http://sportsnetwork.com/default.asp?c=sportsnetwork&page=mlb/news/AAN3057529.htm
COMN. It's not a breaking news story, but I laughed when I saw the following:

RE-SIGNINGS: 1B - Frank Catalanotto

In the Davidi article, Carlos Tosca is quoted as saying that Greg Myers will DH 1 or 2 days per week with Josh Phelps sitting.

Needless to say, I am not impressed. Josh Phelps should get 600 PAs this year, come hell or high water.

I think Griffin's spring training reports are as good as anyone's. He put out similarly good pieces last spring as well, and many here (including myself) hoped that it would be a sign of things to come for the 2003 season. As we all know, that wasn't the case.

Unfortunately after he gets back to Toronto in a month, he'll once again become arguably the worst baseball writer in the business.

Ryan: I think the two of us are having this same conversation on FanHome, but it won't suffer by repeating it. Griffin's strength is in those articles where he talks to human beings and writes about it. It's when the column is about his own analysis or commentary that the negativity creeps in.

The Jays are also the subject of today's "Prospectus Triple Play', a free feature for those of you not subscribed to BP.

Of note in the BP Triple Play, apparently the Jays have 6 players in the annual BP top 50 prospect list. It’s probably safe to assume that Rios, Quiroz, Gross, Bush, and McGowan are 5 of those 6.

Greg Myers returns as the backup and unless Cash falters, will catch about twice a week and DH a couple of times per week.

"Unless" Cash falters? How poorly would a fella have to hit to qualify for that? Dude hit .142 in 106 AB's last year, and hopefully will hit enough over his career to remain in Toronto as a quality backup. What's "falters"? No hits at all?

Best of luck Kevin.

Cash's offence will proably always be a concern. If we can get him to hit .250, handle the pitchers and play good defense then I think it will be acceptable. Through the minors he has a history of batting improvement 2nd time around so hopefully the coaching staff can help him with his offence.

Unfortunately for Mr. Cash, he only has 106 major league at bats. So I think it's fair to assume that this year will still be his first time around.

It’s probably safe to assume that Rios, Quiroz, Gross, Bush, and McGowan are 5 of those 6.

No doubt. Place your bets, folks, on #6.

I'm guessing it's Arnold, who placed #29 on last year's list. (Other BP faves could be Adams, Hill, or Vermilyea).

#6 - I hope it will be League but it will probably end up being Hill. Six of the top 50 is very good regardless of who they are.

Seeing as Dayn Parry, a BP author, has Adams in his top 50, I'm betting that he makes it.

I guess that is what I like about John Sickels. He's got one foot in the BP performance camp and the other foot in the BA tools/scouting evaluation camp.

Any reason why the Jays you can't buy any of the new Jays clothing/merchandise on their official website? They are only listing last years stuff. Who are the ad wizards in charge of this club?

The online store is run by MLB, not the Blue Jays. You can buy the new merchandise through http://www.rogers.com and get free shipping.

Thanks for the Prospectus heads-up Andrew. The day before, they previewed the Angels and had this to say, which I found quite amusing:
"Escobar has shown flashes of impressive performance both as a reliever and as a starter. But like a Raul Mondesi on the mound, he's never been able to put it all together for an extended stretch, struggling with his control and only posting one sub-4.00 ERA in the last five seasons. Three years, $18.75 million was a major reach, especially given the smaller deals given to superior pitchers such as Miguel Batista during the off-season. "

As for the new uniforms, did anyone catch Sportsnet last night. They showed Hinske in the home unis as he was filming a commercial--very sharp.

Shouldn't #6 be Rosario.

Shouldn't Rosario be #6 - good call Jeff.

I doubt Rosario would be in the top 50 after missing a whole season... I still have high hopes, but that's a bit of a reach.

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Speaking of Sickels, he answers a question about organizations with the best pitching prospects in today's mailbag. As is already apparent, he's pretty impressed with the Jays' bunch.

More interesting, though, and worthy of discussion certainly, is this quote from Sickels:

"I believe we are seeing the early stages of a cyclical shift in favor of pitching talent. I am more impressed with the depth of pitching in the minor leagues right now than I am with the depth of hitting. The last few drafts have been pitching-rich, and the 2004 draft class looks to be leaning that way as well."

Any suggestions as to why we're seeing this "cyclical shift"?

A few random thoughts:

1. There is only a 5% chance that a true .210 hitter would hit .142 or worse in 106 AB. It's possible that Kevin Cash will improve as a hitter this year, but you can't blow off his performance as small sample size.

I have to stop being obsessed with the binomial distribution sometime soon.

2. BP's take on Escobar has really disappointed me. They should know better than to selectively quote stats in the manner of "only posting one sub-4.00 ERA in the last five seasons."

3. Rosario wasn't on BP's list last year. Reports are that he's recovering well, but as he didn't pitch at all during the 2003 season I can't imagine him making the list this year. My guess is Russ Adams., but it could be any of the guys that Steve lists. It would be very interesting if they chose Vermilyea, as he hasn't even made anyone else's top 100.

http://economics.about.com
I have to stop being obsessed with the binomial distribution sometime soon.

