Down on the Farm: Evaluating Pitching Prospects

I thought some of you might like to know a bit about how I go about evaluating and ranking prospects. First of all, I am not a scout. I'm just a fan who likes to have an idea about what might happen in the future of baseball in general and the Giants in particular. As a fan, I might go about things differently than a professional scout would. I take my lists seriously, but they are mostly just for fun, and a chance to get a better idea of who we may see playing for the Giants in the future. I think there is more anticipation and a sense of drama when a player you have been following for years makes their MLB debut than when it's someone you've never heard of before, but that's just me. Here are some basic principles of prospect watching that I have picked up over the years:

1. Age vs Level of Play: You may have noticed that I always post the birthdates and minor league level when I do a prospect write up, and wondered why I go to the trouble. It is important, even vital, to know how old a prospect is in relationship to the players he is playing against. The basic rule is the younger the better. There's a vast difference between an 18 year old pitcher in low A and a 24 year old. A player's peak years are generally from around age 27-32. Even if everything goes perfectly for the 24 year old in low A, he's going to be a rookie in the majors at age 27 and still learning the ropes at a time when he should be in his peak years of production. That's to say nothing of the fact that there is probably a reason he is still toiling in low A ball at age 24! A corollary is whether the player was drafted out of college or high school. A 22 year old just drafted the previous summer out of college is likely to move up faster than a 22 year old High school draftee who has been in the organization for 4 years and still only made it to low A.

2. Size Matters!: You may have also wondered why I bother to post listed heights and weights on prospects I write up. Well, size matters, Tim Lincecum notwithstanding! The average height and weight for the top 50 ERA's among MLB pitchers with at least 162 IP last year was 6'4", 225 lbs. That's the AVERAGE! Again, there are always exceptions to the rule, and you never want to be too dogmatic about any one parameter, but most successful MLB pitchers are BIG! Notice that they are not only tall, but have big, strong frames. I would almost rather have a relatively short stocky pitcher than a tall skinny one. The exception is in very young pitchers with sturdy frames who just haven't filled them out yet. The reasons for the size advantage are not totally clear, but intuitively, you like the height for a feeling of dominance, the release point is closer to home plate giving a higher effective velocity for the same air speed of the ball, and you have a downward plane on the pitch, which is harder for the batter to drive in the air. The stocky build tends to give better stamina over the course of a grueling MLB season and career.

3. Velocity Rules: You can always point to successful MLB pitchers who don't bring 90 MPH heat, but the margin for error on these guys is miniscule and you don't often see them dominate for an extended time frame. This is where you have to look up scouting reports and maybe even go to a minor league game or two in order to have the information you need. My benchmark velocity level is 90 MPH. Anything less than that and you have a marginal prospect. My benchmark for elite prospects is 94 MPH or above. Lefthanders get a MPH or two break because it's harder to find LHP's with great velocity, but even they should be right around 90 MPH. Just think back over the last decade of Giants pitching prospects. They guys who have made it, Cain, Lincecum, Sanchez, Wilson have all had the great velocity as part of their game. Even Sergio Romo can get it up to 92 or 93 when he has to. They guys who have washed out, Hennessey, Williams, Foppert, and others have been guys who showed up thowing fastballs in the 80's. Noah Lowry, was the exception, but even he struggled when other teams started sitting on the changeup. All this is why Madison Bumgarner's mysterious loss of velocity is so alarming and disappointing. Hot tip: If you go to a minor league game, try to sneak up behind the pitch charters who are sitting behind home plate and pointing their radar guns with each pitch. You can easily see the readings in the red digital readout at the back of the "gun", and they are generally much more accurate than the stadium radar gun readings.

4. K's are King: The best performance measure of dominance for a pitching prospect is the ability to strike batters out, or miss bats to put it in a different way. Simply put, if a minor league batter can make any kind of contact with a pitch at all, an MLB batter is much more likely to hit that same pitch HARD! A pitcher who misses bats in the minors stands a better chance of avoiding solid contact even if he K rates are not as high once he reaches the majors. My benchmark for measuring Strikeouts is a K/9(strikeout per 9 innings) of 9 or more. This is more true in the lower minors than in AAA where I might drop the threshold to K/9=7 if other parameters are positive. This why the dramatic drop in K rates for Tim Alderson and Madison Bumgarner in AA last year were so worrisome, and why it compounds the worries about Bumgarner's velocity drop.

