David Luciani

Ask Baseball Notebook: Volume 7, Number 4
August 13, 2009

Many of the questions that floated into our inbox recently were addressed in a general format in last week's piece regarding the post-trade deadline deals.  However, several other key questions didn't make it into that space and so now, we openly respond to those in a more typical full length issue.

Q. I have been a big fan and supporter of David and his minor league projections for a long time.  That said, I followed him blindly a few years back when he had both Travis Denker and Mike Carp in his top ten hitting prospects.  While Carp may still have a decent career, neither of them deserved that spot and it is in part because their defense was not going to allow their bat to play where they are playing.  I am loving the new dynamic prospect lists but am wondering if the system that led to Denker and Carp has been tweaked to weed out this type of guy?  Any chance we will ever see more than the top 25?

A. I'll answer the second part of your question first.  Yes, there's a chance we could eventually go beyond the top twenty-five but it won't be this year anyway and remember, you're getting twenty-five hitters and twenty-five pitchers so really, that's already fifty names being talked about on a regular basis.  Still, I'm not satisfied with the format yet and will look for ways to do more with this during the off-season.

I had to look back through our lists to see which one you were talking about re: Denker and Carp and I see the one you're referring to was our post-2005 prospect list, published December of that year.  Indeed, I see that we had Denker at #4 and Carp at #9.

Denker clearly hasn't panned out.  He just turned twenty-four so he's still young enough to maybe fight back but he's struggled at Triple-A this year and is just trying to get back on track in the minors with the hope of re-establishing himself as a guy who could help out a big league team eventually.  Carp actually got a brief call-up this year and also is still only twenty-three so I'm not prepared to write him off completely, as it sounds like you haven't either.

As I look at the top ten from that year's list, I actually see a lot of names that didn't work out and that's what happens sometimes when you're trying to forecast the long-term future.  There were some successes too, though and in fact, the very criteria that you asked if we had tweaked led us to list B.J. Upton at #6 that year with the following quote: "... as the top-ranked shortstop, he's probably not going to be playing that position three years from now... I still wouldn't be surprised to see him end up in center field one day."  When I wrote that, Upton had never even once been tried in the outfield nor was anyone else that I'm aware of talking about a move to the outfield for him.  The prospect-ranking method, even with the misses from that year, looks at skills that could one day prove to be valuable to a big league team and in the case of guys who are projected to hit, teams find a position for them.

As for refining and tweaking our methods, sure, we're always trying to make them better in an effort to figure out what went wrong when prospects didn't pan out.  The prospect list published exactly a year later also listed Carp at #8 and Denker at #11 but that year's top ten list had Jay Bruce, Phil Hughes, Billy Butler, Cameron Maybin, Colby Rasmus, Ryan Braun and Justin Upton.  So, as much as I'll constantly try to improve the methods that caused Carp and Denker to show up among names like these, I'm also not entirely disappointed and can tell you that no prospect list will be entirely successful.

Oh, and I'm sure I've said it before but don't ever follow my advice blindly.  There will be times when a reader simply knows something that I don't and what you should do is to look at our lists and maybe get new ideas or consider players that you hadn't previously.  Sometimes, you'll have information that another writer simply doesn't have or missed and you'll want to bring that into consideration and make your own original decisions based on everything you know.

Anyway, I sincerely believe that we're constantly getting better at this and I plan to do much more on prospects this upcoming off-season as I allude to later in this column in the question re: minor league translations and on the question below about keeper strategy.

Q. This is a bit of a different question but I'm wondering if you have ever considered working in a front office and have you ever been offered a job to do so?  If not, why not?

A. Are you offering one?  All kidding aside, sure, I've thought about it occasionally but I haven't made an active effort to do so, at least not recently.  To answer the second part of your question, no I have not been formally offered a job with any big league team though I have twice been interviewed for one, including once when I was directly interviewed by a major league team's GM.

One issue that has cropped up is that I am Canadian and so that limits the options as most American teams would be unlikely or unable to hire me, I expect, unless they had a way to do that legally such as when they hire Canadian players to play for them.  Perhaps I'm inspired by what Bill James said years ago and long before he advised the Red Sox in this next statement: If I were actually offered a position in a front office, I would very likely consider it if I sincerely believed that (a) I would be taken seriously and could have at least some positive impact and (b) that the team had a long-term plan that would take them in the right direction.  There are several teams who have my interest in terms of their current approach.  For example, I take great interest in the work that the new-look Seattle Mariners front office is doing and of course, I have constant admiration for the work done by all of Oakland, Minnesota and Boston front offices, among others.  So, if a team approached me and said we think you could really help us and your voice would be an active participant in our evaluation of players and this would be an actual position within our organization, I would be interested in that.  By the way, there are teams in the majors which I believe do have the resources to consistently contend and simply don't and such teams also are the kind I would think would be quite interesting to advise (think the Baltimore Orioles, for example).  Anyway, that hasn't happened, though, and as I say, I'm not out there seeking it either.  You asked and that's the truth.

