Cubs Top Prospects

 

Recently I saw an article from Baseball Prospectus that has been commented on in other places.  It lists the top twenty minor league prospects in the organization and discusses the top ten in some detail.  All I can say is that if this is the best, we really don’t know the half of what a mess Jim Hendry and company have made of the minor league system.

I want to state right off that, as readers of this blog know, I am an advocate of the Bill James/sabermetric method of evaluating talent.  There are many variants of this school of thought, but one thing they all have in common – and one thing the new leadership of the organization undoubtedly seconds – is that there is nothing more important than not making outs and showing patience and discipline at the plate.  A corollary to this judgment is that it is very hard to teach this skill, especially at the major league level.

Having said that, it is astonishing how many of the higher-rated hitters seem to be entirely lacking in this respect.  Kevin Goldstein, the author, rates only one player, Brett Jackson, as a five-star prospect.  Jackson ought to be playing CF or RF next year, hopefully right out of spring training.

Of the rest, there are seven hitters among them.  Only a few do not have the knock of being overly aggressive, strikes out a lot, swings at everything, out of control, etc., attached to the commentary.  These include Javier Baez (“rarely took pitches—even bad ones—in high school”), Wellington Castillo, Matt Szczur (“has a very poor approach at the plate”), Josh Vitters (“sabotages himself at the plate by swinging at far too many bad pitches”), Jaimer Candelario, Marco Hernandez, and Junior Lake (“a complete mess at the plate with very little discipline”).

This list doesn’t even include former hot prospect Tyler Colvin, whose shortcomings were all too obvious at all levels last season.  The problem with plate discipline is that it is very difficult to teach the higher a player advances in the system and the older he gets.

I’d have to say right now that Castillo, Candelario, and Hernandez are the most likely of this group to have a major league future with the Cubs, as well as, of course, Brett Jackson.  The rest are very unlikely to make the grade here, though Baez may be young enough to be turned around if he is teachable.  Look for many of these names, including Colvin, to turn up as throw-ins or overrated minor leaguers in future deals.

Just as an aside, you have to wonder why the Cubs have retained the highly compensated and highly regarded hitting coach Rudy Jaramillo.  Since their banner year of 2008, when the team scored 855 runs and had an OBP of .354, they have seen a steady decline in performance.

707 runs, .332 OBP in 2009; 685 runs, .320 OBP in 2010; 654 runs, .314 OBP in 2011.  2010 and 2011 were Rudy’s stats.  Not too good, even accounting for the decline in talent and player skills during those years.

Zambrano Hit by Line Drive

Carlos Zambrano was hit in the face by a line drive yesterday in the fifth inning of what looked like his best performance to date in the Venezuelan Winter League.  He reportedly had some stiches in his lower lip, but from the video it looks like a glancing blow.

What is really remarkable about the incident is that it looks as if he almost caught the ball on the fly and, in any case, made the play to first base.  Rather easily, in fact.

Say what you will about this guy, but he is an amazing athlete.  Maybe he could play first or third base.

Thoughts on the Manager Selection

News broke late yesterday that Dale Sveum was offered the job managing the Chicago Cubs.  Today that story was confirmed.  In a sense that was a surprise since he seemed the least articulate candidate in the post-interview press conferences and was generally considered the favorite for the Boston job.

That followed news earlier in the day that Terry Francona would not manage this season, and so was not a candidate for the Cubs job.  Not that he was ever a serious candidate except in the minds of imaginative sportswriters.

News also broke earlier in the day that Mike Maddux, thought by some to be the favorite after his standup routine in the interview postmortem, had disqualified himself for family reasons.  Frankly, one
of the things that damped my enthusiasm for Maddux was all this soul-searching about leaving Texas and wanting to be near his family.  It strikes me as showing a lack of commitment to the Cubs job.  I mean, you are getting a three or four year deal.  There are schools and houses in Chicago and its immediate surroundings.  Good ones, too.  So what's the problem?  It is not like his kids are babies, either.  His daughters are 21 and 19 respectively.

