November 23, 2009
Order Now The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2010 is now in development and will ship in mid November! This year's book will feature articles by THT's staff as well as Bill James, Tom Tango and Craig Wright. If you use this link to purchase the Annual, you will be in the first group to receive it and you'll be supporting THT. Most Recent Comments
Introducing Visual Baseball (1)
HR/FB Park Factors (7) Why Baseball Needs a Visual Facelift (5) Building a Retrosheet database, the short form (4) Is peak at age 29? (7) 
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Saturday, August 08, 2009How old is your Double-A team?In my article earlier this week, I looked at the age distributions of 2009 Triple-A teams. It was easy enough to generate a similar report for 2009 Double-A teams, so here it is. I've included the average age of the organization's Triple-A affiliate in the rightmost column. Org Team Average Median <23 23-24 25-26 27+ Avg Bat Avg Pit AAA Avg STL Springfield 23.1 23 16 20 4 1 22.7 23.4 25.4 CHC Tennessee 23.6 23 9 20 8 2 23.7 23.5 26.9 ATL Mississippi 23.7 23 11 12 7 3 23.5 23.9 27.4 MIN New Britain 23.8 24 6 17 11 1 23.9 23.7 25.6 ARI Mobile 24.0 24 5 17 13 1 24.3 23.8 26.9 DET Erie 24.0 24 5 20 8 2 24.3 23.7 26.8 LAA Arkansas 24.0 23 11 10 7 6 25.2 22.9 26.8 TEX Frisco 24.0 24 14 9 13 7 24.0 24.1 26.7 BOS Portland 24.2 24 10 10 9 6 23.7 24.7 27.3 CIN Carolina 24.3 24 7 20 11 5 24.4 24.2 26.5 OAK Midland 24.3 25 8 12 18 4 23.6 24.8 25.5 COL Tulsa 24.3 24 6 14 11 4 24.9 23.9 28.2 CHW Birmingham 24.4 24 7 12 10 5 24.4 24.3 27.5 SDP San Antonio 24.4 24 5 17 10 6 23.6 25.0 26.6 SFG Connecticut 24.4 24 5 14 11 5 24.6 24.2 27.4 CLE Akron 24.4 24 7 19 9 6 24.3 24.5 27.3 NYM Binghamton 24.6 25 7 13 13 8 24.2 24.8 28.6 PIT Altoona 24.6 25 5 15 18 4 24.5 24.7 27.0 NYY Trenton 24.9 25 8 11 17 6 24.3 25.3 27.0 WAS Harrisburg 25.0 24 0 20 13 6 25.1 24.9 27.0 TOR New Hampshire 25.0 24 3 17 12 7 24.8 25.2 27.0 TAM Montgomery 25.0 25 5 8 15 7 25.5 24.4 28.0 BAL Bowie 25.1 25 3 13 14 8 26.0 24.4 26.8 KC NW Arkansas 25.1 25 3 14 17 6 25.3 24.9 28.1 LAD Chattanooga 25.2 25 4 16 11 10 25.4 25.0 28.7 SEA West Tenn 25.2 25 7 10 12 15 25.6 24.7 26.8 MIL Huntsville 25.2 25 3 14 11 9 25.9 24.7 26.4 HOU Corpus Christi 25.4 25 1 13 14 8 24.7 25.9 27.2 PHI Reading 25.6 25 4 9 11 11 26.5 24.9 28.8 FLO Jacksonville 26.1 26 5 4 10 16 26.2 26.0 26.7 MLB AVERAGE 24.6 24.3 6.3 14.0 11.6 6.2 24.6 24.5 27.1 The Cardinals are youngest and the Phillies are second-oldest, but overall, the correlation between AAA and AA team age is not very strong. Conventional wisdom, or some variation thereof, probably does a good job of explaining why this is. Triple-A teams are, more than anything else, extended benches. Thus, if a team wants veterans to plug in at a moment's notice, their AAA squad will skew older. That preference will probably not affect the age of the Double-A affiliate very much, if at all. Perhaps such a team would be more likely to stash a veteran catcher (think Max St. Pierre, maybe) at Double-A, or maybe a veteran signed out of the indy leagues would spend time in Double-A because the AAA roster is full. But that's about as far as it goes. But Double-A teams are generally built around prospects, and the makeup of the roster is more dependent on who happens to be in the system. While a lot of free-agent signings go into the formation of a Triple-A roster, most Double-A non-prospects are organizational soldiers (often with their original org) who have survived. If a team has a lot of prospects at a particular level, that affiliate will skew younger. If the club's prospects are mostly younger and/or graduated, Double-A will be unusually full of filler, including some free agents and minor league Rule 5 picks. The Brewers, whose AAA team is young and whose AA team is (relatively) old, are a good example of this. Another look at bimodal distributionsIn my last article, I looked at how players regress to the mean, and how players on the borderline between the minors and majors might not have a readily identifiable mean to regress to. But what if we add in AA players? It seems that adding AA players does not give us a trimodal distribution; the means for the two leagues (or at least their major league equivelencies) are pretty close to each other. It's possible that this is a selection bias from the way the MLEs are computed, of course. But this also squares pretty well with what we think we know about the difference in league quality, so even if there is such a bias I'm not sure it's large enough to give us a truly bimodal distribution between AA and AAA players. But while that shifts our second mode over to the left a bit, it also gives us a much larger population of players in the minors than the majors. Here's a helpful illustration, at