5. Walks are Wrong: I don't worry too much about walks in the lower minors, especially if the pitcher is still a teenager, but as they move up the ladder, it becomes essential to cut down on the walk rate. To survive in the majors, a pitcher absolutely can't afford to be putting runners on base, and/or pitching from behind in the count. In the lower minors, you want to see a BB/9(walks per 9 innings) of less than 4 and in the high minors less than 3. A higher walk rate is allowed with a higher K rate, but you still like to see the K/BB rate > 2 and ideally >3.

6. Keep the Ball on the Ground! Great strikeout pitchers often get a lot of their non-strikeout outs on fly balls. Fly balls are dangerous because the first prerequisite for hitting a home run is you have to get the ball in the air! A ground ball may go through the infield for a base hit, but it's not going to go out of the park! On the other hand, a fly ball that doesn't go out of the park, and isn't a line drive is a more sure out than a ground ball that might bleed through the infield. There are basically two types of pitchers in baseball: 1. High velocity, high strikeout, flyball pitchers. 2. Lower velocity, low strikeout, groundball pitchers. The Holy Grail of pitching is to get a high velocity, high strikeout, ground ball pitcher, but these are few and far between. One reason why prospect watchers were so high on "King Felix" Hernandez before he hit the majors was that he was a rare example of this pitching perfection. Roger Clemens was probably the ultimate example, although he was not an extreme GB pitcher. My threshold for ground ball "dominance" in a minor league pitcher is a GO/AO(Ground out/Air Out) > 2.
MLB pitchers can thrive with a lower ratio, but MLB hitters are better able to "elevate" the ball off the bat, so a prospects GO/AO is likely to fall as he climbs the organizational ladder. A minor league pitcher who has a low K rate(< 1) and a reversed GO/AO(<1) can be written off as a prospect with a high degree of certainty.

7. Don't forget ERA: ERA might be the most maligned pitching statistic in all of baseball. Yes, it's been overrated in the past, but it is treated with such disdain in sabermetric(the study of baseball statistics) circles as to be downright underrated now! ERA, for all it's faults, is still one of the best indicators, if not THE best of pitching success in a large sample size. If a pitching prospect consistently puts up great ERA's in the face of other negative indicators, there may be something going on that you just can't see in the stats and scouting reports. Warning! These instances are RARE! Matt Cain is an example of the rare pitcher whose results are consistently better than his "peripheral" stats would indicate they should be, but that's a whole other post! What is more common is that you may have a pitcher with consistently great "peripheral" stats, and great scouting reports who also consistently puts up ugly ERA's. In this case, a bad ERA should be a red flag that something is keeping this pitcher from realizing his full potential. Maybe it's lapses in concentration at key moments of the game. Maybe it's just inconsistency in location or ball movement. A consistently high ERA should never be ignored just because a pitcher's peripheral stats are good.

8. Know Your Leagues and Ballparks: The Giants have farm teams in multiple leagues. The Eastern League(AA), South-Atlantic League(Low A) and Dominican Summer League(Developmental) are relatively pitcher friendly. The Pacific Coast League(AAA), California League(High A), Northwest League(Short Season) and Arizona League(Rookie), are all much more hitter friendly. These effects have been magnified in EL and SAL by the Giants playing in ballparks that are extremely pitcher friendly. The hitter friendliness of the PCL and Cal Leagues are somewhat mitigated by a neutral park in Fresno and a pitcher friendly park in San Jose. It is important to remember these factors when perusing stat lines. A great pitching performance in AA for the Giants just doesn't mean as much as a great performance in AAA. One rule of thumb is that performances for pitchers in the AAA PCL translate very well to the majors, while hitting stats do not. I think this is a big reason why the Giants have had much greater success in developing pitching prospects than hitting prospects.

That's about it. No analysis of pitching prospects is perfect, even from professional scouts and sabermetricians. A fairly simple understanding of the above relatively few principles will give you a leg up on even the so-called experts in prospect evaluation, and will definitely give you a huge advantage in your fantasy league!