A Favorable Amed Rosario Outcome

It appears to me, that since Mike Trout became, well, Mike Trout, the standard that young players are held to has risen dramatically. Maybe I’m showing my youthfulness, or maybe it has always been this way.

In 2017, we can look at the performances of young hitters like Aaron Judge, Cody Bellinger, or Rhy Hoskins to see current versions of this phenomena, or we can look at Byron Buxton over the past few seasons to see how perceptions can change (either warranted or not) when a top prospect comes up and isn’t an immediately elite talent (though Buxton has been doing quite well recently).

Today, I want to take some time to look at another prospect who have recently debuted, and see what his initial 100 or so plate appearances can tell us.

I have mentioned this before, but often times, I find that fantasy players are distrustful of projections for young players. While I don’t necessarily agree with this sentiment, I wanted to include Rosario’s 2017 line, and current projections to serve as a barometer. The first place I want to start is by looking at Rosario’s scouting report, courtesy of Eric Longenhagen, specifically, the following excerpt:

There’s a chance he has plus raw power at maturity. How much of that power he’s able to utilize depends on some refinement to Rosario’s contact skills. There is some stiffness in his hands prior to their acceleration, and he pushes far too much weak contact the other way right now, but he has good bat control, plus-plus bat speed and a decent idea of what he’s doing at the plate.

Over his minor league career, Rosario has hit ground balls at nearly a 53% rate. Which is likely too high to produce power we may want to see. However, The point I want to focus on here is, “…depends on some refinement to Rosario’s contact skills.” We know that Rosario is an exceptional athlete and defender, even his greatest skeptics would concede this point. That has value to the Mets organization and makes him a valuable piece to them even with no further offensive development. However, for anyone on the fantasy side, defensive value is irrelevant. It would be helpful to know what “refinement to contact skills” looks likes. What would be a favorable outcome for Amed Rosario?

For reference, the league average contact rate is 77.6%. Rosario currently stands at 67.2%. The league swings at 46.4% of pitches. Rosario is at 56.1%, lending credence to his 18.8% swinging strike rate. However, he is young, debuting at 21 years of age.

There are a couple ways to dissect this. First, the only filters in this group are a below average contact rate, and swinging more often then league average. While a strong argument could be made that Rosario swings far more than league average, and makes far less contact, I didn’t want to limit the data too much. Over the past 10 years, we have a sample of 125 players who fit this description. To avoid listing 125 records in this post, I have only displayed record under 24 years of age (sorted by age).

A couple of these players obviously don’t fit. Bryce Harper, for example, was swinging far less, and making far more contact. Several also hit far more fly balls than Rosario. To help with the smaller sample of Rosario’s batted ball profile, I have included 2 separate subtotals from the group, one for the whole group, and another for only players with a higher than league average rate of ground balls (the bucket Rosario currently falls into). If we wanted to limit the group further for contact and swing rates more in line with Rosario’s, the comparable player groupings become even less rosy.

While I don’t think many would disagree that Rosario oozes potential, this is another time to exercise patience with the development of young prospects. While we could try to draw comparisons to other elite prospects who have debuted early, the likes of early career Jonathan Schoop, Tim Anderson, or the Arcia brothers, are more realistic comparisons. If he can reign in his approach slightly and add power beyond what projections see, we would be looking at the higher end. Following the path of offensive player similar to Adam Jones. Is that a favorable outcome for fantasy players? Jones has run a .336 wOBA over his career, but perhaps that would leave us feeling disappointed when comparing him to other top prospects who have recently debuted.