Kentucky

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Felix Hernandez?  Like the scout says, pitchers aren't baseball players.  The principle must not apply to pitchers.  He looks great when he lets the ball go, however... 

Funny thing, it happens for him when his hair is longer, though.  And I ain't a long-hair kinda guy.

I'm sure that the picture above is one reason that I've never bought into Felix Hernandez as the spiritual Mariners descendant of Randy Johnson.  Unfortunately, I can't rewire the primal part of my brain.

Here is the one serious paragraph, lost in the barren wasteland of this 3-part series:  the best things we could do about the "Baseball Face" bias is to (1) be aware of it, and (2) work hard to overcome it.  Jason Vargas is a good pitcher and Felix Hernandez is a great one.  

This is one of the things that keeps Fangraphs in business against tools scouts who know more baseball than they do:  Fangraphs is completely impervious to the Baseball Face trap.  Considering MLB players as nothing more than lines of alphanumeric characters, they are mercifully free of biases which SOMETIMES go awry.

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James Paxton, like Jered Weaver, has an absolutely perfect Kentucky pitcher's face - if he weren't pitching, he'd be out plinking squirrels off tree branches at 50 yards.  

Danny Hultzen has the great silver-spoon Ivy League pitcher's face.   Mark all of the M's pheenom hurlers way up for their baseball faces.

Sudden thought.  Do you think Zduriencik passed on Bauer and Rendon because of their 8x10 glossies?

Taijuan Walker has a sports face; you'd have to ask the Moneyball scouts whether he has a good girlfriend...

Jon Shields has various scouts' quotes on the M's top-100 pitching pheenoms, those being Paxton, Walker, and Campos (with Hultzen next).

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=== James Paxton, LHP ===

For those who just joined us, Baseball America is on the extreme right-side scouting end of the baseball-analysis spectrum.  They are therefore not going to give as much weight to James Paxton's demonstrated 115/20 control, as a college pitcher at Kentucky, as they're going to give to the velocity of Taijuan Walker's fastball.

Dr. D aspires to the center of the spectrum, using both scouting and saber to figure out pitchers, and so he's rather higher on Paxton than tools scouts seem to be.  Those who use only* clipboards or only* the Fangraphs site are not going to like Paxton as much as I do, since Paxton scores 95 cents on the dollar in both places.

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If it's an expansion draft, and I can only protect one minor leaguer in the Mariners' system, it is Paxton, gentlemen, not Walker.

Walker is thrilling, but there is no way you can put him #1 and Paxton #8.  Paxton is the more valuable commodity.  

Paxton's tools are 97% as dynamic as Taijuan's is -- his skill set is, like Kershaw's, actually an even better match for the ML game -- and of the two of them, Paxton is the one who has applied his tools more effectively.

=== Jack Frost with a .310 OBP ===

Heard on the Weather Channel that 31% of the U.S. is covered in snow.  Couldn't be warmer from Dr. D's war room in Bonney Lake, though.  Baseball's here :- )

=== Don't Know What This Has to Do With Anything, But I Thought I'd Mention It, Dept. ===

The A's bullpen looked filthy, didn't it?