Junior Lake

[Rob]

then tell me, what's his upside

Do you propose ignoring potential development by a prospect when determining upside?

no, not attainable potential development. a guy can add bulk to his frame and start putting doubles over the wall, but guys don't really ever suddenly start to gain some semblance of strike zone command after nearly 2000 PA of horrible ineptitude

 

Haven't read fangraphs this week?

 

http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/hitteragigall.jpg

Walk rate performs just about as you might expect. Hitters peak from 26 to 29 years old. They improve their walk rate when they first hit the league, and then as their skills erode, so does their patience. It might be the flattest curve — until 35 they still haven’t lost 1% off their peak walk rate — but it’s a curve nonetheless. Patience is nice and stable, relatively.

 

Strikeouts improve sort of drastically, but not for long. Your average hitter might improve his strikeout percentage until he turns 24 or 25 and enjoy a nice long peak. But then by 34 he’s already lost more off his peak strikeout rate than he did off his peak walk rate. Look at age 31, and you’ll see that’s where the first significant decline in both strikeouts and walks come. It’s more pronounced and detectable than any age-27 peak — perhaps we should be talking about age 31 seasons being critical in a negative way instead of focusing on the 27-year-old peak performer.

 

Besides which, it's absolutely not unheard of for guys to boost their walk rates. We've even got a good example on the team right now in Soriano. 4.5 BB% through his first 3500 PA. 7.4% in the 3400 since. Vlad and Sosa always come to mind when I think about notorious free swingers who were surprisingly patient in their primes. Braun keeps improving his BB%. It does happen, however rarely.

 

ETA: Hanley Ramirez, too.

Edited January 17, 2012 by Rob

[Rob]

then tell me, what's his upside

 

Do you really not understand the term?

 

I stated it earlier. Lake has the raw physical tools to hit 20+ HR and swipe 40+ bags while sticking at SS. There's also something like a 2% chance of that happening.

that's been done four times in the history of baseball, so i'll certainly take the under on those odds

 

Okay. Less than 2%

 

Now explain to me how that isn't his upside.

[sneakypower]

Besides which, it's absolutely not unheard of for guys to boost their walk rates. We've even got a good example on the team right now in Soriano. 4.5 BB% through his first 3500 PA. 7.4% in the 3400 since. Vlad and Sosa always come to mind when I think about notorious free swingers who were surprisingly patient in their primes. Braun keeps improving his BB%. It does happen, however rarely.

 

ETA: Hanley Ramirez, too.

Vlad (.83 BB/K), Hanley (.52) Soriano (.36) still all showed much better command of the strike zone in the minors than Lake (.23) has

 

also, somewhat tangential i guess, but i sort of hate using Sosa as an example for anything, the guy hit .227/.276/.382 in his first three years; if the hope for a player is to give you less than a win of value in three years and get traded for a fading has-been, that's a little grim

[Rob]

Besides which, it's absolutely not unheard of for guys to boost their walk rates. We've even got a good example on the team right now in Soriano. 4.5 BB% through his first 3500 PA. 7.4% in the 3400 since. Vlad and Sosa always come to mind when I think about notorious free swingers who were surprisingly patient in their primes. Braun keeps improving his BB%. It does happen, however rarely.

 

ETA: Hanley Ramirez, too.

Vlad (.83 BB/K), Hanley (.52) Soriano (.36) still all showed much better command of the strike zone in the minors than Lake (.23) has

 

also, somewhat tangential i guess, but i sort of hate using Sosa as an example for anything, the guy hit .227/.276/.382 in his first three years; if the hope for a player is to give you less than a win of value in three years and get traded for a fading has-been, that's a little grim

 

And if we were arguing that Lake is a better prospect than Vlad, Hanley, or Soriano those data points might be useful to prove he isn't.

 

But nobody is making that argument. You said plate discipline can't really improve, these examples prove otherwise.

 

And I still want an answer for this.

then tell me, what's his upside

 

Do you really not understand the term?

 

I stated it earlier. Lake has the raw physical tools to hit 20+ HR and swipe 40+ bags while sticking at SS. There's also something like a 2% chance of that happening.

that's been done four times in the history of baseball, so i'll certainly take the under on those odds

 

Okay. Less than 2%

 

Now explain to me how that isn't his upside.

[sneakypower]

And if we were arguing that Lake is a better prospect than Vlad, Hanley, or Soriano those data points might be useful to prove he isn't.

 

But nobody is making that argument. You said plate discipline can't really improve, these examples prove otherwise.

Vlad and Soriano saw their plate discipline worsen going from the minors to the majors, Hanley's improved a moderate amount

 

that's been done four times in the history of baseball, so i'll certainly take the under on those odds

Okay. Less than 2%

 

Now explain to me how that isn't his upside.

it's his upside insofar as my professional upside is to become a billionaire, i guess; it's so prohibitively unlikely, it's not even worth thinking about for all practical purposes

[Rob]

that's been done four times in the history of baseball, so i'll certainly take the under on those odds

Okay. Less than 2%

 

Now explain to me how that isn't his upside.

it's his upside insofar as my professional upside is to become a billionaire, i guess; it's so prohibitively unlikely, it's not even worth thinking about for all practical purposes

 

Upside has very little to do with likelihood.

 

Upside = Ceiling = Absolute best case scenario if a player turns all his potential ability into baseball skills.

 

If your definition of upside for a 21 year old SS in AA with amazing tools is " to i guess suppress these problems just enough to sneak their way into the majors for a few seasons"... well, you don't understand what upside is.

 

All he really has to do to have a nice major league career as a league average starter is continue on the path he's on and improve one of his power/speed/fielding/strikeout rate/walk rate. That's not "so prohibitively unlikely it's not even worth thinking about." And so even your own made up definition of upside has you underselling him.

[craig]

Lake has some really noteworthy tools, and an exciting combo of power, speed, and arm.

 

Rob's BB and K improvement graph shows typical walk-rate improvements on the order of 2%. If Lake improves his 2011 walk rate (19W/445AB) by 2%, a 2% improvement on awful will still be awful. A 3% improvement on his K-rate will still be awful. He'll have to improve way more than normal to blossom into a bad K/BB guy rather than the awful we've seen. (Merely bad would be a big improvement.) Interestingly, in 2010 he walked 35 times, poor but hardly awful. His K-rate has improved in each of the last two seasons, despite promotions.

 

Lake is almost certain to always have ugly K/BB profiles. To me his question is whether he can improve them enough in the anti-awful direction, and can do enough good things to counterbalance the bad stuff and justify himself as a big-league player.

 

From my rankings writeup (I'm not done, but currently I've got Lake around 14 or 15 on my list...):

 

'As with Vitters, future depends heavily on HR output. His awful K/BB profile show tons of holes, and promise a future with low average and low IsoD. At 25 HR, that could add enough hits and slugging to float an anti-awful BA and to perhaps offset the bad K’s and low walks. Seems very unsuited for the alleged “culture shift” that Hoyer supposedly wants, given his reputation as a “play the wrong way” slacker, non-hustler, and ignore-coaches guy. But perhaps a new regime will institute some changes at the minor-league level that will help him. The other big question is his position, obviously he can’t play SS.'