Minor League Discussion & Boxes, 8-20-16

[CaliforniaRaisin]

Scheduled Games (All Times Central):

 

Iowa won 6-3 Box Score

 

Tennessee won 9-4 Box Score

 

Myrtle Beach lost 5-4 Box Score

 

South Bend won 12-9 Box Score

 

Eugene snapped their NWL record 15-game win streak and lost 12-1 Box Score

 

AZL Cubs won their game suspended on 7/29 7-0 Box Score

 

AZL Cubs won their regularly scheduled game 3-2 (7 innings) Box Score

 

DSL Cubs 1 won 3-2 Box Score

 

DSL Cubs 2 lost 5-4 (11 innings) Box Score

[CubsWin]

Matt Rose grand slam

 

Edit: He finished 4-5 with that HR and 2 doubles

 

He's hit .313/.404/.596 with a 18.3% K rate since going back to the MWL (109 PAs) and honestly it's getting to where the overall line in SB is quality by itself anyway.

With Vogelbach gone, he's the best 1B prospect in the organization for me. It's nice to see him possibly turn a corner.

 

His overall line is getting there, but I wouldn't call .236/.312/.429 quality.

[Aaron_Kennelly]

I liked the idea of Rose a lot when I saw him earlier in the year, when he was still struggling. He's got a large, strong, wiry body. (Think Kris Bryant, only skinnier.) Obviously he's not anything like Kris Bryant. But he reminded me a lot of Bryant, based on what he looked like, his posture, how he moved about and carried himself, etc. And he looked pretty athletic, too. I saw him make a crazy catch, on a dead sprint up, reaching over the dugout fence. He definitely has raw power to spare. It's really exciting to see it coming out in games.

 

I wonder what the deal was with him earlier in the year. He wasn't really striking out a crazy amount or anything. He just wasn't hitting.

[davell]

Badler made a telling quote earlier in the year, on Albertos and it almost definitely applies to Parades too. He said he heard things on Albertos, but didn't do any digging on him and said he should have.

 

Its not great to go off of signing bonus, but we could use it on Parades and figure that we found a guy in an unmined area that we just got at a bargain rate. I can't wait to hear some end of the year gushing on him.

[CaliforniaRaisin]

Badler made a telling quote earlier in the year, on Albertos and it almost definitely applies to Parades too. He said he heard things on Albertos, but didn't do any digging on him and said he should have.

 

Its not great to go off of signing bonus, but we could use it on Parades and figure that we found a guy in an unmined area that we just got at a bargain rate. I can't wait to hear some end of the year gushing on him.

 

The exact quote:

 

Kevin (Bristol): What's the outlook for Jose Albertos? Seems like a potentially exciting arm to add to the Cubs farm system. 17 years old, hitting 95, flashing a plus curve. Is he a name to watch?

 

Ben Badler: Looks like a great signing by the Cubs. Someone I had heard about before July 2 last year but should have dug into more. The reports from Bill Mitchell out of extended spring training on him have been great. Feel for pitching and good stuff that keeps ticking up since he signed.

Read more at http://www.baseballamerica.com/minors/baseball-america-prospect-chat-11/#VtkqEwTtQ1T4XBm1.99

[CubsWin]

Badler made a telling quote earlier in the year, on Albertos and it almost definitely applies to Parades too. He said he heard things on Albertos, but didn't do any digging on him and said he should have.

 

Its not great to go off of signing bonus, but we could use it on Parades and figure that we found a guy in an unmined area that we just got at a bargain rate. I can't wait to hear some end of the year gushing on him.

 

I get the feeling this is a huge factor. Cubs seemed to have ID'd Mexico as a country being underrated - probably a good idea since the best pitching prospect in baseball was signed out of their $3.50 or whatever it was. Don't forget Mexican signees like Sepulveda, Assad, Carrera, and Hector Garcia are all off to successful pro starts.

It's really rather remarkable when you think about it. The Cubs have signed several prospects out of Mexico over the past couple of seasons (from recollection 8, I believe) and the only one who hasn't done well is Ruben Reyes (who wasn't that highly thought of to begin with as a 20-year-old). Even Zamudio's doing okay as a stateside 18-year-old.

[CubsWin]

His overall line is getting there, but I wouldn't call .236/.312/.429 quality.

 

The typical MWL player is SLG below .400, .374 IIRC, and putting up a .707 OPS with a 21.7% K rate. When put in that context, Rose's slash and 18.1% K rate look a whole lot better.

For me, quality means at least average across the board with some above average areas. His power is certainly above average. but the season long AVG and OBP are well below. Hitters in the MWL have averaged .249 and .318 in those categories. South Bend has a team average of .268 and OBP of .334.

 

Perhaps "quality" means something different to you in which case this is just a matter of semantics.

 

If Rose cools off significantly the rest of the way, for me, his season long slash becomes a bit more representative. If he maintains his strong 2nd half through to the end, it will lend credence to the notion that he's better than his season long slash in that he's turned a corner in his development. For me, his 2nd half numbers would then be more (not completely) representative of what he's become.