Q. I have had quite a bit of success from reading your thoughts on draft strategies and using your rankings.  I have gathered that you mostly play in keeper leagues, but really there is not that much information on the site related to keeper leagues, other than an article or two about figuring out who to keep.  I think it would be nice to have some kind of feature on the site to account for future year stats.

A. Long-term forecasting, prospects and keepers was an incredibly common theme among questions submitted recently.  Yes, I absolutely agree with you that it would be a great feature and I plan to look into this immediately after the season ends, if not earlier.  It's important to understand that the fantasy domination ranking forms (a screen we plan to rename after this season - it was named years ago and the word "domination" is both unnecessary and arguably haughty) are meant to focus on current season's value because the current year's projection set is all it has.

What I can envision is that regardless of what progress we make toward projecting long-term value, I could see where some combination of age, position and even comparable career performances to date (such as the excellent work done at Baseball-Reference.com) could lead us to at least a starting point of forecasting future value.  For example, perhaps we could examine how many shortstops who break through to the majors at twenty-three years of age ending up to go on having average X value in future years.  There's a lot that could be done here and when you start accounting for the player's translations, even his contract and draft position, you've got something upon which to build.

As for keeper strategy, I suppose I could do a better job of repeating ideas that have remained consistent over the years.  My keeper league strategy really hasn't changed that much since even ten years ago because it's worked well for me.  I'll not only try to do more drawing attention to old ideas that have worked but also talk about what changes I have had to make over the years, even if they're not major.  Perhaps the site and readers would also benefit if I created a regular slot or even a regular blog entry to say "Keeper League Strategies" or something like that so that I could focus on actual examples that have helped me.  I do plan to do much more with blogging this upcoming off-season, as I'll talk about later in this issue, so we'll try to work in ideas on this to discuss there.

Q. It sounds like the reason the Phillies didn't get Roy Halladay is because J.P. Ricciardi asked for way too much.  Do you think you would have traded Halladay and if so, would you have held out for (Kyle) Drabek, (Dominic) Brown and so on?

A. You know, most of what is talked about on this deal is from the rumor mill but it does sound like the Blue Jays took the path that said they had to be absolutely blown away by an offer to deal Halladay and I appreciate that.  There are plenty of factors that would influence such a decision that we just can't know about.  For example, if Halladay specifically said "please trade me" then that would motivate a move.  Also, if he absolutely confirms to me that there's no chance I could sign him to a new contract extension, well then maybe that comes into play too.  You don't want a guy on your team who doesn't want to be there but Halladay doesn't strike me as that kind of player.  In fact, he's a rare player in that he not only has superstar-level talent but he also has a class and work ethic that isn't as common as you would like to see.

I think that because Halladay is signed through the end of 2010, I probably would not have been looking to trade him.  Maybe I'm too arrogant in this respect but I would be trying to build a contending team for next season and then, if the Blue Jays were clearly out of it in July of next year, you move Halladay then.  I have trouble imagining that you'd get that much less for him as his contract winds down than you would this season because teams in the race want to add that extra piece to help put them over the top this year.

I will say that if we're playing GM and pretending that Halladay's contract was winding down and I didn't think I could sign him, I probably would start high in my demands but would then look for the absolute best deal I could get.  It's an obvious basic negotiation principle that you don't undersell yourself on the first offer.  In that case, it's better to get something than nothing and I don't believe a compensation draft pick matches the kind of package you can get if you move him, even if you only end up getting one key prospect.  In fact, I thought the Blue Jays should have traded A.J. Burnett last year at the deadline and they didn't.

So, given that he's not even a free agent until the end of next season, no, I wouldn't have been trying to trade Halladay given what I've heard about the rumors this year.

Q. The "Week Ahead" column takes care of splits between home/road, but what about lefty/righty pitchers?  Is it a fallacy to think one could spot start players based on them?  Wouldn't individual pitchers have a factor that would influence many of the week ahead ratings?

