Prospect Spotlight - Sean Gallagher

[Guest]

This week’s prospect spotlight will focus on Sean Gallagher, an exciting young right-hander whose domination of the Florida State League recently earned him a promotion to AA West Tennessee. For now I’ll just focus on his High-A stats, as not a lot of conclusions can be gleaned from the handful of innings he’s pitched at AA. We’ll come back to him later in the season to figure out how well he handled the adjustment.

 

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[Outshined_One]

Excellent work BK!

[Chris]

Another tremendous read! Although I am sure that Sean will read your article on the site, I'll be more than happy to provide him a printed copy of it with your permission.

[SouthSideRyan]

Yay for same birthday as me. Boo for me being 2 years older and accomplished far less.

 

Seriously, these are great BK, keep up the good work.

[Guest]

Matt - Seasonal age is usually determined as the player's age on July 1st of that season.

 

Excellent read, though. I look forward to the next installment.

[Guest]

Matt - Seasonal age is usually determined as the player's age on July 1st of that season.

All right, all right... I'll add a couple extra lines of code to my script and from now own that's the cutoff date I'll use. Slavedriver. ;)

 

Although I am sure that Sean will read your article on the site, I'll be more than happy to provide him a printed copy of it with your permission.

I'd be honored to have a future major-leaguer read my work. :)

[Chris]

Although I am sure that Sean will read your article on the site, I'll be more than happy to provide him a printed copy of it with your permission.

I'd be honored to have a future major-leaguer read my work. :)

 

Excellent, I'll be sure to give him a copy! Again, great work!

[Guest]

For the sake of completeness, here's how 20 year old pitchers have fared in High A:

 

  class age Outs   BF  HR  BB   SO  ER   R    H   W  L Hold Hopp S Sopp WP   ip  era   ra   kr  bbr   hrr babip whip  dips
1   AHI  20 5113 7263 111 617 1547 695 856 1626 103 89    4    4 5    6 62 1704 3.67 4.52 8.17 3.26 0.586 0.304 1.32  3.52

It's interesting to note that 20 year olds have pitched just about as many innings as 21 year olds at the level, and were a bit more effective in those innings.

[vance_the_cubs_fan]

Excellent article, BK.

[CaliforniaRaisin]

Fantastic job yet again, BK.

[craig]

I found three things noteworthy or surprising in that analysis.

1) That his DIPS was so as significantly worse than his ERA as it was. I'm not a DIPS Saber guy, so don't know the ins and outs. Obviously it's been a surprise all along that his ERA was so low given how pedestrian his WHIP has been. (Although perhaps not, given how groundball oriented he's been, thus few HR's and not too many XBH.)

 

2) That his DIPS is not more exceptional relative to his league or his age. 3.04 is obviously good, but when the league is 3.71 and other 20-year-olds are 3.5 or whatever, it's not as statistically superior as I'd expected.

 

3) What was really interesting to me was the pitch sequence data. Particularly the T/S rate. A guy who has hitters swinging at an unusually high percentage of his pitches, that's really nice to see. That would seem to be the sign of a guy who is keeping the ball around the plate, and might eventually be a low pitch-count guy. Combined with a significantly low contact percentage and the significantly high outside-the-zone swinging, that's really a nice collection of stats. Perhaps a guy who'se throwing strikes enough so that guys figure they may as well swing; perhaps a guy who has enough movement and deception so that hitters can't read where the pitch will end up. That's a very, very promising combination of numbers in that section. Perhaps a guy who can give or take a little bit in movement or speed, so that hitters think they recognize what's coming and commit the swing, but the real thing is mph-ing or curving or cutting or sliding a little bit differently from what they expected, enough to make it hard to make hard contact?

 

We'll see how AA goes along.

[CuseCubFan69]

Nice job once again BK! I look forward to Gallagher pitching for the Marlins.

[Outshined_One]

Nice job once again BK! I look forward to Gallagher pitching for the Marlins.

 

I hate you for making me laugh when I read that. :evil:

[NCCubFan]

Seems like we are turning into the Marlins' minor league team, much like we joke about Pittsburgh being ours.

[Ding Dong Johnson]

Seems like we are turning into the Marlins' minor league team, much like we joke about Pittsburgh being ours.

 

So, if the Marlins are fielding a AAA team this season, does that make us a AA team with the Pirates being high A?

[CubinNY]

well done BK!

[Laura]

Awesome, BK, as always!

 

I do have a couple of simple-minded questions about DIPS. I apologize in advance; I'm still wrapping my brain around some of this info. Be nice!

 

Is there a general sense of whether DIPS has predictive value for future performance at the minor league level? I know there are some data validity questions with some of the accessible stats from A-AA, so this may be unfair to ask. Have is it been applied much at the minor league levels?

 

How do you (or anyone else who wants to chime in!) explain the dERA being worse than the ERA? Could it be somewhat attributed to the groundball%, as Craig mentions as a possibility?

 

Part of the reason I ask is because my introduction to dERA grew out of reading discussions about the 2003 Glendon Rusch. He had an opposite dERA/ERA split and some asserted that provided hope for him to improve, which he did in '04, but then regressed again. I recall that Rusch was said at the time to be one of the unluckiest (for lack of a better term) pitchers in baseball because of that gap, which some blamed on lousy BrewCrew defense. I don't *think* that line drive % was readily available at the time (pre-HBT) and a few people mentioned that one contributing explanation for Rusch's splits might be that he was giving up an inordinate number of line drives vs other base hits and that wasn't captured in dERA.

 

So I'm wondering whether a pitcher with the opposite split would be termed lucky, for lack of a better term.

 

ETA: Never mind, I'll post the '05 dERA momentarily. THANKS!

[Mephistopheles]

Is there a general sense of whether DIPS has predictive value for future performance at the minor league level? I know there are some data validity questions with some of the accessible stats from A-AA, so this may be unfair to ask. Have is it been applied much at the minor league levels?

 

Since DIPS has a lot of BABIP built in it, theoretically, the only issue would be defense quality or environment. Clay Davenport wrote an article on this a year ago or so. If you take out the extremities (California League, California, Northwest, Texas and Pioneer leagues) and only use the leagues with most parks at sea level, he found that there was a pretty general progression through the minors. I don't know if I can post the table or not, if not a moderator can delete it:

 

.309 Majors (MLB)

.314 IL+AA (AA/AAA)

.316 Eas+Sou (AA)

.316 Caro+FSL (High A)

.321 SAL+MWL (Low A)

.323 NY-P (SS)

.340 App (SS/RK Hybrid League)

 

So basically the DIPS theory works better for projecting success in the minors because of the low quality of defense and the general lowering of BABIP as you move up. In the same article, Davenport also compares pitchers who made the majors BABIPs and ones who didn't from '96-'00. The group who made the majors tended to have a BABIP .005 lower than the ones who did not. My independent theory is due to weaker hitters hitting infield popups against a lot of strikeout pitchers, of course I've never done research on this. From my personal experience, in the college ranks it seems that BABIP is around the .340-.350 mark. This is probably due to the metal bats and the defense though.

Edited June 27, 2006 by Mephistopheles

[Laura]

Thanks, kc! More interesting homework.

[Chris]

I wanted to be sure to make it known that a copy of BK's report on Gallagher was given to Sean over lunch this past Saturday afternoon in Jackson. In appreciation to Bob's Keeper, Sean signed a copy of the report!