[CubsWin]

For me, quality means at least average across the board with some above average areas. His power is certainly above average. but the season long AVG and OBP are well below. Hitters in the MWL have averaged .249 and .318 in those categories. South Bend has a team average of .268 and OBP of .334.

 

Perhaps "quality" means something different to you in which case this is just a matter of semantics.

 

If Rose cools off significantly the rest of the way, for me, his season long slash becomes a bit more representative. If he maintains his strong 2nd half through to the end, it will lend credence to the notion that he's better than his season long slash in that he's turned a corner in his development. For me, his 2nd half numbers would then be more (not completely) representative of what he's become.

 

??

 

From there the strong K rate, SLG, IsoSLG (.197 for Rose, .108 for league) are likely more significant moving forward than being less than a percentage point off the league raw OBP and a couple handful off the league's batting average. Obviously he needs to keep hitting and finish the year high, especially since my exact quote was getting to where the overall line is quality, but as of the night of 8/20 he was moving in that direction. Today's 0-5 hurts, so hopefully the last 17 games plus playoffs go better.

As I wrote in my original response, he's definitely getting there. And I acknowledged that the SLG is already above average. Perhaps we just value different predictive stats. All good.

[craig]

..I think this is funny because Eloy, Bryant, and Russell have all had this issue in recent times for some reason:

Isaac Paredes vs. RHP: .320/.370/.475

Isaac Paredes vs. LHP: .290/.313/.323

 

Another fun fact is that he hit 92 as a pitcher during the 15U World Cup in 2014:

 

Thanks, Tom, that "92-as-pitcher" is pretty interesting. That's a good arm.

*I wonder how he'd been balancing pitching versus in fielding?

*I wonder if there's any chance some teams were looking at him as a pitcher, and didn't appreciate his value as a position guy?

 

I have two questions with the Mexicans.

1. I wonder how teams evaluate. A Mexican signing for $800, kid gets only $400, and Cubs get taxed at only $400. Does a team scout/value him as equal to a $400 Dominican, or equal to an $800 Dominican, or something somewhere in between? (Obviously there is tons of guesswork pre-signing; given how Paredes has made contact, maybe he'd get $2.5 million now, if back on the market..... Maybe all of our Mexicans would get double or triple what we paid for them if available now....)

 

2. The other major question is how development/improvement/projection will go. It's great to have nice relative-to-age stats in the DSL and ASL. But most teens we expect to improve dramatically over time, both physically and skills-wise. The appeal is that their perceived potential ceiling is assumed to be so much higher than their present. With the Mexican kids, I wonder if they might be closer to their ceilings, both physically and skills-wise, than is true for most teen pros; so that they might not have as much improvement capacity? Whether or not the Mexican kids can further elevate their games a lot isn't clear, but will determine whether they'll be able to keep up with all the improvements in competition they'll need to handle to remain good right up the majors.

[CubsWin]

As I wrote in my original response, he's definitely getting there. And I acknowledged that the SLG is already above average. Perhaps we just value different predictive stats. All good.

 

I think mostly it was you confused "getting to..." with "already there" or some equivalent of.

Wow. You must've aced condescension class. You can go back and re-read what I wrote if you want, but I'm moving on.

[davell]

Craig, its a nitpick, but they only get 25% actually, not half. And I've wondered that too-How teams value that. In the end, with these guys sooooo far away and all anyway, my completely uneducated guess is most teams would be of the "money is money" approach and it all counts against what they've got to spend on IFA's.

 

But teams like us and the Dodgers probably are the opposite and use it to any advantage we can.

[Transmogrified Tiger]

How is that condescending? It's just obviously what happened.

 

Now this would be condescending: For me if someone says "getting to" and it gets interpreted as "is presently" or some equivalent of, then what was said has been misrepresented. As I see it laid out before me, that is exactly the case the here. Perhaps we just have a different definition of condescending. All good

 

If you argue with someone back and forth for a half dozen replies and they land on some version of 'agree to disagree', replying with 'yeah you probably messed up the meaning of some words' is condescending.

[craig]

Craig, its a nitpick, but they only get 25% actually, not half. And I've wondered that too-How teams value that. In the end, with these guys sooooo far away and all anyway, my completely uneducated guess is most teams would be of the "money is money" approach and it all counts against what they've got to spend on IFA's.

 

But teams like us and the Dodgers probably are the opposite and use it to any advantage we can.

Thanks. That's not a nit-pick that's a meaningful difference. So, much appreciated! Agree with your bottom-line.

[craig]

.......As far as improvement, there's nothing wrong with being skilled. Skills are what all that potential is supposed to turn into, and young skilled guys can work on their weaknesses more than guys playing catch up.

 

Many of the Mexicans are performing well relative to the DSL/ASL. My question is whether that will translate up the chain. They may be much more practiced, since I'm guessing they've actually played a lot of baseball games, whereas a lot of Dominicans have played very little. So they may have less capacity to improve.

 

(Somewhat like how a college guy can often do well in the ASL because he's more practiced/polished than the teenagers, who have a lot more improvement left to make.)