My personal choice was Sandy Alomar, Jr., who actually lives in Chicago and was also a former catcher, which is a big plus in my book for managerial candidates.  I cannot see what all the fuss is about Sveum, though baseball guys seem to like him and I expect one must defer to the new management crowd on the assumption they are privy to more information than we are.

I think that one thing the pundits have ignored  in all of this admittedly slow-breaking story is the role of the manager in the statistics-driven Moneyball style of team management.  This model is very much geared to putting the front office in the driver's seat.  The field manager is a secondary player.  He is someone who takes the pieces delivered to him and molds them into a lineup.  He provides game management.  He does not have to do any of the thinking and analysis that goes with assembling the team.  All he has to do is to buy into the schema.

The manager also has to be on the same page as the front office on what it takes to win baseball games.  There are a lot of stats and a lot of theories and you can do a lot of analysis, but the real revolution toward the Bill James statistical approach consists in a few simple observations, which, by the way, I think are ultimately true and for which I have advocated in the pages of this blog.

First off, the idea is to score more runs and to prevent your opponent from scoring runs.  You do this not necessarily by being more physically gifted than your opponent, though that certainly helps and physical skills are essential to performance.  But the real point offensively is to avoid making outs.  You diminish your chances of making outs by swinging more often than not at a pitch you can hit and by taking pitches you cannot hit.  So the most significant statistic is OBP.  Next is the number of pitches seen in an at-bat.

If you get on base, you obviously have avoided making an out and you have extended the inning, thus enhancing the chances of hitter following you extending the inning or getting a pitch to hit, and so on and so on.

It follows that the most important thing a pitcher can do is prevent your opponent from scoring runs, which starts with keeping him off base.  Similarly, fielders who consistently are too slow to reach balls that ordinarily should be caught or who make mental errors like throwing to the wrong base, etc. diminish the odds of winning games.

Readers of this blog will realize that this approach to the game and the player decisions it implies pretty much describes the opposite of the team the Cubs have habitually assembled, especially in recent years.  I can remember only one year when they played this way, 2008, and, of course, they scored more than 800 runs that season.

What Billy Beane did for this system was simply to make a virtue of necessity.  He didn't have much money, but his insights into the game allowed him to find undervalued assets and so to keep his teams competitive even though they could not afford to sign or retain big name talent.  Epstein in Boston and also here in Chicago will have the luxury of the analytical philosophy as well as a lot of money, so the Cubs move was a good one and he is likely to succeed over time.

Anyway, not to belabor the point, the job of putting together a team is the job of the front office.  All the manager needs to do is to accept these principles and to manage accordingly.  Also he has to make put together the lineup and make the game decisions that increase the odds of winning.  In Oakland, Beane and LaRussa famously clashed about philosophy.  LaRussa was an old-line guy with a record of success.  Guys like that, and generally guys with a big following either among the fans or a great deal of prestige are generally the enemies of the front office and organization men who are recruited to implement management's policies.

The kind of structure Epstein and company are likely to bring to Chicago doesn't need a manager with personality and reputation.  In fact, I rather think they correctly realize that not only don't they need one, they don't want one.  These guys are the architects, the designers.  The manager in this schema is more like the contractor or the foreman.  His job is to read the blueprints and make sure nobody gets killed.

I'm not saying this is the best model.  I'm only saying this is the model that fits the system and this is the model we are likely to get.  Terry Francona was not a household word when they hired him in Boston.  He had bounced around some marginal jobs after a four year stint managing the Phillies, which was undistinguished to say the least.

Somehow, maybe through his coaching stint with Oakland, he came to the attention of the Red Sox brass.  This seems to be the common thread with the candidates Epstein and Hoyer chose to interview and from whom they selected Sveum.  I think that is also one of the reasons Sandberg was not considered.  He had no connection to the new regime, and he was a celebrity to boot.  If you look around at the other teams employing these same principles, the same pattern emerges.

I still have my reservations, though.  Take a look at the linked video and you will see what I mean.  What on Earth is this guy talking about.  And, gee whiz, I've bossed teams of workers in my time, and I've worked for strange bosses as well, but I never thought it was a plus from either side not to know what was going on in their heads.

