Check out a couple of the other M's sites. They are advocating a Carp/Wells PLATOON in LF.
Really. No kidding. Sheeeeeeesh....
We trade Fister for a part-time platoon guy?
They're wrong of course. vL platoon guys are all over out there. You don't have to give up a #3 for them.
Z must see Wells as a 550-600 PA guy.
As I said in another thread, more and more I see Beavan as a part of this trade. In effect, we got Beavan as part of the deal. He's now in the rotation for good this year...and supposedly beyond.
Beavan AND a .260-.325-.455 Wells (which is the '11 Wells and doesn't include his lightening-in-a-bottle '10) in CF is a pretty good trade-off for Fister. Then, any MLB peformance from the other three guys, especially Furbush, is BIG gravy.
moe
=== Slaves To Our Principles ===
We notice, in a quick surf around the Seattle blog-o-sphere, a lot of folks who are virtually writing Wells off because he's now 26 years old.
***
In the 1970's and early 1980's, Bill James argued that if you had a hundred 23-year-old hitters and a hundred 25-year-old hitters, both hitting the same way in AAA baseball ... that the 23-year-olds, as a group, would have twice as many hits in their careers as the 25-year-olds would. (That is almost word-for-word the argument that he put in one of his Abstracts.)
Baseball scouts hated James' guts for saying this, and it was an ugly war for many years.
Like most good ideas, this age-arc principle has gone wayyyyyyyy too far. There is a big difference between saying "the 23-year-olds will do better as a group" and saying "the 25-year-olds will never do anything."
.
=== The Ideal ===
For a High School player to develop classically and ideally as a 1st-round major league All-Star, he would hit these checkpoints:
- Age 20: Cleanup hitter in A+ ball
- Age 21: Rips up AA ball
- Age 22: Rips up AAA ball
- Age 23: Average player in major leagues
- Age 24: Good player in major leagues
- Age 26-27: ML All-Star
Check me on this, but I think Shin-Soo Choo followed this basic timeline.
You get a player arriving much faster than that, and you have a real shot at a HOF career. At age 19, Griffey was age 24, as it were. At age 21, he was age 27... at age 27, he was outside the normal scheme.
***
Not meaning to go emo about it, it does make me melancholy to see fans writing off players who are at all behind this ideal. Player after player, you have to re-establish the point all over again, convert the world one person at a time.
Most ML regulars did not achieve the above timeline.
***
Being a star in AAA at age 22, that is just like having a 95 mph fastball. It means you have much better chances. It doesn't mean you're playing a different sport.
.
=== Cases In Point ===
If you want to find players who were nowhere at age 24, 25, or later, just click on any random MLB hitter's name. The odds are probably like 67% that the MLB regular was not a regular at age 24.
You've got real late bloomers like Rauuuuuul Ibanez, Jose Bautista, legit stars who were nowhere at age 28, much less age 24.
But you've got boatloads of good ML players, who, out of college, were following Casper Wells' timeline:
- Age 25 & 26 - Ripping up AAA, big splash in MLB (.490 SLG)
- Age 24 - Good player repeating AA (weak, consolidation, year)
- Age 23 - Destroyed AA (.589 SLG)
- Age 22 - Cleanup hitter in A ball
- Age 21 - Struggled first year out of college
- Age 20 - NCAA
He's basically one year right-shifted against a classic path to "ML Regular" out of college.
Mike Morse followed a similar path, despite having the advantage of being a High School player:
- Age 28 - Arrives as ML cleanup hitter
- Age 27 - 300/400/500 in AAA; teams can't decide what to do with him
- Age 25 & 26 - 300/370/480 in AAA .... surprisingly good in ML trials
- Age 24 - Decent in AAA ... suprisingly tough in ML taste
- Age 23 - Decent in AAA ... suprisingly tough in ML taste
- Age 22 - Cleanup hitter in AA ball
- Age 21 - Decent in A ball
- Age 20 - Decent in A ball
=== The Bottom Line ===
If you offered me 100 players on Morse's, and Casper Wells', career minors arc, I wouldn't bet heavily on a whole bunch of them.
But now supposing that you allowed me to cherrypick those 20 of them, who landed in the big leagues slugging .500 in their first 200 PA's? Those are different odds, aren't they?
.
=== Dr's Prognosis ===
Wells has a label as a boring prospect without much upside. And SSI doesn't say that he's Justin Smoak. Not by a longshot.
But as boring prospects go, he has survived the most brutal cut of all, and has pounded ML pitching -- looking sound, doing it. That puts his age-arc in a distinctly different category from those of, say, Carlos Peguero or Matt Tuiasosopo.
It's worth a long look. Watching Mike Carp, and watching Casper Wells, becomes approximately the same game in 2011.
Hey, you're sick of prospects coming up to the bigs and failing. Here's one who came up and didn't. Enjoy his audition.
Cheers,
Dr D
Comments
Let's assume that the '11 Wells is the real Wells and discount '10. Hey, he BABIP'ed .371 last year. That ain't happening again.
He's at a sustainable .313 this year.
His LD rate and his GB rate were higher in '10 and his FB rate considerable lower.
So, '11 may be the sustainable career path for Wells with occassional dips downward.
He's played 74 MLB innings in LF, 58 in CF, and 377 in RF. He's a plus defender at all positions, with a career UZR150 of 22+. In his (very) limited CF innings he's at 26.
So, if we look at '11 as his template, we have a very nice CF bat with a better than decent CF glove. By the way, Carp is showing himself as a plus 10 UZR150 guy in LF. Gutierrez is a plus 21 career guy in CF. So it appears that Wells is, at least, adequate in CF, perhaps (much) better. He may be close to Gutierrez. Carp can certainly field his position. A Wells bat/glove in CF and a Carp bat/glove in LF is much more attractive, in a runs created and saved way, than Guti and either.
And if Beavan is Fister-lite, this becomes more attractive. If so, it certainly is interesting how quickly Z will have bailed out on Guti, who was his first real "steal."
So, in that situation, does Guti become a 4th OF or is he on the block next (assuming his value hasn't totally crashed and burned). I remember advocating a Guti for Ellsbury swap with the Sox over the winter, when Ellsbury's stock was low in Boston. How would that look now?
If you guys eveer watched any original Star trek you will remember that, iin nearlly every episode, some expendable security guard on the Enterprise got vaporized. Are Saunders, Peguerro, Halman, and Guti now completely expendable sucurity guards?
Two of them probably are. I still think there is a Z/Wedge man crush on Peguerro's pop so he hangs around. What about the other guys.
Would love to see Wells in CF today. It would be a comforting statement.
Does Wedge have the huevo's to make that statement from day one? Let's see.
More likely that Carp DH's the first game, but I think we can all see that a Guti return to '09, bat-wise, appears less likely all the time.
Casper in CF batting 5th or 6th today? Very cool.
Smoak sits for the second day in a row, while Carp maintains the cleanup role.
The horror outcome in this for Dr. D is the M's shedding Carp to go become Shin-Soo Choo someplace else... an outcome that would invalidate, at a stroke, whatever Zdurneick did on July 31...
So the daily Carp watch is on, and today's news is cheery...