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If Edgar in his prime had put on Grouch Marx glasses and snuck down to the AFL how would you know?
Ackley Fall League Primer - Stats
Q. Can you "translate" AFL stats?
A. No.
You can't grab a Major League Equivalency (MLE) out of the AFL.
You can't take a particular AFL season and say, hey, the batters were facing pitching that was 87.3% as good as major league pitching, and so you can't say "a guy hit .300 in the AFL and so could hit .264 in the majors."
You can, essentially, do that with AAA and AA baseball. You can't with the AFL.
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Q. Can you make any sense of the stats?
A. Yes! Sometimes.
Oftentimes, 'net-only sabertistas figure that these two things are exactly the same:
- Converting a league's stats systematically to MLE
- Gaining any information at all out of a league's stats
Dr. D happens to know, directly, that ML orgs do not draw this equivalency that is so implicit in the writings of 'net saberdudes.
Guys figure, "Well, we can't systematically EqA the AFL's stats -- the league is too inconsistent -- so they're worthless."
Not so. ML franchises can't EqA college stats, but they're hard at work distilling what they can from those stats.
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Q. For instance?
A. For instance, Tim Lincecum pitched in exactly the same league as Brandon Morrow -- and struck out twice as many hitters as did Morrow. Can you make any sense of that stat, amigo?
Experimentally speaking, Morrow is the "mini-control" and Lincecum's the delta. Lincecum did, in reality, turn out to have way better stuff -- and Morrow's was plenty sizzling itself.
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Q. Ackley's got a .444 AVG with a .600 OBP and a .800 SLG. What sense do you make of that?
A. Only that Dustin Ackley has a high-minors "select" league hugely overmatched.
Once you are in "stop da fight" territory, that's all you can tell. The guy should be two leagues up, probably. The rest suffers from imprecision.
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Q. How about from his BB/K? The kid's at 21:8 now?
A. We remember when Frank Thomas was in college, the scouts didn't like him much.
James fired off angrily, "This is a big huge guy who is light on his feet, who won't swing at a ball, ever, and .... " Boy, I wish I could remember how the rest of that went. :- )
It's clear now that Dustin Ackley simply will not swing at a pitch outside the strike zone. That takes a lot of things away from a pitcher, you know what I'm saying?
Baseball is about the strike zone, and this is a kid with Edgar-like strike zone control.
The fact that he's got 4 homers, leading the AFL, and that he had so many homers in college... you've got to be optimistic about his chances to make the pitchers respect him.
Edgar used to hit 20, 25 homers a year, and a bunch of doubles. Did the pitchers take liberties with 2-0 fastballs? "You make a mistake with that guy," Cito Gaston once said, "And there's no telling where the ball will wind up."
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Q. Exec Sum?
A. The AFL torching doesn't anoint anybody an MLB All-Star. But this kid is starting to look like a lefty Edgar to me. With wheels, didja say?
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Cheerio,
Dr D
Comments
2
The question for me is not whether anyone could do better. That would be REALLY hard to do at the blistering pace that Ackley is setting.
The question is, "Is it possible to be an AFL monster and not be a good pro, or even a great prospect?"
And the answer to that is yes.
This year, who are the prospects right behind Ackley?
Juan Carlos Linares, 1.180 OPS. 26 year old Cuban defector, plays CF, was miserable in his first 50 ABs in the pros (.662 OPS, 13K/0BB) and stellar in these last 50 in the AFL.
Derrick Norris, 1.098 OPS. 21 year old catcher. Rated the #38 prospect by BA before the season. Career .876 OPS bat behind the plate with a great eye and low BA.
Cory Harrilchak, 1.052 OPS. 22 year old, low-power CF/RF. Drafted in the 14th round. Might be the best OF prospect in the Braves' system, though. I see Jeremy Reed.
Charlie Culberson, 1.048 OPS. 21 year old 2B/3B. Had a sub-.800 OPS in the Cal League in his 4th year as a pro. Supplemental first round pick in 2007, terrible til now.
Jordan Pacheco, 1.026 OPS. 24 year old Catcher, transplanted from MIF. Rising prospect with a career .824 OPS and an even batting eye.
So as I look them, I might be tempted to say, "Wow, Ackley is really staking a claim to an opening day roster spot, and Linares is starting to make the pro transition with style, and Norris and Pacheco are continuing to climb as catching prospects...but Harrilchak and Culberson are just getting lucky and will be falling back to earth shortly."
50-80 at-bats are a tough way to make a judgment. If Ackley came out of the gate in April and posted a .600 OPS in the bigs for the month, I wouldn't exactly consider him a bust. If he'd only been average in the AFL I wouldn't have thought he needed another year in the minors to get ready. So how much weight can be placed in the numbers he IS posting.
When succeeding means something, but not everything, and failure is easily discounted, that's when it's hard to tell what the league performance means.
I do believe his performance is indicative of something, but it still doesn't mean he's immune to falling on his face come 2011, any more than his good performance means mister Culberson is going to carry this back to AA and suddenly become a monster.
I like it, I get enthusiastic about it...but my expectations for Ackley's coming year remain unchanged from September.
~G
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In my opinion there is 20 homers in this guy with high OBP and runs with improvement every year at 2B...I see Olerud,Edgar,Jeter with high run totals and winning games....I see a guy who will be a quiet leader who will win games. I see a guy who will be a great teammate who will win games. I see a guy that every team he plays on wins games...
