Affiliate Success: Fun With Numbers

[bird]

 

Starting with the big club and ending in the Dominican Republic, every single Twins team, all eight of them, boasts a winning record. In looking at the seven affiliates, not only are the teams winning, but in a few cases, they're dominating their league. None of the teams are less than five games over .500 (GCL and Cedar Rapids). Chattanooga is a whopping 33 games over .500. That's nine games better than the next team in the league. The DSL team, at 44-16 and with the best record among forty (40!) teams, is 28 games over, Rochester +17, Fort Myers +12, ETown +9.

 

I'm going to venture a guess that no other organization in baseball has a winning record with their big club and all seven comparable affiliates. I thought it would be fun to contrast the records of our affiliates against those of our AL Central opponents. Here are a few fun facts I found:

 

Combined, CWS, KC, CLE and DET have a grand total of seven teams among their 28 affiliates with winning records. So they tied us, 7 to 7. That dang Terry Ryan or something, right? CWS had one winner, their AZL Rookie team at 20-19. KC had one, their Advanced A team, 5 games over at 62-57, only 3 games off the pace of the Twin's Advanced A team. The Tigers also had one, but it's their Low A team, which has Chattanooga-like dominance going at a remarkable 80-35. Cleveland has winning records with 4 of 7 affiliates. You know, because Derek Falvey. And while their High A team is 23 over, the other 3 are over .500 by  similar margins to our worst (5 games) margin at Cedar Rapids.

 

And then, when I look at the losing records of some of the affiliates of our pals, I see some impressive losing percentages. CWS, for example is at least 21 games under .500 with all three of their high-minors clubs and 10 games under with the next two before the bleeding stops with that stellar 20-19 rookie club. In fact, of the 21 affiliates out there with losing records, all but 3 of them are under .500 by more than 5 games. Yeah, I know CWS has an elite farm system. I have no idea how to reconcile this fun fact.

 

Now, I don't know what this all means, but I know it isn't meaningless. I know it's a very positive thing. I'm certain there's a strong correlation between winning and talent. I'm confident that it eventually bodes well for the big club, and that it probably bodes especially well for them given the records of their AL Central counterparts.

 

It will also make me continue to be skeptical of general claims that the Twins are lousy talent evaluators and that the Twins have inferior development people. And this record, in my mind, states the case that, if anything, the talent in the system is better than average and refutes the fairly common (albeit declining) claim that the system is low on talent.

 

So, what do you think these fun facts tell us?

 

[diehardtwinsfan]

you post this as Chatty has 18 hits in 5 innings tonight and only 1 home run...

[bird]

 

you post this as Chatty has 18 hits in 5 innings tonight and only 1 home run...

 

Schooling CWS's 16th best prospect in the process.

[DocBauer]

What it says to me is something we've been hearing for a while now, that the "star power" in the Twins mild system is lacking right now due to graduation of so many talented prospects, but that the overall depth of talent is still strong. And we always have to remember those "star" players don't always turn out, solid prospects become solid to very good ballplayers, and some turn in to stud/all star ML performers.

 

Now, I think is somewhat fluid and arbitrary as this time next year the "star power" could easily rise in the system with Guys like Gordon, Gonsalves, Romero, Kirilloff, Lewis, Polacios, Javier and maybe Rooker all potentially top 100 prospects. Not saying all of them at once, but each with the potential. So I would say the list of potential top players and overall depth is pretty solid.

 

Arguements can be madem and have ben made, about the age of players at certain levels, the success they have at such levels, and whether or not they can maintain such success as they climb the ladder. But we have also seen by various data that the Twins are NOT exclusive in age vs level arguments.

 

Final analysis? If your system, overall, is winning like this, then there are enough good prospects throughout your system to warrant said winning, and offer up additional hope for the future.

[gunnarthor]

I'm not sure if we have another Buxton/Sano level prospect in our system right now (Lewis could be) but i do think we have a fair number of prospects who could rise to the Kepler/Gordon level, which is just a tier below. I know that they are far away but Baddoo, Miranda and Rortvedt are really exciting young players. Rooker has real power. Thorpe, Romero, Gonsalves could all be top 100 prospects next year. We seem to have a legit SS at every level for the first time in my memory. It's a real deep system.

