In the article talking about Chase Utley’s injury, its mentioned that Donald won the AFL’s Darrell Stenson Award, given to the player who displays hard work, leadership, and unselfishness. A nice way to cap off his 2008. He better rest up, because I think he’s going to end up playing a big role in 2009.

I figured this would be an interesting topic of discussion, just to get an idea what others are thinking. Taylor came out of nowhere this season, after a very mediocre debut in 2007. So, who is the 2009 version, if we have one? Who will come off of a very pedestrian 2008 season to really jump up the rankings in 2009?

Edit > The Phillies have finalized their 40 man roster heading into the Rule 5 draft. Joel Naughton, Carlos Carrasco, Sergio Escalona, and Drew Naylor were added. Jeremy Slayden and Pat Overholt were not. There’s a very good chance Slayden will be selected.

The reports on Jason Donald this fall remain the same. He’d be fine at shortstop, but he doesn’t have prototypical power to play third base, and he’d be more valuable to the Phillies in a trade. Well, lets consider the composite batting lines for the 3B position over the last few years

2008: .266/.336/.436
2007: .273/.342/.443
2006: .276/.347/.458
2005: .270/.338/.435

Of course, this line considers all players who appeared at 3B, its not a standard for players who started at the position and played a large chunk of games. So to do that, I looked at all 3B who had at least 400 PA in 2008. The line, when considering these 27 players, is

.271/.355/.457

This tells us a bit more, its not radically higher, but it is a bit higher. So then we have to figure out what kind of hitter Jason Donald is in the majors.

Career: .297/.384/.459
2008: .307/.391/.497

Donald’s 2008 was his best minor league season, betting his numbers across the board, while doing it in AA. Is he a .280/.360/.460 hitter in the majors? If he is, then he’d be a league average 3B. I guess time will tell.

The guy who is largely responsible for overseeing the drafting of the nucleus of this team was allowed to walk out the door, and baseball lifer Ruben Amaro Jr was promoted to General Manager today. At least he was only given a 3 year deal. I’m too tired to rant about how bad a decision I think this is, but until he screws things up in a big way, I guess I won’t complain. I’m assuming I’ll have material by February. Then again, I was seemingly wrong about Chuck LaMar as well, so who knows.

Hats off to the players, coaches, and everyone associated with the team. And a big tip of the cap to the Phillies scouting and player development guys who assembled this roster, loaded with homegrown talent. Soak it in everyone.

As you’ve noticed, the left side of the site is messed up. This seems to be a problem across wordpress, so I have no way to fix it. Hopefully wordpress gets this resolved soon. I’ll be back tomorrow with the Reading review. For today, here’s an open question for discussion. What will happen with Lou Marson next season? Will he start out on the 25 man roster? Will he be a mid season callup? Will he spend all year at AA or AAA? Will he be traded in the offseason? Make your case here, and we can re-visit this next winter to see who got it right.

The last two days we looked at guys who may have performed better than their surface numbers would indicate, so today we’ll look at a few guys who maybe are overvalued based on their surface numbers. Don’t take offense if someone you love ends up here, as I’m sure we have different methods to evaluate prospects. Affiliate wrapups start Monday.

Continue reading Overvalued prospects in 2008 →

As promised, today we’ll dig into the pitching aspect and try to find out who might have performed a bit better that what we see on the surface, ie, just looking at ERA and WHIP and wins. The main statistic I’ll use today is DICE, which I’ve discussed before. DICE is basically a form of component ERA which tries to determine what a pitcher’s ERA should have been based on the hits, walks, strikeouts and home runs he allowed. It’s a good indicator of luck, which pitchers were fortunate and which got a bit unlucky. For a more detailed explanation, go here. And again, just a reminder, this is mainly to try and find guys who are undervalued. A guy like Carlos Carrasco was expected to pitch well, so he’s not really undervalued.

Continue reading Undervalued pitchers in 2008 →

Kind of a lame title for today’s article, but essentially I wanted to point out 3 players who kind of had under the radar seasons. Guys we didn’t focus on, or that we maybe focused on in a not so positive light. I’ll explain all of the choices using some of the new statistics I’ve been focusing on as well as using the more basic numbers. I decided to narrow it down to 3, so lets get started…

Continue reading Undervalued positional players in 2008 →

Here is what I have in mind for the rest of the week:

Wednesday – Undervalued positional performances in 2008
Thursday – Undervalued pitching performances in 2008
Friday – GCL review/introduction of my new prospect evaluation system

I’ve been spending a lot of time working on my new system, and I’ll start to explain it/unveil it on Friday. My goal is to do a review of each affiliate, and my Top 30 this year will be heavily influenced by how the player fares in my new system. Eventually I’ll do a Top 30 prospects for every team, but obviously won’t go into the same detail as I will for the Phillies list. My plan is to start the Reader Top 30 for 2009 sometime after the AFL ends, in between the holidays when we have some down time.