John
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I think Ackley is our #3 hitter by about August of 2011 and will stay there until he either retires or signs to play for someone else.
And I think Smoak is our #4 hitter starting in about...August of 2011 (hey there!) and will stay there until he either retires or signs to play for someone else. Hey...three down, 6 to go. :)
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different about Ackley vs. those other guys you listed above is that Ackley isn't merely posting top of the league numbers like the guys above. He is doing something MORE than destroying the league. I can not even come up with an appropriate adjective for what Ackley is doing to the AFL. I agree that all those guys above are destroying the AFL, but Ackley is a standard deviation ABOVE those guys. And while the stats for those guys may or may not carry over, and Ackley's may not carry over completely to the majors. I think it does tell us something that Ackley (or anyone) even has the ability to put up the numbers he is. We are out of the realm of luck or merely being on a hot streak like Culberson is having.
If Ackley was just merely destroying the AFL (heck even the once golden prospect Brandon Wood is doing fairly well down there this year) I would agree with you, that it is great to see and it keeps me excited about Ackley, but is no garuntee. But in my mind this is different and I have in fact upgraded Ackley's potential ceiling in my mind after seeing this. Yeah his probability of hitting his 25%, 50% and 100% projections may not have changed, but the projection itself has take a fairly large shift up IMO.
Where as I once saw Ackley as a very good shot at an all star 2 hole hitting, OBP machine 2bman (Pedroia ceiling), I know see him as a very good shot to being an All star 3 hole hitting 2bman, still more predicated on OBP than SLG, but a legitimate 3 hole hitter all the same (Utley ceiling, or ::shudder:: Morgan ;) ).
Of course I tend to be WAYYYYY too optimistic on these things anyways :)
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I give up :- )
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As you so well articulated: Ackley is visibly consolidating his acorn-gathering process.
Hey, as you know G, the pros will move a kid up-and-down their draft board based on one weekend in May.
An NFL mini-camp is a piece of data that goes into the hopper. Ackley's mini-camp is showing a lot of things. Airtightness of his strike zone, reaction to offspeed, ability to drive the ball.
Gotta part ways on this one. Ackley's stock is pleasantly up for me :- )
...............
If you mean: hey, we knew he was great before? Then yeah.
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Is that Ackley's putting on a full-court press to be given a fair shot in March... publicly and, no doubt, through his agent...
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But in my mind this is different and I have in fact upgraded Ackley's potential ceiling in my mind after seeing this.
Would agree.
Seeing Ackley do that Franklin whip-crack HR against Reynolds, seeing the SLG, well ... the ball sounded like a Browning .300 Win Mag.
The AFL doesn't overthrow previous evaluations -- agree with G there -- but I'm a LOT more comfortable with Ackley's chances to show Edgar-type power.
Franklin weighs 170 and none of us doubt his ability to hit home runs, because of his swing. For me, Ackley is showing similar right now.
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... you're describing Joe Morgan...
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I understand completely that you can be an AFL success and a MLB failure. Not gonna argue that. But I have to disagree a little that failure is easily discounted. Stock can and does fall with a poor AFL performance.
If Ack were flailing and failing miserably maybe you are level headed enough to toss it out but lots of folks would be wanting to reevaluate him. If say for example he had tripled or quadrupled his strike out rate I think Jack Z would be on the phone wanting someone to sit Ackley down in front of an eye chart pronto!
I guess I just have trouble with the paradigm being that success is disregarded or at least treated indifferently while I know failure matters when it comes to rating prospects. I hope kids aren't sent to Arizona being told. “It doesn’t matter if you do great, just don’t suck.”
I’m personally having a hard time not getting excited because he’s not doing anything radically outside of his skill set. If it were say, Balentien, getting 15 walks in 50 at bats you could chalk it up to some wild arms in the desert. It would be easy to dismiss as an outlier because he’s never shown that to be in his skill set. But with Ackley I don’t see him doing anything GREAT that he hasn’t at least done really GOOD already. Am I missing something?
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Hope there are more where those came from.
................
The 5-walks-in-5-AB's type stuff tell us, as y'know, that Ackley's strike zone is diamond-hard. That he's not getting anxious because the previous 2 hours have been weird. That no matter what angle you throw at him, he's still got an idea up there.
I love the consistency of his zone in 9,734 different scenarios, and love the whippy authority in his bat. He's seeing 900 different blitzes and loving all of 'em.
Nobody's saying that a big AFL is a guarantee, but *this* big AFL is exciting, for me. Ackley had a few question marks and those are precisely what he's rebuffing.
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...I was saying he'd be our #3 hitter by no later than August...I think he'll be somewhere in the line-up a lot sooner than that. :)
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Ya, I know...
Wondering how quick Ackley could be winning games.
There's the acknowledged possibility that Ackley could go through Smoak-type adjustments, but there's another possibility that he could be the M's best hitter (except Ichiro) in April...
I notice that Evan Longoria hit .273/.388/.527 in his first month in the bigs... Olerud had a 121 OPS+ in his first month as a 20-year-old...
It's just in Seattle that we rule out splash landings :- )
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I would not be at all surprised if Ackley hit .290/.390/.450 his very first month in the bigs...or even better...but a guy's gotta hedge his bets a tiny bit, right? :)
I'm foaming at the mouth excited for this kid...he's the most "sure thing" prospect we've had since A-Rod.