Wait Until Next Year - Part III

I sort of left off 2/3 of the way through an assessment of the Cubs roster and roster needs around the time of the Epstein hiring.  Here is the rest for what it is worth.

The outfield is the Cubs biggest problem even granting the thin starting pitching.  That issue can be resolved with the acquisition of just one pitching asset and/or the complete recovery of one or two injured starters.

When you look at last year, the Cubs had the least productive outfield of any team with pretensions to compete in all of the major leagues.  With the exception of Fukudome who was traded at the deadline and Johnson who was strictly a platoon player when he wasn't on the DL, none of them got on base or hit for average.

Not only were they weak offensively, but they were weak defensively as well.  And that goes also for all the bench-warmers they brought up from the minor leagues with the exception of LaHair, who is primarily a first baseman anyway.

This is an area of the game where the team needs to just start over.  They have to trade Byrd for whatever they can get.  Somebody has to figure out what is wrong with Colvin and whether there is any hope of fixing it.  They need to try to move Soriano as well.  This guy is simply an albatross.  Worst case scenario, he platoons in left field with somebody in the hopes he can be moved at the trade deadline.

Deep in the minors there is some help on the horizon, but, realistically, Brett Jackson is the best hope.  He looks ready for a shot and I expect him to deliver.  That still leaves at least one big hole.  As much as I like Tony Campana's speed, I think this kid is really just a fourth or fifth outfielder.  Someone needs to work with him to get him to stop swinging at everything and start hitting ground balls.

I'd like to see the Cubs get aggressive in pursuing the Cuban star Yoenis Cespedes.  This guy looks like the real deal.  He is a center fielder.  He is fast, a good outfielder, and he can hit for average and power.  I saw recently the Cubs had scheduled a private workout for him.  This is a good sign and he might prove to be the first impact player the new regime acquires.

Hurrah! Quade Fired

So far I cannot fault most of the moves the Epstein/Hoyer team has made.  The best is firing Mike Quade.  Quade had some bad luck losing two starters in the first week of the season, but he just seemed hopelessly out of his league and he continued to use the same old formulae developed by his predecessor Lou Piniella.  Witness the mindless Tyler Colvin/Kosuke Fukudome "platoon."

On to the search for a successor.  The Cubs and Red Sox seem to be working from the same shortlist, which makes for some interesting scenarios given they still have not settled the Epstein compensation issue.  So far Pete Mackanin, Mike Maddux, and Dave Sveum are on the shared list.  Also mentioned are Dave Martinez and Sandy Alomar, Jr., as well as the inevitable Terry Francona rumor.

I could see either Martinez or Alomar being a good fit.  Both are well-respected bench coaches with the Rays and Indians respectively.  Of the two, I think I would prefer Alomar because I think pitchers and catchers generally have made better game managers.

For the same reason, I would prefer Maddux from the first list.  I can't see what the buzz is on Sveum at all and Mackanin has been around the block a few times and must be 60 or pushing 60 by now.  I'd like to see a younger guy take charge here and grow into the job.

I hope they do not consider Francona.  I think he needs a year off and after that whole September collapse and all the scuttlebutt associated with it, do the Cubs want to saddle themselves with more baggage than they already carry?  Also, enough Red Sox already.

I was frankly disappointed that the criteria outlined seemed to exclude Sandberg from consideration.  I'm not a manic Sandberg supporter, but he should have been given at least an interview.  He'll probably wind up with the Cardinals, which would be really weird.  You wonder whether there is some unrevealed skeleton about Sandberg lurking somewhere in the back of the mind of baseball insiders.  There's always some reason teams come up with to pass him over at the major league level.

One guy whose name has not been mentioned prominently is Bob Brenly.  Brenly might be a great fit here.  He has watched these guys play awful baseball for quite a while, so he ought to be a quick study.

I haven't heard much about the coaching staff other than the usual bromides about how the final decision belongs to the manager.  Jaramillo and Listach are signed for another year.  Personally, they are holdovers from the old regime and I would like to see them go.  With Jaramillo in particular, although he always sounds like he knows what he is doing, the players seem to have become even more aggressive and less thoughtful in their approach, so it may just be his approach and style is not what this team needs.