Written by Greg Fertel
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13 April 2008
The unique nature of minor league baseball creates a slow process where we are slowly unraveling enigmas about unknown puzzles. Minor league baseball players are unknown, but tell us more about themselves every day when they take the field. Every week, I'm going to review what information has been revealed to us.
1. Brad Suttle's adjustments worked.
Suttle was very, very bad after signing with us. You probably all know this by now, but after hitting .100/.250/.175 in winter ball, a lot of questions began to emerge about his ability to handle a wooden bat. It turns out that the usual Yankee party line about a struggling player, that "we're making some adjustments on his swing", actually came true. He's hit .368/.429/.553 so far. This doesn't mean that he won't struggle in the future in the South Atlantic League, but it does mean that his "potential" looks a like less nebulous.
2. Edwar Ramirez's Story isn't over.
Strange flukes sometime happen in baseball. Sometimes players have some kind of ridiculously good (or bad) season that is uncharacteristic of their ability level. Edwar Ramirez was better in the minor leagues last year than any reliever in recent memory. He failed to make the team more because of better options ahead of him rather than his own spring failures. How has Edwar started the season? He has pitched 6 innings in 5 games, with 11 strikeouts, 1 walk, and 1 hit allowed. There might be three or four teams in the majors, including the Yankees, that are not clamoring to call up a reliever while being this dominant. His 16.5 K/9 is almost exactly the same rate that he struck batters out at last year, but this time he's not walking any body. Its hard to believe that he would do a worse job than Kyle Farnsworth at the very least, and he could be just as dominant as Joba Chamberlain at his best.
3. Mark Melancon is human.
The Yankees have always been very high on Melancon. Even after his surgery, we were hearing all sorts of sources explain how special of a pitcher he was. Melancon, the farthest along of the Tommy John casualties toward recovery, finally back to playing baseball and to (for all intents and purposes, I know that he pitched a few innings in 2006) start his professional career. I was hearing talk of Melancon possibly helping out the major league team in 2008. We all have now seen that Melancon, a highly-touted relief pitcher in college, needs to go through all the things that normal minor league pitchers go through. Melancon has allowed 6 runs in 4 innings, including 2 home runs. This doesn't mean that Melancon is going to be a bad pitcher, but it should serve to temper our expectations a little bit.
4. Brett Gardner is ready.
Gardner always carried with him the "adjusts to new levels slowly" tag. His ability to hit for power fell off temporarily every time that he was promoted to a new level. So, after slugging .331 in Triple-A last year, we weren't all that alarmed. We understood that Gardner was a pretty good bet to regain his former ability levels this season. After hitting .324/.395/.441 in the spring, and earning rave reviews on the side, Gardner is off to a .400/.407/.800 start. He's already hit 3 triples a double, and a home run. Am I the only person who thinks that the Yankees would be better off with Gardner in center, Melky in left, and Damon on the bench?
5. There's a hitter or two in Charleston.
Through 9 games, the Riverdogs have hit .317/.377/.455 as a team - 62 points of OPS higher than the second-best A ball club. We're talking about a league where the median OBP is around .300 right now. The party probably won't last forever - Justin Snyder, Brad Suttle, and David Williams are all college players, with the potential to earn promotions to Tampa fairly quickly. The team is still waiting for Carmen Angelini, Abraham Almonte, and
Austin Romine to get going, so there are places to pick up the slack.
