=== Wit and Wisdom Dept. ===

Slap me silly, you want to see some tight writin' infotainment, check out Spec on Kevin Rivers. 

That article is a model of what M's-minors blogging should be:  heavy research, witty lines, great sense of backdrop and context, a topic (Rivers) that is garden-fresh, yada yada yada ... you can't stop Specktater, you can only hope to contain him.

Not going to call this a POTD, since Spec already had that one.  But hip-checking off his fine work, we'll try to offer a bit of almanac-style perspective:

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Q.  If a hitter is nowhere at 21, is it possible for him to be an ML impact player?  Is it a huge longshot ?

A.  First of all, Rivers wasn't nowhere at 21.  He was nowhere at 20.

At age 21 -- his debut* in pro ball, now, so there's no failure on the resume -- he led his low-A league in OPS+.  Because he turned out to be too good for the league*, we have no way of knowing whether he was a class-A player, an A+ player, or even a solid AA player.  There are any number of AA players who would have performed worse than Rivers just did.

In order to triangulate a player's level, you would ideally want him to be performing at league average.  The weirder his performance is in a league -- terrible or terrific -- the less you know where he should have been to start the year.  But if a 22-year-old hits .270/.340/.430 at AA and then hits .265/.335/.450 at AAA as a 23-year-old, you can say, yes, he was a AA player at 22 and a AAA player at 23.

We don't know whether Rivers was an A- player at 21.  It doesn't look like he was, does it?  In retrospect you'd have liked to know what he'd have done at A or even A+.

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Q.  In plain English, what did Rivers actually do this season?  How much did the sky-high BABIP muddy the water?

A.  He hit like Bernie Williams or Bobby Abreu.  You know what they did in the majors in their primes?  Okay, that's what Rivers just did in low-A, after you edit out the defense and park effects.  Like Williams/Abreu looked in the majors, Rivers looked in low-A.

Minorleaguesplits.com to the rescue.  After you take away Rivers' BABIP "luck" and take away benefits for the park, he still hits .275/.415/.465 -- a legit .400-and-plenty OBP with excellent gap power for a 21-year-old.  (Gap power is what 21-year-old sluggers have.)

"Normalizing" for "luck" gives Rivers a big penalty -- and as Taro notes, it's not clear that Rivers "deserved" only a .335 BABIP.  BABIP's can go to .360 even in the majors, if you're Jim Thome and you're putting speed on the ball.

Normalizing for park is valid only in huge samples, like 50,000 at-bats.  It's not clear that Rivers specifically got anything from his home park.  He might have got nothing (or he might have gotten a triple benefit).

If you don't normalize for park and "luck" -- say you edit the BABIP to .365 -- Rivers had an Edgar Martinez season.  .300/.440/.525. 

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But supposing you do knock Rivers down on all that:  adjusted, he had an Abreu, or Bernie Williams, or Paul O'Neill, slash line this year (then made to look much better by soft defense).

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