A. This probably falls into the slot of the so-called "admitted limitations" of the weekly feature that we direct readers to re-read.  That is, since the sheets don't yet account for the daily pitchers, the same would probably apply to lefty/righty matchups since you'd need to know the daily pitchers in order to pull that off.  Also, keep in mind that in this era, most starters aren't going to pitch more than six or seven innings on a day that they even pitch well and so the bullpen still comes into play where managers are going to try to manage to the other team's weakness.  Yes, I'd say that individual pitchers absolutely influence many of the week ahead ratings and this is one of the elements we concede that isn't perfect about the piece.  Still, that we have now been able to account for the park each game is being played in, the quality of the opposition overall and the defense of the other team, I think it has value and captures at least the general effects of the upcoming week, even if it isn't close to being perfect.

As for your question about spot starting, no that doesn't sound at all like a fallacy and probably makes for an excellent strategy.  That would require you to not only look at daily pitching match-ups but even keep your eyes constantly on the news.  Also, I'd emphasize that season-to-date splits are not reliable, particularly when you're dealing with hitting vs. lefty pitchers as sometimes, certain hitters hardly get an opportunity to play against southpaws and so you can't tell from the sample whether you've got a guy who can actually handle them when he does get that chance to start.  In fact, what you asked about sounds like something you should be doing on a regular basis if you can make daily transactions.

Q. I'm wondering if any of the following pitchers will make it back this season: Chris Young, Eric Bedard, Shaun Marcum.

A. The Blue Jays claim that Marcum is healthy but they're now holding him back.  I imagine that with them being out of the race, they figure there's no point to putting him back out there but at the same time, I would argue that if they believe he's truly healthy, there's no reason to hold him back either.  It would be better to at least get him back on a mound with an eye toward having confidence this upcoming off-season that he's back to being his old self rather than wondering into next spring.

The other two guys, to me, look like they're done for the year.  Bedard is almost certainly finished as we just learned that he's to have "exploratory surgery" tomorrow.  In the next set, we're removing what little we had left of his forecast.  As for Young, what started out as an apparent minimum-time-on-the-DL injury has turned into a season-long frustration.  Unlike Marcum above, if there's any doubt at all about whether he's healthy, there will be absolutely no reason for the Padres to bring him back this year.  At this point, it's looking like Young's season is over and the best case scenario looks to be about three or four starts the rest of the way and that's if everything goes perfectly.

Q. I have questions about the minor league translations.  Often, I'll see a guy who's at or near the top of the weekly translated leaders but I know he's not possibly going to be as good as that in the majors for the long run.  So, how do I find the guys who will have the best careers?

A. The translations are simply converted minor league stats to date for the current season that say that accounting for the park, the level of competition and other factors, that this is how this guy's performance equates for the season to date in a neutral major league environment.  In no way does it attempt to forecast the future and if two players of different ages were to play for the same team and have exactly the same minor league stats across the board and assuming the even more impossible and that is that they faced the exact same opposing minor league players, they would get identical translations.  So, it doesn't attempt to project the future.

There are several things I want to say on this issue, including some you didn't ask about but which are related.  First, the distinction needs to be made between translations and prospect lists.  Our dynamic prospect lists are attempting to highlight key players who forecast out well for the long-term, something the translations don't necessarily do.  Certainly, some top prospects will have excellent translated seasons but the reverse is not always true.  That is, a player can have an excellent translated minor league season and not do well in the long run.  Also, I have to tell you that events have recently motivated me to consider that the translations have now achieved their full potential and it's time to move forward and even away from them with far greater emphasis being on (a) forecasting current big league ability, regardless of season-to-date translated performance and (b) forecasting long-term big league careers.

In particular, a key business event has me thinking this way.  Just before this season started, STATS Inc. bought out PA-Sportsticker, who has been our minor league stats provider.  We have dealt with PA-Sportsticker back to when they were affiliated with ESPN and then long before that, we dealt with many of the same people there who worked with the old Howe Sportsdata company.  Not in any way to say anything negative about STATS Inc because they do great work but we face an uncertain future on whether we can continue to get the raw pre-translated minor league statistics in a format that's necessary to create the translations on a weekly basis.  This isn't to say that anything has been implied but we can at least see that there will be major technical challenges on our end to adjust to the merge for 2010, at least where the minor league translations are concerned.

This has me recently realizing something important that should have been more obvious to me all along.  The more I have thought recently about these forthcoming technical challenges with continuing to produce weekly minor league translations, the more I realize that we have become far too distracted by a large percentage of the minor league player population that simply doesn't matter to most baseball fans.  That is, readers constantly have told me that they want to hear more of my specific ideas on players and forecasts, fully aware that I am absolutely entirely hands on when it comes to not only producing the weekly forecast sets every Sunday but the weekly translated minor league stats that are published every week by Friday morning.

