Since joining RotoGraphs last month, I’ve spent the bulk of my time here discussing prospects who are worth considering as impact fantasy commodities. Today, I want to focus on the flip side, and talk about five prospects I’ve seen this season who don’t quite measure up to their hype or statistics and should be avoided.
New Britain, Connecticut — Rain, humidity, and the Western Division dominated the 2013 Eastern League All Star Game in New Britain, Connecticut.
The game took place at the home of the New Britain Rock Cats on July 10th, and there were a few standouts for Eastern and Western divisions, with the West side taking down the East side (ok, kind of a ridiculous hip-hop reference there)5-0.
Here’s some of the standout moments and talent that graced the field:
It is often said that closers are made, not born. Any experienced baseball fan knows this; it seems that for every Huston Street type who arrives with hype, four or five Jason Grillis, Andrew Baileys, or John Axfords slip into dominance after finding dead-ends in other roles. As such, predicting who will ascend to MLB closer roles (beyond the obvious “the best MLB non-closer relief pitchers”) is often a fool’s errand.
This becomes even more difficult when one attempts to find future closers in the minor leagues. Many of the pitchers who end up closing MLB games were starters all through their minor league careers, but it’s tough to project a minor league starter as a closer outright–in doing so, one is essentially saying “This pitcher will fail badly at the role he’s currently in and subsequently find tremendous success in a role he’s never pitched in.” Certainly plausible, but not something that seems like it can be said with much confidence. And minor league relievers–well, they’re equally problematic to forecast. After all, if a pitcher has a big future, why isn’t he able to crack a minor league rotation?
It’s certainly possible to envision any number of minor leaguers closing out ballgames–as so many sabermetricians are fond of saying, the role of garnering save totals can be accomplished reasonably effectively by any number of players, and the minor leagues have no shortage of interesting power pitchers that could fit a closer profile if things go their way. However, it’s quite another thing to actually predict that a minor league pitcher will end up amassing saves in the big leagues.
I think White Sox pitching prospect Daniel Webb merits such a prediction, though.
Brooklyn, New York- In his two most recent starts, Giovanny Gallegos pitched like two very different pitchers. In his first year of short-season ball with the Staten Island Yankees, that’s unsurprising. While he got hit hard in his final start of June, it was good to see manager Justin Pope leave him in to work it out through three innings, despite coughing up an early 4-0 lead to the Hudson Valley Renegades.
Gallegos (pronounced Guy-A-Gos) struggled to throw strikes in the early part of his June 27th outing, unable to consistently locate his fastball. His fastball overpowers hitters low in the zone, but on that day, he couldn’t move it around the strike zone effectively.
If you’ve ever had to go through a rebuilding phase with a dynasty league roster, you may have run against the difficulty of finding a minor league first baseman who projects as a bigtime MLB force. A couple of years ago, I discussed the extreme paucity of first base prospects here, and I feel that many of the points I raised in that piece still largely hold water. First base prospects are held to such a high standard of offense and are constantly competing with not only other first base prospects, but also defensively-challenged third base and corner outfield prospects, for the few open MLB spots at the position. Most of the first base prospects that do ascend to considerable MLB playing time–let alone success–at the spot are the players who are pegged as bigtime prospects from the moment they sign a professional contract–witness Prince Fielder, Mark Teixeira, Eric Hosmer, Adrian Gonzalez…even guys traditionally at the lesser end of the quality spectrum like Justin Smoak, Ike Davis, and James Loney.
If you’re in a dynasty league with any depth, chances are that most of the “obvious” first base prospects have been swept up (if you’re looking for a first baseman of the future and the big prospects aren’t swept up, stop reading this article and grab Jonathan Singleton). Who might you be able to turn to that’s a bit lower-profile (and thus available) but still could end up as a solid producer at the first base position? Today, I’m going to look at five players who might fill that void.
Since joining the RotoGraphs team, I’ve discussed two minor leaguers who were (at the time) leading the minors in a fairly notable stat category. There was Micah Johnson with his stolen bases, and Ryan Rua with his home runs.
Today, I’m going to talk about another player leading the minors in something: righthanded pitcher Matt Koch, who sports a 61/2 strikeout-to-walk ratio. No, K/BB ratio isn’t a fantasy category in many leagues, but it’s also a broad stat that encompasses a lot of ability, so such dominance merits a closer look into Koch’s skillset.
Aaron Griffin struck out a season high four batters in his fourth and final outing of June, but that’s just part of what you’re going to get from the Rays RHP prospect.
Griffin was economical and used a mixed bag of tricks to get Brooklyn Cyclones hitters out, going four innings without allowing a run and holding them to just four hits.
Gavin Cecchini started the 2013 season where he ended it, in the Class-A (short season) New York Penn League, with the Brooklyn Cyclones. But the Penn League was not a proving ground in 2012, as he only played in five games, starting just one, and pinch running in the other four.
The shortstop, 20, has begun the season productive, consistent, and was noticeably bulkier than last year; he approximated he put on about between 10-12 pounds, in a conversation in early June. Regularly hitting second or third in the lineup, he’s had a hit in six of the eight games the Cyclones have played. He put together a five-game hitting streak, collecting three multi-hit games in that stretch.
Last week, I examined unlikely minor league stolen base leader Micah Johnson, whose 58 swipes in the Low-A South Atlantic League have propelled him past some better-known base thieves (Billy Hamilton, Rico Noel, Byron Buxton, Roman Quinn, and Delino DeShields Jr., just to name a few) to a double-digit lead in the category. By now, Johnson–ranked among Chicago’s top 30 prospects by Baseball America entering the season and also sporting a hefty batting line–has started to gain publicity. It is less known, however, that the SAL also houses the current minor league home run leader: Hickory’s Ryan Rua, who has amassed 24 blasts, one ahead of highly-touted teammate Joey Gallo and well-traveled minor league slugger Mauro Gomez.
As with Johnson, Rua’s ascent to the top of the homer leaderboard was tough to foresee. He was a 17th-round pick in 2011 out of Division II Lake Erie College, where he had 27 homers in a three-year career. In 126 career professional games before 2013, all at short-season levels, he had just eleven homers. He had a very good .191 Isolated Power in rookie ball and a more pedestrian .136 in short-season-A play.
That lack of a track record, as well as Rua’s somewhat advanced age (he’s 23), may lead some to dismiss him as irrelevant for prospecting purposes, let alone fantasy ones, if not for one very important fact.
He plays second base.
The number one name blowing up my twitter feed is also fun to say. Yasiel Puig is a manbearpuig, a monster, a manchild, and a linebacker playing baseball, and he once looked like the bodybuilder you see on the left. And yet his batting average on balls in play is over .500, he’s walked three times, and he’s just so impossibly hot that selling high on him — in keeper or redraft leagues — is a popular play. But is it the right one?
To answer this, I just wanted to put him in the context of his peers. He’s only 82 plate appearances into his career, so I had to set the minimums low (80 PA). But here are the top ten rookies in slugging percentage since 1974:
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