Quote:
Originally Posted by BigRedChief
O’Neil has a 1.100 OPS in AAA. Is there a #/% that is “usual” when a player transitions from AAA to the majors? What OPS can we expect?
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I've recently come to a conclusion: baseball prospects are like NFL prospects times two. Here's what I mean:
Consider the bust rate of the draft and how often scouts are wrong in football. For football players, that happens twice, but we really only hear about it once (unless you follow a team's CFB recruiting closely).
I think it happens three times in baseball. Projections from the draft to A-ball, from A-ball to AA/AAA, and from AA/AAA to the bigs. Every time the projections get a little more accurate because there is more data to judge from (and the competition is better), but there is still huge variance. IMO, that's why you have such a difficult time projecting stars, not only from the draft, but even among those who transition to the bigs.
Consider the Cardinals:
When Oscar Taveras reached MLB, all of a sudden his swing looked a lot longer than it seemed in the minors. He was probably never going to be the threat he seemed like in the minors.
Matt Carpenter was a 12 homer guy through the system and his first several years in the bigs, and is now a 25-30 homer guy.
Carlos Martinez was supposed to have wipeout stuff, but as strikeout numbers have gone up, he's middle of the pack (and if you look at his minor league #s, you'd see someone who only struck out an average number of players).
Point being: all of these projection systems are flawed. Sometimes we assume growth in a player that never happens (Martinez), other times we don't see growth that occurs as they mature or make slight alterations to their swing (Carpenter), and there are yet other times where the equalization of talent levels reveals deeper flaws within a player's game (Taveras, Byron Buxton, Miguel Sano, Jurickson Profar, Delmon Young, Brandon Wood, Gregory Polanco, the list goes on forever).
This is a long way of saying that we don't really know with any great certainty. There are a few things that are obvious: O'Neill will strike out a ton in the majors, and he'll probably walk about 8-12 percent of the time. Defense usually projects pretty well, which is why you've seen some of us be more pessimistic on Munoz than you are. O'Neill could end up being a slightly better version of Grichuk. You could look at his minor league numbers, which have ratios similar to Aaron Judge with far better power totals (seriously, Judge hit 76 homers in 340 minor league games, O'Neill has 145 in 516 games) and think that maybe he'll hit with 45 HR power and be a 7 WAR player, but that's pretty damned unlikely (and the Yankees would have never guessed it would have happened with Judge). You'll see a lot of sabermetrically-inclined people use a Gaussian/normal distribution to say that they'll end up with this many WAR this percent of the time, but it's really just a cover for admitting ignorance.