Cool Papa Bell, who won the last 20-team mixed league at DOV/SSI, sez:
I am completely unfit to be commenting on a players mechanics so while all this sounds good I really have no clue how correct it is. What I do know a little bit about is stats. And something I have discovered is that if a hitter has any sort of major league career, his ISO in the majors will be BETTER than what it was in the minors. Now, I haven't done any kind of study and it might not hold up for the guys with next to no power (like Luis Castillo and Willie Bloomquist), but from what I've seen this is a very reliable rule of thumb.
With that in mind, I think it is extremely bad analysis for anyone to state that a guy who swats 25 homers as a teenager will only be a 15 or 20 homer guy in the majors. That appears to completely ignore how players actually develop. If Franklin has what it takes to play in the show, then his power is probably going to be a plus, not mediocre.
A convincing re-statement of the 200 principle. (A real expert has 200 of 1,000 light bulbs on; an aspiring expert has 950 of them on.)
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Part of it has got to be the difference in shoulders and chest for the same guy aged 19 or aged 24. Part is anticipating the pitch and loading up on it. Part is who knows what.
For some reason, it's an act of Congress to convince most folks of that, though. Seems that I've re-argued this point at least five or ten times.
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One thing is for sure: very odd to see Nick Franklin hit 22 homers in only 124 games as a teenager, and AFTER he does that, to see crack Seattle analysts assure us all .... that Franklin will never hit homers in the bigs. To be fair, the locals are passing along conventional wisdom. CPB's more perplexing question, is why many professional scouts aren't hip to his Advancing Iso Principle. :- )
I agree with CPB: this completely inverts the actual ISO arc that would be normal for a kid like Franklin. If a boy shows flashes of pop at 19-20, you can fairly project more consistent pop once he has a man's body.
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CPB again:
Every year hundreds of players are drafted by MLB clubs, and every year we are treated to tons of analysis by bloggers and Baseball America telling us just how good all of those players are and how they all rank amongst each other. Now, everybody knows that the development of young players is extremely volatile and we all giggle about how wrong the experts were about most of the players in years past. Yet when the next draft comes about, everyone spends hours talking about whether a guy deserved to be drafted with the 17th pick or the 24th, and we get all angry and flustered about who the team picked or who they passed up.
This is all really absurd. We don't have a clue how any of these guys will develop. What we do know, what we can be absolutely positive about, is that our expectations will turn out wildly wrong. So I get really tired when people bash the team over the draft and act like they know so much more than the professionals. While there are certainly some picks that are worthy of criticism, for the most part we should reserve ALL judgment for a couple of years.
Nick Franklin is a perfect example of this. At the time of the draft most M's fans were upset because he wasn't viewed as being real good and there were a bunch of guys available who were SOOOO much better. Well, one year later and we can see that flatly is not the case.
It also needs to be pointed out that the teams know FAR more about each of these players than any of us. I respect people like Jason Churchill and John Sickels, but they are operating with a fraction of the information of a MLB scouting director and we need to keep that in mind. Also, teams don't get ahead of their competitors by going along with the consensus. No, they need to BEAT the consensus which necessarily means evaluating players differently from others.
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As to the need to beat the consensus, no doubts that there is a lot more room to do that in MLB than there is in, say, the NFL.
The NFL has indeed gotten scary-close to "solving" draft methodology, and as far as I know they've got the co-op Groupthink factored into the bargain. In the 1960's and even 1970's, the Steelers and Cowboys could run a draft and get 6 of the top 30 players on their own boards. That's over with, but in baseball there are future stars up-and-down the draft.
Zdurencik and co. provided the Brewers with a legit crop of young draft stars, and he might very well have pulled off the same kind of "ahead of the curve" coup with Franklin. If so, it's the kind of thing that turns a franchise around.
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From the position of the hands at ready, to the slide forward into launch, to the angle of the bat through, to the blossomy finish, Nick Franklin's swing is closer to Ken Griffey Jr's swing than any I've seen. No exceptions. Franklin's swing is as close to Griffey's as you'll see.
Of course, Franklin isn't as big as Junior. If he were, you could confidently begin speaking of his 35-50 homers. How many homers would Junior hit if he were 6', 175 lbs? Maybe we'll see.
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Good to hear from you CPB. If you get a minute, where are you on Smoak?
Cheers,
Jeff
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