Eric's Giants Blog

Fun with old predictions

There are some current events moderately worthy of discussion. The Giants lost again last night (a loss? In a game started by Tomko? nah...), Barry made some comments about retiring after next season (and also that he'd play as a DH for a California-based AL team), and that he might retire before breaking Aaron's record. Fine, fine.

I was flipping through my old 2001 baseball books (mostly Baseball Prospectus, which everyone who reads here knows I think is an invaluable source of information and evaluation). What I thought would be interesting would be to randomly look through and see how some of the comments wound up turning out. It's fine to make predictions based on certain past events (in the case of sabremetricians, often concrete data, rather than scouting reports), but it's useful to sanity-check those by seeing how they turn out.

Bobby Estellala is a fine ballplayer who is only going to get better...He will be at least a reasonable MVP candidate at some point during the next five years.

He's a shaky defensive third baseman who has drawn a grand total of 105 unintentional walks in seven minor-league seasons. You want to be a good player in the majors? Get on base. You want to get on base while drawing less than a walk per week? Hit .350. Feliz won't.

Ballplayer. Ramon Martinez swings hard and can play any infield position well enough to be a defensive replacement. On another team I'd be clamoring for him to at least receive a shot at the starting shortstop or second-base jobs.

The Giants can carry JT Snow because of Aurilia, Bonds, Kent and Estallela, but imagine the offense with a true bomber at first base like Jason Giambi, Carlos Delgado or Frank Thomas.

Tony Torcato is a good athlete... There's an overriding problem here, though, and I don't mean just with Torcato but throughout the Giant organization: these guys have no plate discipline! ... I wonder what Torcato would look like at this point if drafted by, say, the A's.

Many Giant fans think Kurt Ainsworth is a prospect like Rick Ankiel or Ryan Anderson. He's not, and he's not close.

Ryan Vogelsong's numbers and stuff are promising, but if you watch him pitch it's hard to imagine him having a really bright future.

I prefer Jerome Williams to Ainsworth; if he can avoid the dreaded injury nexus, I think he'll have a major-league career.

This stuff all came from a book published between the 2000 and 2001 seasons. There's a lot of other interesting stuff in there, including a prediction that a single-A masher named Albert Pujols might be starting for the Cardinals before anyone thought possible. They missed a few above (obviously they didn't see Estallela's injury-induced fall from the majors) but for the most part I think those look pretty good with almost four years of hindsight. I find the comment about Ainsworth particularly illustrative - the comment was, at the time, true. Ainsworth wasn't the prospect that Rick Ankiel or Ryan Anderson was. What's interesting is that of those three, all considered top or near-top prospects, only Ainsworth is still in the majors, the other two having succumbed to injuries (and in Ankiel's case, control problems). This is just a general comment on pitching prospects and should probably be considered relevant to a team that only seems to draft pitchers.

Some other tidbits that have come to my attention:

Damon Minor is outhitting Snow and Feliz by a lot right now: Remember Minor? Old non-prospect who mashed the ball in Fresno but couldn't do a whole lot with it when he got called up for a couple hundred ABs. Well, the 29-year-old is currently putting up a tidy little .333 / .425 / .613 batting line for Fresno. Of course, it's over only 75 ABs, so expectations should be tempered a lot, but this is a guy who hit pretty well in the minors for a lot of seasons and costs nothing. What is JT Snow doing? .217 / .327 / .313. I don't care how deeply you discount AAA stats to MLB stats, no translation equates these two. Feliz (.299 / .304 / .416) is outhitting Snow too, but Tiny is outhitting either of them.

The Giants might actually have some players in AA this year: Yes, call this irrational exuberance based on a month's worth of stats. As a Giants fan who is pretty sure his team isn't going to go Plan B and actually rebuild the minors, I have to look for hope where I can get it.

With Todd Linden doing his best Orlando Palmeiro impersonation at AAA for the second year in a row (.304 / .368 / .391 in a hitters' league), we turn to Daniel Ortmeier (is that a baseball name or what?) as the guy who might come save us all from the chimera-like beast of Jeffrey Tuckermohr. Ortmeier is 23 and is big, strong, not too old and seems to be able to tell balls from strikes and hit the ball hard. His .295 / .370 / .505 line in 95 ABs at AA Norwich isn't quite enough to call exciting, but it's encouraging.

Also in the "remember that guy" category is Carlos Valderrama, who at 26 is clearly old for his league. Still, this is a guy who I've always sort of liked. Why? Because even when he wasn't hitting much (which has been relatively frequently) always maintained his batting eye. Players who can tell balls from strikes can learn to hit for average with a lot greater success than Feliz / Niekro types can learn to take pitches and draw walks. Valderrama is currently pretending to be a power hitter at AA (.361 / .417 / .557) with 8 steals (in 8 attempts) in 97 ABs. I've always liked that Valderrama consistently draws about one walk for every 10 ABs. If there's a problem right now it's that he should just emphasize the leadoff skills he naturally possesses and not try to be a power hitter. He's striking out too much, which doesn't bother me much, but it probably bothers coaches and scouts. If he could cut his strikeouts and increase his walks, it would be worth it, even if the cost was a loss of power. A guy with his profile doesn't need to have a .200 point IsoP anyway. If he could hit .300 and draw a bunch of walks, steal a bunch of bases and play defense, he'd have a future on this club. He should try to be Dave Roberts or Juan Pierre more than Carlos Beltran or Bobby Abreu.

Who is Mike Cervenak? He's old (27), was drafted by the A's, and appears to have been part of the Norwich roster when the Giants acquired the team from the Yankees (still not sure how this works, btw). He's currently hitting .352 / .434 / .670. The batting average isn't real (.289 career in the minors) and there's little to suggest the power spike is totally real either, but it could be. I guess call me in a month - if you're still slugging over .550, we'll talk.

Chris Begg appears to be done with AA and made a AAA start last week. He was moved from A to AA last year, and was 2-1 with a 3.05 ERA and 16-2 K-BB ratio in 20.2 innings. He didn't go too deeply into games, which leads me to believe he's young for his level (I can't seem to find that info) but his first start at Fresno was a 7-inning shutout. Someone to keep an eye on.

Simply because my brother once played with him - Jay Pecci is actually in the Giants organization now, and is hitting the cover off the ball in a very small number of ABs. Pecci is 27, was drafted by the A's, then bounced to the Mariners and then to the Giants. There's not much in his history that suggests he can really hit (the A's took him in the 11th round because of his .407 OBP at Stanford in 1998), but he's currently hitting .382 / .447 / .559 in 34 ABs at AA.

What I find sort of interesting is that these guys, some of whom are actual prospects, are down at AA while Fresno appears stocked with a bunch of guys who are just there to be roster filler when the Giants need help. I've heard it said a few times that AA is where a lot of teams are keeping their real talent. I'm hoping this is true of the Giants as well.

posted by Eric @ 7:07 AM