Kevin Goldstein from Baseball Prospectus - Phillies Prospects Q&A
by WholeCamels on Feb 22, 2010 1:40 PM EST
17 comments
Kevin Goldstein from Baseball Prospectus has graciously volunteering to take some questions regarding his recent Phillies Top 11 Prospects piece. Some really good stuff here, thanks for your questions.
Thanks again to Kevin.
1. What are your thoughts on Jonathan Singleton, who obviously had a nice debut in the GCL?
I like Singleton a lot, but not enough to put him in the Top 15. I think people over-react in both directions to GCL/AZL debuts. Go look at the minor league records of Hernan Iribarren and Chipper Jones for good examples. There's a reason he got $200K as opposed to seven figures – it's because that's what kind of talent he is. It's certainly better that he looked good in the GCL as opposed to bad, but either of those scenarios shouldn't push one's opinion too far in either direction.
2. Of the gaggle of polished low-ceiling arms the Phillies have — Vance Worley, Yohan Flande, Mike Stutes, Mike Cisco, Matt Way, Austin Hyatt — which of them jump out at you? Are any likely to stick as back-end starters?
I actually like Stutes out of that group, as I think he has the most complete arsenal – it's really just a matter of improving his command and control. Still, I do think Flande is a big leaguer, just more likely out of a bullpen, while Way could go the same route.
3. Have any of the Zach Collier, Anthony Hewitt, Kyrell Hudson, Aaron Altherr crew of "toolsheds" done anything to indicate a possible breakout year, or is it the same old crapshoot?
It's pretty much the same old crapshoot. Like I wrote in the Top 11, scouts did see some very real progress in Hewitt in 2009, so there's a bit of optimism here, but all of these guys, as well as someone like Jiwan James, are high upside high risk talents. I don't want to be down on them at all; I actually fully support and agree with the philosophy of bringing these guys into the system. They're lottery tickets, but if you don't play, you don't win, and those organizations that always go the safe route tend to be stuck with average at base big leaguers in the end and few impact players.
4. How much does quality of instruction have to do with who does and doesn’t convert that raw talent to on-field performance, and where would you place the Phils among the 30 organizations as far as coaching acumen?
I wouldn't rank them at all. I'm just not qualified. This is another place where there is just way too much unfounded speculation. Unless you are there every day, and you are with the players during their workouts, instruction, in the locker room, etc., you are just in zero position to discuss the efficacy of one's coaching. There are great coaches out there who have had kids that for whatever reason they just couldn't connect to. It's a strange dynamic, but I also believe that the players themselves control their destiny far more than coaches.
5. There's no mention in your BP Phillies Top 11 entry on Phillippe Aumont about his questionable mechanics, and the rumored hip injury that lead many to conclude he’s not cut out for starting. Do you think Aumont can hold up in the rotation physically (and it’s just a matter of his secondary pitches coming along), or is he ticketed for the pen long term?
I just did an interview elsewhere about this and I went off there, so I guess I'll go off here as well. Who is questioning them? I'm not saying they're perfect, as they hardly are, but what is perfect? Show me a prospect who does NOT have some aspect of his delivery that you might have a problem with? Mark Prior had perfect mechanics, how'd that work out? Felix Hernandez has anything but perfect mechanics, you don't want him anymore? No pitcher is perfect, nearly all pitchers get hurt, it's just a fact and I think at times people are just looking for things not to like. I understand why Seattle put him in the pen, as he could move very quickly in that role, but I like Philly seeing if he can start, as they can be more patient. I've seen him in person on numerous occasions; I've seen way worse mechanics, I've seen way better.
6. What are your thoughts on Freddy Galvis as a hitter? Is he just struggling with being moved up quickly, or learning to switch hit? Or, should we just be happy with his baseball magnet like defense, because he’ll spend his career at the Mendoza Line?
It's certainly a possibility. The fact that he makes contact gives me some optimism, but even the most optimistic projection for him is a very good glove guy who hits eighth. The bigger concern for me was an approach that took a step backwards in 2009. He's obviously never going to have power, so he needs at least some on-base skills.
7. Yohan Flande and Justin De Fratus – thumbs up or down?
Up! As long as I can temper expectations, here. I think they're both big league relievers. As a lefty with a very nice change, Flande has enough right there, while De Fratus' numbers are even better than they look when you separate out just his relief appearances, where his stuff plays way up. I don't think either is a closer, or even a set-up man, but you need middle relievers too.
8. Is Joe Savery cooked? Any chance of a conversion back to first base?
I don't know if he's cooked, but he's not going well. There's no way a move to first base would work, just zero chance. If he was an up-the-middle player or something you might consider it, but first base is a whole other story. If you want to be a first base prospect of any note, you have to be an absolutely elite-level top-notch freakin' monster offensively, and he's not that.
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Nice work getting ahold of Kevin, WC, and thanks to KG for doing this (and for pulling double duty by also doing a Q&A over at Phuture Phillies, which is likewise well worth a read).