about 110 PAs:  I almost wonder if there's something I'm missing here, though, with my assumptions - if pressed I would guess that in real life the right-side part of the curve on the two distributions line up a lot better than what I'm showing here. There are estimated standard deviations, and so maybe the observed SDs for minor league talent are larger than what I'm showing. I'll have to check into that. What does Junichi Tazawa throw?Due to the length of the extra-inning affair between the Yankees and Red Sox, we got a preview of Junichi Tazawa's stuff. Here's his scouting report from SoxProspects.com: Tazawa makes use of an 88-92 mph fastball that works inward on righties. It flattens out at higher velocities. Presently it's about average, but it has some plus potential. His secondary stuff is very advanced for his age, and he relies on it heavily. He mixes in an excellent low-80s backdoor slider, a nice low-70s curve (his out pitch), and occasionally makes use of an above average forkball (basically a split-fingered change-up). Tonight (or should I say this morning?) he threw a four-seam fastball and two-seam fastball, both around 91-93 mph. His breaking pitches were an 81-83 mph slider and a 77-78 mph curveball. There was no sign tonight (in two innings) of a change-up, splitter, or forkball. So it looks like this scouting report from Casey Greer at Bleacher Report might be more accurate or up-to-date than the more oft-quoted report from SoxProspects. Tazawa features a low-mid-90s fastball, which tails in on right-handed hitters. His curve, which generally sits between 75-78 mph, is an effective offspeed pitch with sharp, late break. His slider, or possibly a shuuto, which he throws the least of all of the pitches breaks mostly down, and sits in the low-mid-80s. The pitch that A-Rod hit for a home run was a curveball. Other factors 1, numbers behind numbers 0Brian Bannister was knocked out of his start Friday night after allowing five runs to the Oakland Athletics in the fourth inning. What happened? Well, it certainly didn't help that Bannister threw only 20 of 36 pitches in that inning for strikes. He walked Tommy Everidge and Adam Kennedy, both of whom came around to score. But aside from that, did Bannister's "numbers behind numbers" fail him? He allowed seven balls in play in the inning: five ground balls, one line drive, and one fly ball. So in that sense, he got what he wanted--70 percent ground balls. That's good, right? Did they hit the ball too hard on the ground? Did he just get unlucky? Or was he trumped by, as Dayton Moore puts it, the "other factors" of the defense behind him? Let's take a look. Batted ball #1: a sharp ground ball single scoots between second baseman Alberto Callaspo and first baseman Billy Butler into right field. This one was hit pretty solidly. Batted ball #2: a bouncing ground ball fielded by first baseman Billy Butler at the edge of the grass, toss to Bannister coming over for the out. Well-executed defense, but a typical ground ball out on the infield. Batted ball #3: a line drive out straight to center fielder Josh Anderson. The ball was hit right on the nose but Bannister got a little lucky with this one. Batted ball #4: a three-hop ground ball single past the shortstop side of second base and into center field. Why was Betancourt positioned so far into the hole that he couldn't even come close to this one?  Batted ball #5: a fly ball double off the wall in right field. This was a change-up down but right over the middle of the plate, and Cliff Pennington hit it hard and deep. Blame Bannister for this one. Batted ball #6: a two-hop ground ball single cut off by second baseman Alberto Callaspo on the shortstop side of second base. Callaspo's throw was unable to beat a speedy Rajai Davis at first. Once again, Betancourt is playing deep in the hole and can't seem to range over to get this one, although it looked like he could have made the play on the ball and the throw to first on Davis if he'd called Callaspo off. On both this ball and the Ellis single it looked like Callaspo was running about twice as fast to the ball as Betancourt.  Batted ball #7: a two-hop ground ball single past shortstop Yuniesky Betancourt in the hole between short and third and into left field. .  Betancourt can't field balls hit up the middle on the shortstop side of second base, even if the second baseman can reach them. He can't field balls hit into the hole. I must be missing some of those "other factors" like defensive positioning and what not, although I'm not sure what positioning gives you problems with balls up the middle and in the hole. I don't watch as many games as Dayton Moore's scouts or Willie Bloomquist's memory, though, so you should draw your own conclusions. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||