April 22nd Box Score Roundup

Box Score Recap

Just the links tonight, you supply the analysis

Lehigh Valley wins 12-2.

Clearwater wins 3-2.

Lakewood loses 11-7.

24 thoughts on “April 22nd Box Score Roundup”

  1. How about some chatter for KLaw’s 101’st best prospect, JC Ramirez. 7 innings, 8Ks, 1 BB. Nice line. Seems as if he likes the FSL a little bit better than the CAL league so far.
    Brian Gump struggling to get in the lineup or to the Mendoza line at Clearwater. How soon until Castro moves up. I say 150 ab’s at Lakewood.

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  2. (standard disclaimer about small sample size, repeating a league, and being old for the league goes here)

    Cody Overbeck seems to be off to a good start. It would be nice if he could keep it up and maybe get moved to Reading. He certainly won’t profile as a long term solution at third (too many glove issues), but if he’s a decent slugger, he could be a decent utility guy.

    – Jeff

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  3. Two walks, ten strikeouts. I smell mirage.

    It seems to me that a batter’s K/BB ratio is a great indication of whether his ability is real or not. D’Arby Myers had a poor ratio a few years ago and he fell apart.

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  4. Yeah, true. And Overbeck’s K/BB ration has been poor going back to his college days. Given the dearth of 3b prospects in the system though, I’d think if he can slug the ball pretty well, he’s got a shot (very slim, but a shot nonetheless).

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  5. Anon: Agree. Another way of saying that is that if the K/BB ratio is poor, it is likely that a very high BABIP is keeping the player afloat, which can’t last for long. BABIP goes down, and down goes BA, OBP, SLG, everything.

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  7. A lot of guys put a great ephasis on BABIP when evaluating players. It seems that not enough emphasis is placed on LD% and how it relates to BABIP. If a guy has a good LD%, it does not matter what his BABIP is, IMO. For me, any discussion of BABIP should include the player’s LD%. David Wright and Ryan Howard have high BABIP, it does not mean they are “lucky”. It means they hit the ball hard.

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  8. Mike77: Thanks for the correction. I agree with your view.

    Certain players hit the ball harder than others when they connect and a higher percentage fall for hits. Howard is a great example of that. So you have to look at the long run and see if the LD% is higher than avg and it should mean a higher BABIP than avg over time.

    I used BABIP as a shorthand to make the point that an uncharacteristically high BA or hitting streak in a player without good discipline can simply be luck–or might be a guy seeing the ball and squaring it up during a hitting streak in a player who has a hard time staying locked into that level of hitting. As with most stats, there are various profiles and narratives that go into the averages that the statistician provides.

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  10. mego – that doesn’t make sense. the same caveat applies to pitchers. some get weak contact and thus pitch to contact.

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  11. BABIP is only good in large quantities.

    Say, if a pitcher usually puts up a .290 BABIP over 5-6 years and suddenly posts a .220 BABIP with a corresponding drop in his ERA. You can point to the BABIP and say “There’s a good chance this is luck as its out of character for him”.

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  12. I’m not certain about LD%. I look at the leaderboard from last year and you have Kosuke Fukudome, Chone Figgins, Adam Kennedy and Luis Castillo in the top ten. Castillo? He’s the biggest slap hitter in baseball. Add in that you have far less variations in line drive percentages than you do on fly balls or grounders, and I’m not quite certain what to make of it.

    I would agree that there’s a difference between guys who hit the ball hard constantly. There are teams actually tracking this data in the minor leagues, I know for certain in AAA and AA. But a lot of that is proprietary.

    The thing to remember with batting average is that it is prone to fluctuation. So much so that even 500 at bats is not really an accurate scale of what a player can do.

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  13. I agree with NEPP, although I do think you can make judgments when guys have ridiculously high or low BABIP’s that clearly aren’t sustainable.

    BABIP like all stats is just one piece to the puzzle that helps us to judge players.

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  14. “the same caveat applies to pitchers. some get weak contact and thus pitch to contact.”

    Uh, sorry, no.

    See years of research by Voros McCracken and others. Thus FIP, etc.

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  15. “Castillo? He is the biggest slap hitter in baseball.”

    Since when does being a slap hitter mean you can not hit line drives? Pete Rose and Rod Carew were slap hitters and I never saw them hit anything except line drives. When Barry Bonds was in Pittsburg, he choked up on the bat and hit everything to the opposite field. Basically slapping everything his first 2 years. Nothing but line drives. Tony Gwynn never popped up. Line drive, slap hitter.

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  16. Philly Chuck is mostly correct, with a slight caveat – there is some (small) statistically significant variation between pitchers in BABIP, but much less variation than for hitters.

    Knuckleball pitchers are an exception, with a larger range of meaningful variation.

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  19. Must be nice to be a 17 year old and hit a 430 ft. walk off home run on a first pitch, fast ball in the bottom of the 14th inning. Let the legend of Domingo Santana begin.

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  20. The amazing thing about Santana is that he’s not hitting lefties at all right now. There’s very few righties who don’t end up hitting lefties well. It’s probably just an inexperience issue (can’t imagine he saw anything close to what he’s seeing this year playing against 16 year olds in the DR), and when he starts to pick them up (and I say when, not if), he’s going to be talked about as a super-elite prospect.

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  21. Who is Torre Langley and where have they been hiding him? He played catcher in his 1st game for LWD last night. He was 2 -5 with a RBI, BB and K. But that wasn’t what caught (no pun intended) my eye. He threw out two guys stealing and picked another off 1st base. I see he was with Greensboro in ther SAL last year.

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  24. Looks like Langley is a former Marlins 3rd round pick, Hasn’t hit much at any level, and has practically no plate discipline. He has 31 walks in over 800 at bats.

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