In particular, he elaborated on Aumont a bit over there, and I feel a little better about the big righthander after reading what KG had to say…
I think he could definitely be a mid-rotation guy, but I also think he can be much more if some things work out. The fastball really is a special pitch. I’ve seen the guy in person on multiple occasions, and it’s very, very hard to find that kind of velo/movement combination in a fastball, and he will flash a plus breaker. There’s a lot of upside here, it just comes with some risk. How many high-upside prospects don’t come with a lot of risk? You don’t need more than one hand to count them.
so, yeah...
Jayson Werth’s beard totally sucked the oxygen out of the room w/r/t Phillies news on Monday.
http://www.thegoodphight.com
No pitcher is perfect, nearly all pitchers get hurt, it’s just a fact
No comment regarding the Phillies per se just about baseball in general: someday my beloved sport will pull its head out of its ass and being to actually apply the princples of modern sports science. This quote alone attests to this fact. This is the only sport (and a non contact one no less) that assumes chronic over use injuries is an inevitable outcome of playing the sport. Other than a congential physiological defect, chronic over use injuries are the fault of bad trainers, and coaches. Period.
I agree... to an extent
I think ultimately Pitching is a violent activity that is prone to causing shoulder and elbow injuries. Even perfect mechanics put significant strain on your elbow and shoulder.
That said, I agree that dismissing it with a “well, whatever, Pitchers get hurt, deal with it” is detrimental for an organization. Proper mechanics can theoretically reduce (but not eliminate) injury risk. A team needs to balance the risk of tinkering with a pitcher’s mechanics. It’s really easy to say “these are perfect mechanics, do this”, but when a guy has been pitching a certain way for 10+ years, sometimes they just can’t make those adjustments. Maybe with his poor mechanics he could have had a 7 year career as a top of the rotation starter, but by screwing with his mechanics he never makes it above A ball. With a player like Scott Matthieson, I think tinkering with his mechanics is a fantastic idea, as he has proven to break down, so reducing that risk is almost all upside. Same for Kyle Lotzkar in the Reds organization (you want to see really bad mechanics go to Driveline Mechanics and search that name. Kid’s been on the DL a ton and his mechanics are amazingly sloppy).
That said, KG is not a trainer or a pitching coach or a GM, he’s a scout/sports writer. In his role there is nothing he can do to affect a change in a Pitcher’s arm action. What would be the point of him getting into a discussion about mechanics, when he himself admits to having fairly rudimentary knowledge of pitching mechanics. I know you weren’t necessarily directing your comment at KG.
Lastly, I don’t think Aumont’s mechanics are as bad as some people make them out to be. He could benefit by tightening a few things up, but I think his mechanics are pretty average overall. Probably not worth messing with them.
I think ultimately Pitching is a violent activity that is prone to causing shoulder and elbow injuries
…not if the the connective tissue is properly prepared and the pitcher is properly strength trained. This is something you can’t do and pitch. It’s like painting a house. The new surface must be properly prepared….all failures of the previous coat must be fixed or the new coat can fail. Pitching (hitting as well) it is a speed/technical activity and as such it relies heavily upon the “flight or fight” aspects of the central nervous system. The subsquent neuromuscular imprinting is deep and that much more difficult to override, thereby limiting the effectiveness of general strength condition designed to prepare the body for the loads the athlete will face. Essentially, their neuromuscular plasticity is limited to that activity and any compensatory measures the body takes for the loads it was unprepared to handle. For example, adaptive shortening of surrounding musculature to protect joints. Think of it like a virus or trojan that gets lodged in your registry, everytime you boot the computer it loads it self or some remnant of itself into your OS. This sports specific plateauing can only be overcome by shutting the athlete down for about 6 months to reset the nervous system. During this period I forget when general strength exercises may be introduced but to properly prepare the connective tissue these exercises are performed with light loads and high repetitons. This doesn’t however correct the damage that often occurs at the amateur, collegiate and high schools levels like growth plate damage or ligament laxity which occurs when the loads on unprepared or overworked musculature are transfer to the connective tissue. This requires additional training and /or various medical interventions. I believe the reason why baseball players spend an inordinate amount of time in the minor leagues is they struggle to overcome this plateauing which is a symptom of an athlete who lacks sufficient general conditoning or introduced general conditioning exercise before the aforementioned system reset. (Alot of athletes don’t want to hear that they must stop playing in order to improve)
Pitching is a dymanic asymmetrical activity and it invovles one of the most problematic joints…the shoulder, but to expect injury as a normal consequence is on par with a boxer accepting that his nose will inevitably be broken. Tennis, a non contact athletic activity that put similiar stresses on the body has shown declining chronic overuse injury rates because new training approaches have been fully embraced. Baseball’s de-evolved with this new rash of hip labrum tears which are assosiated with kickboxers and butterfly goalies. Granted it easier for a tennis player to makes these changes as they are beholden to only themselves….athletes in team sports don’t always have that luxury. However, with baseball the shit is out of hand. Not only that, teams are wasting capital on these stints in the minor leagues…it’s not the friggin decathalon or Green Beret training…Christ in the time it took Chooch to reach MLB he could be a lawyer. Many of these players are spending their most physiologically viable years playing in the minor leagues. That’s just dumb.
