markos

I don't think it is appealing to "luck" to use to fWAR in this case. Santiago has benefitted in the last three seasons from pitching in one of the best pitching parks in all of baseball (definitely top-5) and in front of one of the best defenses in all of baseball (4th by UZR from 2014-2016). Gibson has not had those same benefits, particularly in the case of defense where the Twins have been terrible (2nd worst by UZR in the same timeframe). There is an ERA gap between Santiago and Gibson, but it isn't huge. KG HS 2014 4.47 3.75 2015 3.84 3.59 2016 5.07 4.70 It works out to only 5-10 runs a season. Personally, I think the defensive and stadium differences are more than enough to explain Santiago's ERA advantage. Even bWAR has Gibson ahead over the past 3 seasons, 5.8 bWAR to 3.2 bWAR, because it recognizes that Gibson has faced harder opponents, in worse ballparks, and with worse defenses behind him.

I ran some numbers a few months ago, and even when normalizing for draft position, the Twins from 2006-2011 were 27th or 28th in the league as far as draft results. It has been pathetic.

Doesn't it have to be a fair amount of both? If you want to argue that they weren't at the level of their playoff competition, that's fine. But exactly how big of underdogs do they need to be in order for an 0-9 record to be an expected outcome? Or even a 3-19 record? My back-of-the-envelope calculations might be off, but wouldn't they need to be something like a 10-1 underdog in every single game in order for those results to be expected? It seems crazy to me that two playoff baseball teams would have such wide discrepancy. I can't check at work, but are any Vegas lines close to that for a single playoff game?

Why shouldn't Rosario play CF if Buxton is out for a prolonged period? I just don't see any evidence that the 32-year-old Stubbs will be any better than Rosario defensively. For me, Rosario is the backup CF, and the question is who will move into LF.

Yeah, I'd like to see him do the opposite - pick pitchers that will stay healthy.

In the interest of speculating wildly about the future, what are people's thoughts about Hughes's velocity over the short and medium term? My thoughts: - Right now, zero concern that he is just in the upper 80s. It is early, and he is working back from injury. - In four weeks, I'll be pretty concerned if he is still just working 89-90-91. I think there is a decent case to be made at that point to just move him to the bullpen. However... - This is probably a lost season for the team, so I don't think it is critical to move him to the bullpen right away. I would leave him as a starter for the first few months and see if 1) he regains the lost velocity over time, or 2) he can figure out a way to be effective with lower velocity. Neither of those options are particularly likely, but it's not like there is a lot to lose right now with being patient. To sum up, there are a lot of unknowns about his particular injury, and not a huge sample-size to make guesses about his likely recovery path. I think the Twins should error on the side of being too patient with him, even if he is getting knocked around in March/April/May. I'm curious what others think.

From everything I've read, Greene, as a shortstop, would be in 1st round consideration but not an top pick. He is not at the same level as Machado, Correa or other elite HS SS players.

Regardless who they at a 1-1, they should be able to bank some money. I don't think anyone 1-1 pick has signed for full slot yet. Most of the top-5 picks have all be underslot to one degree or another. They won't be able to bank a ton (like recent years), but I'm guessing something like $500k. Having almost back-to-back picks at 35 & 37 should allow them to pounce if a top player does fall to them. They can grab the player at #35 and then pick someone significantly underslot at #37. Adding that to the savings at with the first pick, they could probably offer $3M+ at #35 if a player warranted it, which is basically what the major overslot players received last year from the Reds/Braves/Phillies. This won't require any shenanigans with the 1-1 pick. Just take the best player.

We are still a month away from Opening Day. Don't tempt fate!

Agree on Kendall. How much upside does Wright have? He is sitting low-to-mid 90s, and occasionally cracking 95. Translating that to pro-ball workload, that isn't terribly impressive. Gerrit Cole he is not (as one recent example). Is he even at the Kevin Gausman level? It will be interesting to see how his velocity tracks during the next months, but right now I'm not impressed.

The take-home message from the article you linked: If the Twins take Greene, the most important thing is to make sure he doesn't tear his rotator cuff while defending his brother in a bar fight. Personally, I don't think the competition quality for high schoolers is very important, particularly for pitchers. I'm very confident that professional scouts and decision makers are not judging Greene's abilities by his box score stats, but rather are judging this tools and projection. But even beyond that, Greene (and almost every other top high school prospect) spent a lot of his summer playing in showcase tournaments around the country. Outside of the top-tier of the SEC, not many college players have the opportunity to play against a dozen or more potential first round picks like the HS players get to in these tournaments. Also, I'm not sure how much weight to put on secondary pitches (or lack there of) right now. How good were Kershaw's secondaries coming out of HS? I know that was the big knock on Bumgarner going into his draft. At a certain level, the selection of a HS pitcher is a bet on the projection of their tools: arm strength, athleticism, build and work ethic. I'm not sure how much present-day stuff and results factor into that.

