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Lookout Landing has a cool, fan (fun?) post up. The funpost headlines "Tyler O'Neill might be Bryce Harper and Mike Trout."
1. The author, knowing that O'Neill had "a gigantic jump forward in 2016," measures that by K, BB, and OPS+. Well, wRC+, but ninety percent of the time OPS+ has the same number as wRC+, within the margin of error, and I interchange them because everybody here knows OPS+.
2. He points out that this big improvement in numbers came despite a promotion from A ball to AA ball - from the low minors to the high minors, where they throw breaking balls behind in the count.
3. He finishes with 'elan, Any one of the changes would be exciting in isolation; take them all together and suddenly you're a top-50 prospect.
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4. What is cool and fun, is that the author goes back to a 2010 list of Baseball America top prospects and he asks, how many had any minors season (in 2008, 2010, or whatever) that saw improvements in EYE and OPS+ like that?
He finds that four did it -- Jason Heyward, Giancarlo Stanton, Carlos Santana, and Buster Posey (though Posey had to repeat levels to do it). Ten did not, and they were all Justin Smoak.
Intrigued, he runs it for 2012. The glam prospects who had a huge plateau leap on the resume were Harper, Trout, Manny Machado and Jurickson Profar.
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There are a couple of objections to this: First, O'Neill was not a Baseball America top-20 prospect, and so is not a 5-tool buffet of talent like Heyward who THEN added a great SABERMETRIC showing into the bargain. (Actually Tyler O'Neill is being called pretty freakish as an athlete now that he's a good baseball player.)
Second, I'm guessing that O'Neill had an easier route to victory than most of these guys. LL is using EYE ratio, and O'Neill's was like 0.20 before he made his leap. (But still, factoring in the A+ to AA promotion, Tyler O'Neill got way wayyyyyy better very suddenly.)
But that said, c'mon. Practically everybody in 2010 and 2012 who pulled a Tyler O'Neill --- > wound up a big star in the majors. Maybe it's a good thing we didn't trade him for Jake Odorizzi (no offense Mo' Dawg!).
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Here's a good side video from rkyosh007 on YouTube. Compare O'Neill's dynamics to Jeff Bagwell's.
Enjoy,
Dr D