While considering this, I looked back at some old translated minor league sets that go way back to our first years of publishing full translated sets in the early part of the decade, in 2002 and/or 2003.  What I discovered was that the vast majority of players who had translations not only never even made a big league appearance but never even made it to Triple-A.  Moreover, an extremely high percentage of this group were players we pretty much knew would never make an impact.  For example, if you have a guy who's 31 years old and who hasn't played above Double-A in his career and hits around .240 or .250 at that level every year, chances are pretty high that even if he happens to make it to the majors, he's not really a guy you need to know about right now.  Sure, he may come up and have an impact for a week or two, but he's not a guy that's on the radar.  Just as important to realize is that even if he does start to make waves and get close to a call-up, say, getting a promotion to Triple-A suddenly for the first time, well then he enters your vision in a way that you can give him a closer look, still long before he gets that call-up and easily before anyone else such as an opponent in a fantasy league, for example, has ever heard of the guy.

I suppose what I'm saying here is that the time has come for me to now refocus and redefine my personal efforts on players that matter in the grand scheme of the big leagues, either for the current season or for the long-term but at least one of these two criteria.  Some key decisions will need to be made soon, obviously, about whether we can continue to produce the minor league translations as we have.  In fact, we open up early registration for next season usually by mid-September so we would have to know then what our 2010 format is and what options will be available.  My inclination now is that I think everyone would benefit more if instead of me saying, here is how the current season to date happens to translate for several thousand minor league players (we are currently publishing translated statistics for almost 4,200 minor league players), instead I would love to be able to say, here are the minor league players you need to know about.  I could envision something like you look at most of a team's top draft picks from recent drafts, probably all of the Triple-A and Double-A rosters and maybe some other breakout players lower than that.  You then focus in even tighter, separating out those Double-A 31-year-old .250 hitters that you're not going to spend any time on right now from the 20-year-old who's hitting only .210 at Double-A but was drafted in the second round two years ago.  In other words, by spending significantly less time on trying to interpret 4,000+ minor league players, I believe we now have the skill and the tools to narrow this down to a small group of players worthy of a closer look and disregard the others until they even remotely begin to become worthy of further attention.

On this note, and related to the first question we covered in this column, I have several pieces of good news for readers, or at least good news for those who like what I personally bring to the discussion.  First, this upcoming off-season, I plan to not only bring back the full blog much like I published in the off-season prior to 2007 (in those days, I was writing an entry approximately four or five times a week) but we're really going to make an effort to expand what we do on long-term forecasting, not only for young players but for older ones as well.  In other words, I want to begin examining how much more you can expect out of Alex Rodriguez for the remainder of his career when you compare him to someone like, say, David Wright.  With all the attention on forecasting current seasons and forecasting top prospects, this idea will bring something completely new to the discussion.  I also hope to further explore separating out injury risk from performance risk as I think that people tolerate the former more and the two types of risk are important to separate.

On an even more significant front, I am pleased to say that we've developed our tools to a point now where I sincerely believe that we can produce projection sets for 2010 much earlier than we've ever done before.  We have never published our first forecasts before the first week of December but I can absolutely say that we're going to aim to do something far earlier than that.  I am even thinking that there's no good reason to hold back early forecasts for players at any point, even considering getting into the first forecasts for 2010 right after the World Series ends.  Why not?  I think readers have learned to check out all the warnings and I could remind readers that on the potential free agents, their forecasts might change a lot but here are their projected abilities in neutral stadiums or if they return to their old team or even get into scenario forecasting.  That's where having a more frequent blog comes into play as it allows you to openly play with game theory type trees and say if this happens, then that happens and so on.  Readers seem to be very understanding when I admit what I don't know but still play with scenarios.

Anyway, I will have a lot more to say about several of these things in the next three to four weeks, once we begin our annual feedback process and early registration for next year.  In short, I'm saying I not only can do more if I shift my attention to where it actually has clearer benefit but I think we can do better too if we start opening up our forecasting process to readers more than we have.  I have noticed, virtually without exception, that every blog entry or essay produces at least one piece of useful feedback.  Sometimes, a reader will spot something and point out that maybe I hadn't considered an important factor in a forecast (and often they're right) and other times, a reader will make a suggestion that clinches that breakthrough to the next level, gets you thinking along a new line you hadn't really considered and for which the reader doesn't have the tools or the background necessary to take it any further than he/she has.

So, to answer your question, to find the guys who will have the best careers, you need something different than what you're seeing in the translations and I fully plan to redirect many of my efforts towards that purpose.

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