I agree with you again on most points
But all boxers can expect to get their nose broken at some point. I think you’re comparing apples and oranges there.
Good explanation otherwise.
But all boxers can expect to get their nose broken at some point. I think you’re comparing apples and oranges there.
That was a bit of hyperbole but I was trying to emphasize the point that baseball’s continual struggle to make any real headway in this area leads to people to conclude that baseball must deem chronic overuse injuries an inevitable part of playing the game.
It was…the rain made things difficult. Anyway it was a rather harsh indictment….coaches and trainers are not responsible for their athletes prior histories but are for recognizing was has happened and for fixing the fixable. So, they might be playing with a tainted hand unlike the Soviets who in pioneering the science controlled the training process from the ground up. Advantages of a totalitarian govt. : country wide programs found children who either possessed an untrainable trait(s) advantageous to certain sports, or had good general atheletic form by which they were assigned a sport according to their body plan. Any defects like posture, begnin bone cysts (common for boys), duck footed or pigeon toe gaits, muscular imbalances, etc. were corrected before any training started. With this level of control, variables that other coaches might have to contend with were eliminated. That said, baseball has made the effort to change by adopting newer training methods and exercises however there are fundamental mistakes made: 1] unwilling to let go of so time honored axioms of baseball training, exercises are cherry picked 2] improper sequencing, 3] and implemetation on a poor foundation which is common among many athletes playing team sports but more I believe is more pronounced in baseball players for several reasons.
Okay….so you can see how this is shaping up…before I start droning on about the nervous system if your interested
let me know….I don’t want to come of as some holier than thou thread highjacker if your not interested. I read a complaint in another thread about phd mathematician who bored everyone to tears about park factors. I don’t want to be that guy, but it is a rather complicated subject. Also, I have to condense alot of information and as I am not gifted in the language department, it will take some time and I might tend to over explain things kinda anime style…you know that weird, clutzy, it can’t be so convulted in Japanese anime dialogue….
Again, nothing on Mayberry, who I’ll admit inhabits a strength purgatorial netherworld of AAAA-rosterdom. If I decide to go fantasy, I’ll put my money where my mouth is, expect some bench competency and hope he does something.
Other than that quibble, I enjoyed the exchange, thanks WC.
I meant
…inhabits a strange purgatorial netherworld…
by Wet Luzinski on Feb 25, 2010 11:38 PM EST up reply actions
Mayberry would hardly be alone among those who struggled to hit off speed stuff but can rope a fastball…think about Pedro Feliz ; a fastball hitter whose fielding keeps him in enough games for enough PAs to average out the all those strike outs on sliders. Ryan Chruch struggled with curveballs for years but was a decent bench guy until he improved. Perhaps with more chances Mayberry may prove a decent bench player . Think about Werth….without Geoff Jenkins’ poor play and injury Werth’s plays less and his potenial never fully materializes. Not to say Mayberry matches Werth’s raw talent or potenial but he’s merely a player with some athleticism who may only need more chances to prove himself. Or has he regressed? For reasons that I briefly touch on in the two long posts of this thread I am ambivalent about the minor leagues in general and so casually follow our prospects’ progress. While he never commanded the attention of Taylor , Drabek or Brown, he’s all but fell into what you aptly described as prospect limbo where players are rarely heard fom again.
j reed
Just curious, are you a professional in sports medicine, physiology or physical training?
No, not a professional…I went back to school as a pre-med student but alot of “life happens” forced me to stop. During this time I came across Soviet-era training literature and read some of Tudor Bompa’s work on plyometrics to improve in kickboxing but, was unable to continue the sport due to a congential, idiopathetic hip problem. However when I applied the Soviet training principles and what I learned from my pre-med courses, my athleticism improved dramatically until the effects of my hip condition which, despite my vigilant preparatory medical consultations, went undiagnosised, reared its ugly head. An idiopathetic medical conditon is the medicine’s version of limbo because medicine works best for patients with conditions that fall on the horses’ side of Occam’s razor. (If you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras) . I’m in the “zebra, medical oddity, christ there goes everything I’ve worked for” category. It forces you to become your own doctor. I am just appling what I learned over the years to understand why baseball fails to make any headway against all the chronic overuse injuries that plague the sport. The Soviet research, other than the advantage of mitigating variables that state control of their athletes afforded, took things in a new direction during the 60’s and 70’s by challenging orthopedic medicine as the lone arbiter of truth in all things bio-mechanical. Orthopedics was at the time and still is in many ways, woefully conservative favoring more “Frequentist” minded methods that work well for simple isolated phenomenon but struggle to understand complex multivariable conditions. The Soviets adopted a more “Bayesian” or heuristic (for lack of a better word) approach and it yielded great results, the principles of which are on display right now in Vancouver. If your interested Stadion press publishes alot of great stuff. Warning: the books are from Poland so don’t judge them by their covers which by the dated Eastern European graphic design most would be well within in their rights to do.
Note by Frequentist and Bayesian I am not necessarily speaking strictly in terms of statistics but referring more to the scientific philosphies they embrace.
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