Important to always translate college velocity. Because they only pitches once a week, college starters will generally lose 1-2 mph when they switch to throwing every 5 days. So, when Wright "worked in the low-to-mid 90s, touching 97 mph", in my mind that translates to "worked in the low 90s, touching 95 mph".

Much of the (at least public) work that tries to project prospects has found that SBs are a statistically significant indicator for future success. For example, Chris Mitchell's KATOH projection system uses SB% (Stolen base attempts / times on first base) because it was a predictor of reaching the major leagues, even at the rookie ball level. In fact, it was more significant than walk rate at that low of level. In addition, there is a line of thought that stolen bases and triples form a decent proxy for overall athleticism, which in turn can be use to predict defensive ability. In the case of Kirilloff, the lack of stolen bases are a legitimate concern. Certainly not the be all end all, but combined with scouting reports that universally project him to a corner position (and some that say he looks pretty good at first base!), there is a fair amount of evidence that points to him being a liability in the outfield, and potentially on the base paths as well. Obviously there is a continuum here, but if he ends up closer to the Kubel/Arcia end of the spectrum rather than the Rosario/Kepler end, then that just adds even more pressure on his bat.

How often is Gonsalves actually hitting 94+ with his fastball? This seems like a very generous description. If he was regularly hitting the mid-90s, I think there would be a lot less concern about how his stuff will play in the majors.

Oswaldo Arcia played 37 games in CF at Elizabethton. I don't think his time in center is meaningful at all.

Another warning sign with Turner is that he had a crazy .ISO spike (.225!), and the statcast data showed that he was more productive on flyballs than his launch angles and exit velocity would predict. There is some speculation that teams expected him to be more of a slap-hitter and positioned their outfielders too shallow. Regardless, the Nats have definitely put all their eggs in the Turner-at-shortstop basket, at least for this season. They brought in Eaton and traded away Espinosa, and their backup SS is Stephen Drew.

I agree with this take, and it backs up my own memories of that draft. Jay might have been a tiny bit of a reach at #6, but almost every single draft prosnosticator had him in their top-10. And almost everybody was at least cautiously optimistic that he would be able to transition to a starter. For example, Keith Law, who is extremely biased against pitchers he pegs as future relievers (ex. he had super low draft rankings for Chris Sale (#47) and Carson Fulmer (#43) based on that concern), had Jay ranked #9.

Yeah, I definitely have him above Kirilloff.

Definitely a worthy concern to bring up; however, my defense for this ranking is twofold: 1) it is easy to underestimate how valuable a broad set of average skills can be, and 2) a CF/SS prospect can still be very valuable despite not hitting much. My poster-child for this kind of player is Denard Span. He never hit many homers, but he made a lot of hard contact (consistent above-average BABIPs) which translated into a lot of doubles and triples. He didn't walk a ton, but his 8% walk rate was very good when combined to his very low strikeout rate. All said, his overall batting line is just slightly above-average (105 wRC+). He wasn't a great base-stealer and got picked off too often, but overall he was an above-average baserunner because he was good at taking extra bases and stretching singles into doubles and doubles into triples. He was never flashy in centerfield (not like Hunter or Gomez), but he was very consistent and made enough plays to be at least average, maybe even above-average. All told, he has averaged almost 3 WAR per season for 9 seasons. That is an extremely good and valuable player. It isn't that much of a stretch to see Gordon in a similar light. He doesn't hit a lot of homers, but he makes hard contact and is getting extra bases. He is having some issues stealing bases, but all reports indicate that he is a heady baserunner who will take extra bases when available. I agree that he doesn't walk enough (relative to his strikeouts), but the Delmon Young comparison isn't completely fair - even Young, with all of his batting deficiencies, would have been perfectly fine big league player if he played an adequate CF or SS. In my mind, the big question is where exactly Gordon's defense will end up. Will he be a legitimate shortstop? Parsing through the scouting reports from the various prospect analysts, there is enough doubt to make me pause.

