Written by Greg Fertel | 11 September 2010

Here are the leaders from full-season ball. I used a minimum of 300 plate appearances.

Hits

Doubles

Triples

Home Runs

Stolen Bases

Written by Josh W. | 10 September 2010

Throughout his minor league career, Ivan Nova got plenty of groundballs. He has a 50.8 career GB% according to minorleaguesplits.com, and had a GB% of 51.7 in AAA before getting called up. I don't recall where I first heard this observation, but Ivan Nova doesn't really pitch that low in the zone for a guy who gets a lot of groundballs.

I decided to look at his most recent start to test this observation. In retrospect, I probably should have looked at all of the pitches he has thrown this year instead of the pitches from just one start, but that's not so bad.

And big thanks to Albert Lyu who helped me out a lot with R. He also does some great pitch f/x work over at his blog so you should check that out.

Here is a plot of Ivan Nova's pitch locations, with a loess regression line in black:

The red box is the strizeone. "px" is the horizontal location of Ivan Nova's pitches, and "pz" is the vertical location.

It seems that most of his pitches are not low in the zone, but in the middle third of the strikezone, which is bad.

Here is density plot of his pitch locations:

In this start he certainly threw a lot of pitches in the middle of the zone, and a lot on the inner third of the plate (from the perspective of a right handed batter). Again, this is only one start, but this location looks pretty mediocre to me.

I then wondered if opposing batters swing primarily at his lower pitches, mitigating the issue of his poor location.

Here is the swing rate of opposing batters (from Nova's most recent start):

I apologize for this graph being so ugly. Anyway, the blue line represents opposing batters' swing rate. It seems to have two peaks, one at about 2 feet high and the other at about 4 feet high. The height of the strikezone is typically 1.5 feet (bottom of the zone) to 3.5 feet (top of the zone). This tells us that opposing batters swung often at pitches at the bottom of and right below the strikezone. Batters also swung a lot at pitches right above the strikezone. Both of these peaks approach a swing rate of 60%, meaning that batters swung at a pitch at these heights almost 60% of the time, compared to 43% average for all of his pitches.

If he can continue to induce swings at these pitch heights, then great. However, I wouldn't bet on batters taking so many of his pitches in the middle third of the zone so often in the future.

Again, the major caveat here is that this is data from just one start. In the offseason I will revisit Nova and take a more comprehensive look at him.

Written by Sean P | 10 September 2010

The next team in our set of BB/K graphs is the Staten Island Yankees. Below are my introductory remarks from the Wednesday’s graph.

I wanted to take a look at BB% and K% for each level because it can give us a rough outline of a player’s strike zone judgment. Strike Zone judgment encompasses a player’s ability to avoid strike outs as well as draw walks.

Thanks to Jeff Sachman who did some work on translating amateur K%, we know that a strikeout rate of 25% in the majors roughly equals a 21% rate in single A ball. Of course we know that players are going to cut down on these rates as they get older and gain more experience- I don’t think anyone would blindly write off a top talent because he struck out a lot as an 18 year old in the Gulf Coast League. Also because these are short season leagues, we may be running into a sample size issue with some of the results. So keep that in mind as well.

When looking at these graphs, make sure you take into account the age and experience of each prospect before rushing to judgment on them. The average K% in the NY Penn league among qualified batters was 23%, while the average BB% was 9%.

click to enlarge

That Shane Brown has good strike zone judgment shouldn’t really be a surprise, considering he’s an advanced college bat who had a terrific season at UCF. He profiles as utility type if he progresses but didn’t really do anything well except get on base in SI- .235/.375/.297….Kelvin DeLeon would certainly qualify as a contender for most disappointing season- .236/.288/.359- definitely not encouraging. DeLeon has always struggled with strike outs, still over 30% this year while actually drawing fewer walks than last season as well. Not good…. Kyle Roller was another polished college bat with a history of taking walks and getting on base, so it wasn’t surprising for him to find success in SI….Eduardo Sosa had a terrible 2009 which may have been partially due to a rock bottom BABIP so it was nice to see some improvements, however minimal in 2010- Sosa walked more and actually struck out less in 2010 which was nice to see…Kevin Mahoney had a nice year doing what he does best- playing defense and getting on base. He’ll strike out a decent amount, but a combined .286/.400/.471 across 4 levels is pretty easy on the eyes.

Written by sean P | 08 September 2010

With the minor league season now over, we’ll start to take a look at the results of the 2010 campaign. To start, I wanted to take a look at BB% and K% for each level because it can give us a rough outline of a player’s strike zone judgment. Strike Zone judgment encompasses a player’s ability to avoid strike outs as well as draw walks (H/T Amazin Avenue).

Thanks to Jeff Sachman who did some work on translating amateur K%, we know that a strikeout rate of 25% in the majors roughly equals a 21% rate in single A ball. Of course we know that players are going to cut down on these rates as they get older and gain more experience- I don’t think anyone would blindly write off a top talent because he struck out a lot as an 18 year old in the Gulf Coast League.

So when looking at these graphs, make sure you take into account the age and experience of each prospect before rushing to judgment on them. The average K% in the GCL among qualified batters was 23%, while the average BB% was 8%.

(click to enlarge)

Obviously you want to have as many guys as possible in the lower right side quadrant- low K%, high BB%. Ramon Flores obviously jumps out at you in a big way- his line as an 18 year old in the GCL was .329/.426/.481. He did make an appearance last year and managed to cut down on his K% considerably from last year....It would be tough to expect anything more from Gary Sanchez this year. A 17 year old making his stateside debut, walking and striking out at league average while posting a .353/.419/.597 batting line is phenomenal.... Cito Culver I think really handled his own for how raw he was entering the year. He certainly wasn't over matched.....Henry Pena had a .434 wOBA and gets on base very well but is 20 years old and strikes out a ton....I was pleasantly surprised by Fu-Lin Kuo, the rookie from Taiwan. He didn't have an great year but I expected him to struggle more...

Written by Greg Fertel | 07 September 2010

The minor league regular season has come to an end for some of the teams, while others will try their hand in the playoffs. Since the regular season is over, I wanted to put together a final leaderboard for both pitchers and hitters(which I'll post later). For full season ball, I'm looking at pitchers only with at least 80 innings and at least 25 from the short-season leagues.

RHP Chris Cabrera, had a very nice debut season at just 17 years old after the Yankees signed him for $400,000. He has drawn comparisons to Arodys Vizcaino in the past, and couldn't have had a much better season. He only pitched 35 innings, so I wouldn't expect to see him pushed too far next season.

Craig Heyer, who the Yankees are sending to the Arizona Fall League, had a much more impressive season than I had realized. The 11:1 strikeout to walk ratio is pretty absurd, and it came in 92 innings of work for Tampa. The Yankees definitely liked what they saw, and had him begin starting games regularly on July 20, after spending much of the season in the bullpen.

The performances from Dellin Betances, Graham Stoneburner, David Phelps, and Hector Noesi have all been well documented, but you just don't see so many pitchers in one system have such successful seasons that often. That's before even mentioning guys like Andrew Brackman, Adam Warren, and Jose Ramirez.

Other than Cabrera, I don't know too much about most of the names in the short-season league sections and those numbers tend to not matter very much. At that level it is much more about improvement and scouting than it is numbers, so I won't make any assumptions about any of those guys.