Burt Macklin, FBI

Minorleaguecentral.com, but don't fall into the trap of thinking LD% is worth looking at. Minor league LD% or LD% in general?

These last 3 days have been the first time in a long while (2008?) in which I'm actually excited about almost (cmon Soler!) the entire lineup.

Also, because I feel obligated to post a P&R gif, my reaction to Bryant having a high BABIP: http://i.imgur.com/tKWbnnS.gif

Stealing this from the minor league thread: Bryant before the break: 30.3 K%, 12.1 BB%, 1.105 OPS After the break: 23.7 K%, 15.5 BB%, 1.113 OPS If he can keep his strikeout rate in the low to mid 20's I see no reason he can't be a fairly immediate 3ish WAR player, even with some BABIP regression. On a side note, does anyone know where to find minor league LD%?

The break pretty nicely splits his AAA PA in half (99 vs 97). Before the break: 30.3 K%, 12.1 BB%, 1.105 OPS After the break: 23.7 K%, 15.5 BB%, 1.113 OPS He's hitting fewer HR (9 vs 6) but making up for it by being far more selective at the plate. If he can maintain a strikeout rate in the low to mid 20s I have a lot more confidence in him coming up and having success quickly.

http://i.imgur.com/NTUPyyi.gif

BandMLTICST doesn't quite have the same ring to it...

With all the lurkers coming out of the woodwork recently, I thought it would be interesting to pass along some results of being bored at work. I wanted to figure out how our top prospects seasons at Iowa compared to the majors, but I couldn't find a good MLE calculator online, so I built one following Dan Szymborski and then plugged the output of that into a version of Wahoo's On First WAR calculator to get an idea of what their seasons looked like (note that these are not projections, just the MLE of their current season at Iowa): Alcantara (with slightly above average CF defense): .278/.318/.462/.780; 5.6 BB%, 25.6 K%, 3.6 WAR This seems pretty reasonable, and in line with what he's done so far. Maybe a touch optimistic on the power. Baez (with average 2B defense): .234/.283/.438/.721; 6.5 BB%, 34.1 K%, 1.9 WAR This is the MLE of his whole season, so building in an adjustment period to the majors (today's game aside). You can equally well extrapolate his July and arrive at 4.7 WAR. Soler (with slightly above average RF defense): .257/.344/.593/.938; 11.7 BB%, 23.0 K%, 5.5 WAR Bryant (with below average 3B defense): .291/.369/.571/.940; 11.0 BB%, 31.4 K%, 5.0 WAR These two seem crazy optimistic, although I again want to note that this is not a projection. Instead, I would look at it as yet another sign of how crazy of a season these two have had. There's reasons for both of them to struggle in the future (notably small sample size for Soler* and strikeouts for Bryant) but it's fun to dream on how good these two could be, quickly. Side note: I was concerned that these numbers were too high, so I also ran Vitters (-2.7 WAR) and Jackson (-2.0 WAR). Phew. *In the course of loading the data, I noticed Soler only has a .286 BABIP at Iowa, so if anything he may be due for some positive regression, which may be the most insane thing about his Iowa campaign!