Baseball's Best Rookies, 1900-2017
All Rise, dept.

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At BJOL I guess they had a spare 20 or 30 minutes, and they scratched up a formula on the back of a baseball envelope to determine whether Aaron Judge is a superstar.  (He is.)

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METHOD

James classes all 15,907 position player rooks into 10 categories, using something a la the idea of a standard deviation -- 50% of all seasons were Level One seasons, that is, 7,490 of them.  Level Two has about 53% as many players as level one.  Level Three rookie seasons are 53% as common as level Two, and so forth -- James' plan was to have 25 Level Ten seasons, so he massaged the 53% to get there.

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THE BUFFET LINE ...

The article would be good reading if it were a 200-page novella, with sections like "The Top Rookies of 1900-1919," a second asking "Should you have bet on Walt Dropo or Ron Kittle?," and stuff like that.  By "stuff like that" we mean "stuff like chessplayers would write it," since we're always asking the question "how could we have thought about that weekend Swiss game in 1992 that would have fixed the timeline we live in?"

If you were wrong, how would you know, man.  There's never a bad time to ask it, know what um sayin.

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... BUT WE'LL JUST GRAB A COUPLA SIDE DISHES, MOST OF THEM TRANSPARENTLY MOTIVATED TO THE LOCAL BOYS

1.  If a rookie was Level One, he's got about a 1/5 chance of going on to 1,000 career AB's.  That actually seems like a lot, doesn't it?  Does that mean that every Mariner who batted in 2017 has about a 10%, 20% chance of becoming a regular?

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2.  There were 94 Level Ones this year, including Guillermo Heredia, 'Bach, Jacob Hannemann, and Mike Marjama.  Of all 94 players, not of all 4 players, there "might" be one or two in there who have pretty good careers but not more than that.

I could easily see Heredia beating odds on this one.

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3.  At least 44% of Level Two rookies will go on to >1,000 plate appearances.  Don't get the idea that you can't get a great player out of Two.  James names Thome, Palmeiro, Darrell Evans, Ted Simmons, David Ortiz, Manny, and ten other guys from that group.  Fascinatingly, Level Twos who do go on to star, always* go on to be power hitters.  That right there was worth your $3, yer skinflint yer.

The 64 Level Twos included Taylor Motter and Tyler Smith.  Dr. D knows two guys who need to keep reading SSI, those being Jerry Dipoto and Moe Dawg.  Give Taylor another chance there why don'cha JeDi.

Zoom had an interesting take, that the Mariners are frustrated with Motter's ability to adjust to pro pitch sequences despite being well capable.  Way above Dr. D's pay grade to even suggest a specific here, but it sure would be nice to see Motter re-rack and take that second run at Brian Dozier.

And, I never did quite jump on board with Keith about Tyler Smith, but he might wanna hang on to that one.  :: dumb and dumber ::

 - NEXT - 

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