[rukavina]

My heart wants to believe these records matter, but experience says it's noise.  This is all about individual prospects - I begin to pay attention when:

 

- prospects get to age 22/23

- prospects tear up AA and then AAA

 

I stop paying much attention when they hit 25.  Dozier is an exception.  

[bird]

 

My heart wants to believe these records matter, but experience says it's noise.  This is all about individual prospects - I begin to pay attention when:

 

- prospects get to age 22/23

- prospects tear up AA and then AAA

 

I stop paying much attention when they hit 25.  Dozier is an exception.  

 

So these 2017 winning records are all noise? I've been following this stuff for awhile, and don't recall anything like this, so I question whether your own experience can call it noise with any level of certainty. I'm not sure we have a precedent for this kind of winning. In fact, I bet an historical look-back of the seven affiliates would show an extremely consistent cumulative record of very close to .500 and maybe slightly below that year over year. 

 

These records are built from the production of a collection of individual prospects, right? Why wouldn't we pay attention to any of these prospects? What's so magical about age 22/23? I think most of us recognize that the jump to AA is a big one and is the falling off place for marginal prospects. Tempering enthusiasm about performances below that level makes sense, especially for the older prospects you favor. I think a lot of us here do that pretty well.

 

What made Dozier an exception for you? I don't recall many people paying that much attention to him, so you would have been the exception in that regard. What did you see that the prospect hounds missed? They were hot to trot about 23 year olds in AA named Joe Benson and Chris Parmelee and pretty much ignored 24 year olds Dozier, Chris Herrmann, and Yangervis Solarte, the three position players off that New Britain roster who are enjoying nice careers and hadn't cracked anyone's Top 25 at that point.

 

As an aside, that 2011 New Britain team finished 72-70, which might explain (or might not) why Liam Hendriks and Deolis Guerra were the only other prospects from that collection to have a decent run in MLB. A ton of guys got the proverbial cup of coffee: Benson, Parmelee, Hollimon, Albers, DeVries, Dean, Darnell, and Robertson.

[drivlikejehu]

It doesn't mean anything, most minor league PAs and IPs are by non-prospects or low-level prospects. So wins and losses are more about them than anything else.

[drjim]

I don't think lots of winning minor league teams means that the Twins have better prospects than the national lists would suggest, but I do think there is value for good prospects to be a part of a winning atmosphere as they develop. Not sure how you would quantify that exactly.

[Dman]

It is exciting to see all the affiliates doing so well.   I am not sure what correlation or causation can be gleaned from the win loss record though.   As we all know the affiliates are more about player development than winning records and prospects are more about potential (future results) than current results.

 

I think an argument can be made that the Twins have fantastic roster balance among their affiliates but according to most evaluators’ average talent in their system.   Most affiliates have 3 to 4 really good hitters a really good pitcher or two and all of them seem to have a pretty dominant bullpen.   The exception being Chattanooga who has had really good pitching 1-5 most of the year and it shows.

 

If we are winning it seems obvious that we have good players but if the losing teams have just a couple of super star players at each level and lose a lot they are still better off than we are.   I’m not trying to diminish what the affiliates have accomplished this year.   Frankly I have been amazed at how well they’ve all done.   I just don’t know how to quantify what that gives us other than likely a lot of good players that can’t make the jump to MLB.

 

Winning feels a lot better than losing and I am hopeful that a lot of these players make there way to MLB.  I like having a balanced system.  I just hope we produce some super star players as well.

[ashbury]

Another Fun With Numbers Project would be the relative ages of Twins farmhands on each of their respective teams. I started at the top and had to work my way all the way down to the Dominican farm team to find even a half of a roster (in their case the batters) who were younger than the league average.

 

While simply flooding teams with over-age nobodies won't win any minor league pennants, and having all-winning teams is an accomplishment, I still feel as though the farm system is giving themselves a leg up for building gaudy W/L records apart from developmental progress.