I’m going to have to do something about those increasingly unwieldy archives links at the bottom of the page. When I put the original system in place, it was with the assumption that I’d quickly tire of blogging (or, more accurately, that other people would quickly tire of my blogging). But interestingly, that hasn’t happened. I go through periods of more or less enthusiasm and energy — not to mention useful things to say — but I always come back for more. What it really comes down to is the fact that I just can’t get enough baseball.

Happy New Year

Good gig to ring in the New Year. We were a pitcher struggling with command early, fighting our instruments, our songs, ourselves. But we battled back and finished strong. High point for me came just before midnight. We had about five minutes to kill before the ball dropped (well, before we saw the replay of its being dropped): not enough time for a song, but too much time to just stand around and look like idiots. So our bass player starts thumping out "Louie Louie." Don, our drummer, kicks in, and I look over at Billy on bass; he tells me what key he’s in and I start playing along. Three of us sing in the band, and we all kind of look at each other. Nobody knows the words. I step up to the mike, figuring I can just keep repeating the two lines I know for a couple minutes. After a while, Don picks up the verses and I leave it to him. Next thing I know, the dance floor is full. That was awesome.

Folks, if you’re ever out seeing your favorite local band and they’re scuffling a bit, give ‘em some energy. It works wonders.

Anyway, we had a great New Year’s. Hope you did, too.

Housekeeping

Starting today, I’ll be including a little e-mail link at the bottom of each installment. This should make it more convenient for you to contact me. I’m hoping to turn it into a form at some point; I’ve played around with some, but I haven’t been able to resolve some security issues so who knows when that will happen. Meantime, let me know what you think!

Prospects, Prospects, Prospects

Awright, as promised, January is prospect month here at Ducksnorts. So let’s get the ball rolling. We’ll kick things off by revisiting prospects from John Sickels’ 1996 book and win shares.

What follows is a continuation of some findings presented on September 16 and November 26. This is turning into an ongoing project of sorts. If you’d like to see the data set, or if you have any ideas on what other questions might be worth asking, let me know.

And now, let’s jump in and see what we find.

Win Shares (1996-2001)

This shows how many win shares were earned by players in each grade group during years 1996-2001. For those not familiar with Sickels’ work, he grades each prospect on a scale from A to C-. The lists that follow give the number of players in each group, the total number of win shares garnered by players in each group, and the average number of win shares per player in each group. We’ll look at all players, pitchers only, and hitters only.

total

No   Grd    WS  WS/player
12    A    794  66.17
14    A-   642  45.86
32    B+   964  30.13
59    B    939  15.92
76    B-  1026  13.50
95    C+   934   9.83
129   C   1133   8.78
98    C-   642   6.55
515  tot  7074  13.74

No real surprises here. Pretty much a linear progression; the most highly regarded prospects earned the most win shares, and so on down the line.

hitters

No   Grd    WS  WS/player
8     A    651  81.38
11    A-   571  51.91
20    B+   609  30.45
38    B    705  18.55
38    B-   759  19.97
46    C+   588  12.78
70    C    668   9.54
55    C-   492   8.95
286  tot  5043  17.63

An oddity here is that the Grade B- group did slightly better than the Grade B group, with exactly the same number of players in each group.

pitchers

No   Grd    WS  WS/player
4     A    143  35.75
3     A-    71  23.67
12    B+   355  29.58
21    B    234  11.14
38    B-   267   7.03
49    C+   346   7.06
59    C    465   7.88
43    C-   150   3.49
229  tot  2031   8.87

The B+ group did significantly better than the A- group. The A- group (Alan Benes, Rocky Coppinger, Jeff Suppan) turned out to be pretty weak, whereas the B+ group comprised three (Chan Ho Park, #1; Bartolo Colon, #3; Ugueth Urbina, #4) of the top four pitchers in terms of win shares.

There were small fluctuations among the B-, C+, and C groups but nothing too startling.

To summarize:

• overall the more highly regarded prospects turned into the more successful players
• there was greater fluctuation among pitchers than among hitters

This isn’t earth-shattering, but it does confirm some suspsicions.

Tomorrow: the prospects’ minor league stats…