Non-issue. If Javier is truly blocked by Gordon when he reaches the cusp of the majors in, say, 2021, he could make a fantastic trade chip if the Twins need to get an Ace (kind of like what the Cubs did with Torres). And if the Twins aren't competitive for whatever reason, then Gordon would be a valuable trade chip to speed up a rebuild. There is very little, if any, downside.

I'm pretty sure Polanco is under team control for 6 more seasons. His short call-ups in 2014 and 2015 didn't count as full seasons.

My explanation for why he has struggled is that his stuff has backed up. One of the major reasons that he was a consensus top-10 pick is that he not only had very good stuff going into the draft, but he also had the build, mechanics and athleticism that allowed scouts to project that his stuff would improve in pro-ball. Take this quote from BP: "Stewart's raw stuff, combined with the room for growth in that stuff, might make him the highest upside arm in the entire draft. He checks all the boxes for a future potential #1, including a big body, four-pitch mix, two potential plus-plus offerings, good athleticism, and repeatable mechanic that should improve as he continues to refine." Instead, every indication is that over the past 3+ years there has been zero grown. His stuff has stagnated at best, and backed up at worst. Looking at his velocity, the spring before his draft he was said to have a fastball that worked 91-96, but was inconsistent inning-to-inning and game-to-game. Today, you can basically copy-paste the same scouting report, though depending on who you talk to he is more in the low-90s than mid-90s. I think the exact same argument could be made for his command-and-control. And I'm not aware of anyone suggesting that his slider has improved in the past 3 years. Now, obviously this is a hard assertion to prove, and impossible to quantify without access to consistent PitchFX data. But that is my suspicion. I don't think it is completely fair to blame the Twins development for this - some HS kids develop better stuff; a lot don't. Stewart wouldn't be the first kid to have his stuff take a step back. But at the same time, the previous regime does not have many (if any?) positive results when it comes to guiding young power pitchers to the majors. So I guess that is why I'm holding onto some optimism for Stewart. Last year I was basically ready to write off Stewart as a non-prospect, but lots of prospect analysts were and are still bullish on Stewart's tools. Keith Law still has him ranked as a top-100 guy. The 2080 guys said he is still an arm that they really like. There is still upside there. A new regime with a better development program could work wonders for him.

Two rebuttals to a couple of points that have been raised in Stewart's defense. - At this point we are almost four full seasons past his high school career. Whether or not he focused on baseball in high school should have such a minimal impact on his results right now. On top of that, at the time of the draft there was very little concern about how his HS football career was going to hold his development back on the mound. In fact, it was often brought up as a positive, in the sense that "look how good he is, and he hasn't even focused on pitching full time. Imagine how fast he will develop once he focuses on baseball full time!" Contrast the scouting reports of Stewart that year to those of Trey Ball, who EVERYONE agreed was a major, major project as a pitcher. Heck, even as late as October, 2013, Baseball America selected Stewart as the "Closest To The Majors" for that high school draft class. Personally, I think it is more of a post hoc excuse for his lackluster performance rather than a serious consideration at the time. - As mentioned above by Spycake, his results, particularly his ERAs and HR rates, have in part been surpressed by the leagues in which he has been playing. For example, a 3.20 ERA is superficially very good, but in the Florida State League in 2015, that was just league average. Similarly, he gave up 4 HRs in the FSL; the average pitcher in that league would have given up 6. A similar dynamic played out in the Southern League.

When did the fences change? I looked back several years, and frankly Diaz's results are middling at best compared to other Twins youngsters at Eizabethton. Josmil Pinto, 2009, 20yo, 166 wRC+ Oswaldo Arcia, 2010, 19yo, 197 wRC+ Eddie Rosario, 2011, 19yo, 175 wRC+ Miguel Sano, 2011, 18yo, 153 wRC+ Kennys Vargas, 2011, 20yo, 132 wRC+ Max Kepler, 2012, 19yo, 153 wRC+ Jorge Polanco, 2012, 18yo, 143 wRC+ Travis Harrison, 2012, 19yo, 138 wRC+ Jermaine Palacios, 2015, 18yo, 131 wRC+ Lewin Diaz, 2016, 19yo, 149 wRC+ Other than Sano, none of the others managed to hit enough (yet, anyways) to be an above-average 1B/DH option. But if the ballpark characterizations have changed, then maybe it is more meaningful.

He was better, but I don't think it was a massive step forward - he was very, very good as a sophomore. http://www.thebaseballcube.com/players/profile.asp?P=stephe-strasburg