back up to 9 or so.

There are key points to his game that are lacking here, so I’d monitor his K/9 and GO/AO this year pretty closely, and (obviously) his home run rate. His ERA is currently 3.2, and I don’t think he’ll ever be any better than his 2008/2011 seasons of 3.4 or so ERA pitching in the majors, but that will only happen if he starts tuning up his numbers.

7IP 5H 3R 3ER 1BB 6K with 3 HRA. Fourth appearance with multiple homers allowed, and now up to 11 in 50.2 IP. (Courtesy of Charles Wallace’s 5/15 blog post on minorleagueball.com)

Sorry, his K-rate is so misleading, I haven’t checked into his actual game performances much so far this year…