Archive for Hickory Crawdads

Few Low-A teams have ever had quite the array of young position-player talent as the 2013 Hickory Crawdads–six of their nine everyday players ranked in Baseball America’s Rangers top 25 prospects coming into the season, and a seventh, Ryan Rua, came out of nowhere to lead the minors in home runs for much of the season…until he was promoted to Double-A and passed by fellow Crawdad Joey Gallo.

While Gallo’s race to the minor league home run championship in his first full season was probably the biggest story of the many intriguing Hickory developments, the heralded slugger wasn’t the highest-drafted member of Hickory’s vaunted group of teenagers, being picked ten selections behind teammate Lewis Brinson in the 2012 draft (39th to 29th). In the fight for attention on such a stacked roster, Brinson’s 2013 campaign got somewhat overshadowed by Gallo’s incredible power output, Jorge Alfaro’s ascension up catching prospect leaderboards, Nick Williams‘ big numbers, C.J. Edwards becoming a force on the mound (and subsequently the key to the Matt Garza deal), Rua’s out-of-nowhere emergence, and other stories. He still won plenty of praise for his tools, hit 21 homers, and posted a solid triple-slash line, but also raised eyebrows by striking out 191 times, one short of Harold Riggins‘ minor league lead.

Having seen Brinson in 17 games this past season, I’m going to use this post to dissect his current skillset and 2013 performance, hopefully lending some clarity to a rather extreme set of numbers.

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The 2013 Hickory Crawdads were undoubtedly one of the most star-studded low-minors teams of the past decade. The Rangers’ Low-A affiliate, they had Joey Gallo, who became the first teenager in half a century to hit 40 homers in a season…and did it in just 113 games. For much of the season, though, Gallo trailed teammate Ryan Rua in the minor league home run chase (Rua finished with 32, 29 of them coming in 104 games with Hickory). They had Jorge Alfaro, who many consider one of baseball’s top catching prospects. They had Nomar Mazara, who holds the record for the highest signing bonus by a Latin American amateur, at $4.95 million. They had 2012 first-rounder Lewis Brinson, second Dominican bonus baby Ronald Guzman, and for much of the year, had pitcher C.J. Edwards, the headline prospect in July’s Matt Garza trade.

While all of those players (and relievers Alex Claudio and Jose Leclerc) hold considerable intrigue on their own, there was no 2013 Crawdad who left a stronger positive impression on me than outfielder Nick Williams.

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The most polarizing prospects are often those who juxtapose areas of tremendous skill with pervasive, troubling weaknesses. Supporters of such prospects will claim that the strengths will render the weaknesses irrelevant as the player progresses and faces tougher competition, while doubters will claim the opposite. Few players inspire this sort of phenomenon more strongly than Rangers third base prospect Joey Gallo, who launched 38 homers in just 106 games as a 19-year-old with Low-A Hickory…but also struck out a whopping 165 times in that span, good for an astronomical 37% strikeout rate.

It seems absurd to dismiss a teenager who swatted 38 homers in full-season ball while missing 33 games–that sort of accomplishment basically never happens. Had he stayed healthy for the whole season, Gallo almost certainly would have eclipsed the South Atlantic League record of 40 homers in a season, and probably would’ve broken the Low-A record of 42. He already holds the Arizona League homer record, with 18, set in 2012…despite being promoted early and missing 13 games. He has remarkable power. On the other hand, there’s only one player who has ever struck out more than Gallo did in Low-A and done anything in the majors: Russell Branyan, who struck out 38.7% of the time in 1995, then repeated the level in 1996 and set the aforementioned SAL record with 40 bombs.

So, Gallo combines monumental power with a very troubling inability to make contact. Today, I’m going to take a detailed look at what is going on to provide such extreme statistics and see how his skillset needs to evolve for him to attain major league success.

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Whether we like to admit it or not, exposure can play a key role in the perception of baseball prospects. Baseball’s player universe is so wide, and there’s so much going on during the season, that it’s impossible to get a good firsthand read on every notable minor leaguer out there–invariably, we have to turn to outside sources (like this very website!) to fill in the gaps and lend some measure of authority. The more sources unite at a given point in their praise or condemnation for a particular prospect, the more likely we are to take that praise or condemnation as gospel.

One surefire way for a prospect to get some helium in this fashion is to be traded, especially if the trade involves a somewhat protracted negotiation period where the prospect’s name comes up again–you know, when we hear “This is the guy System A would hate to lose and System B has to have” and so on. This sort of publicity can’t help but have an effect on the general notability of a prospect–suddenly, an A-ball guy with good numbers goes from somebody discussed on a few MiLB-centric websites and discussion threads to a topic on Baseball Tonight. For those who don’t keep extensive track of the minor leagues, suddenly the player is on their radar.

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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.

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