I'm just surprised you haven't been flamed by any Bayesians yet! I guess you and I are the only stat-theory nerds in the Box. :)

Cheers,

Mike

Vermilyea has a chance if all they look at is performance, once you factor in an 88-89 mph fastball his star fades especially in a top 50.
Because I have doubts about his prospect status and have stated them, he will probably be the one - I just can't justify it.

There is only a 5% chance that a true .210 hitter would hit .142 or worse in 106 AB. It's possible that Kevin Cash will improve as a hitter this year, but you can't blow off his performance as small sample size.

Your calcuations would imply that a batter's ability is constant and has no way to change, and that he has no ability to learn, gain experience, or mature as a batter whatsover.

That implication is unlikely for a vetern player, and not at all applicable to a rookie player.

John, I think you have to take into account Cash's minor league performance. Taken as a whole, it looks like he'll hit .220-250 in the majors and last season's performance just makes it more likely that it will be closer to .220 than .250. If he regains the power and strike zone judgment he showed throughout his minor league career, he'll make a fine backup to Guillermo Quiroz for years and years.

Carlos Delgado hit .215 in 130 major league ABs in 1994 (100 points lower than he was hitting in the minors). Nobody worried that he was a .250 hitter.

One other thing, Cash's BABIP was .167; Myers' BABIP was .316. Or to take another example, Jose Molina, the backup catcher for Anaheim who was probably Cash's closest comp last year (hitting .184 with less strike zone judgment and power) had a BABIP of .239. There is no reason to believe Cash's BABIP will be significantly different from Molina's this year.

In Cash's case, I am quite sure that a good part of his horrific batting average was simply bad luck. Not that he's going to be challenging for a batting title any time soon...

http://firstport.com
It would be very interesting if they chose Vermilyea, as he hasn't even made anyone else's top 100.
Actually, Perry had him at #51.

JDM's Scoresheet Baseball has a neat a neat summary of all the current lists, showing you just how variable and subjective prospect lists are. Dioner Navarro, the subject of some debate here recently, places anywhere from #87 to #1!! (CreativeSports) overall.

Dustin McGowan tidpits:

Jim Callis just finished up his Mariners chat over at BA. Responding to a question about which minor league pitchers he believed to have the highest upsides, Callis said: Edwin Jackson, Greg Miller, Zack Greinke, Dustin McGowan and Scott Kazmir.

And for what it's worth, Mr. McGowan is included in a spring training clip on SportsNet this eve. Quite the drawl he has there.

There is only a 5% chance that a true .210 hitter would hit .142 or worse in 106 AB. It's possible that Kevin Cash will improve as a hitter this year, but you can't blow off his performance as small sample size.

I have to stop being obsessed with the binomial distribution sometime soon.

I appreciate the binomal distribution and I mostly understand it, but not well enough to do my own calculations with it. As Maneesh said, don't you have to consider that these were Cash's first 106 AB in the Majors, i.e. he's still going through an adjustment phase? And mostly out of facetiousness, but also a little bit out of curiosity, I'd like to hear what the chances are of a true 3.40 ERA pitcher having an ERA of 10.64 or worse in 94 IP. I think you know who I'm talking about. : )

That, of course, should say 67 2/3 IP, not 94.

Considering the amount of bile that's sent Richard Griffin's way, I'm surprised at how fair he seemed in this article. Nothing blasting the organization or Hinske for his poor performance last year (for the standard he set his rookie year, at least). Nor was there too much on steroids.

One thing surprised me:

As such, yesterday was spent at the Field formerly known as Grant, shooting a series of TV commercials using the same "Baseball North" slogan as last year, but with a less-offensive-to-Canadians slant.

Not living in Toronto (or being American), I may have missed this, but when was the Baseball North campaign offensive to Canadians? I thought it was lauded for appealing to the Canadian aspect of the Jays. Or is this just hyper-sensitivity to the Don Cherry/Triumph the Insult Comic Dog incidents of recent times? That just stuck out as I read a surprisingly good article by Griffin.

Maneesh:Your calcuations would imply that a batter's ability is constant and has no way to change, and that he has no ability to learn, gain experience, or mature as a batter whatsover.

Actually, it doesn't. You must have missed it when I wrote

It's possible that Kevin Cash will improve as a hitter this year...

Mike, Jonny: I don't dispute any of your claims. I'm not trying to prove that Cash can't or won't hit major league pitching. All I'm trying to do is point out that his 2003 batting line can't be shrugged off as "small sample size." His 2003 performance doesn't prove anything, but it provides strong evidence that he wasn't at all ready to hit major league pitching when he was called up. His struggles *might* be the result of horrible luck, but I think it's equally plausible that he just wasn't ready to hit in the Show. That's all I wanted to point out.

Whether Cash will improve in years to come is something that the numbers don't really tell us. Many people have pointed out that he tends to struggle when promoted. Fair enough. I'm not going to play the "there's no evidence that guys who struggle in AA and AAA at first like Cash did also tend to struggle at first in MLB before breaking out in their second season" card. I wasn't terribly high on Cash before he was called up, but I thought he had a chance to make it, and I still do. It's just a lower chance than it was.

Jonny: I'm not sure what good the Halladay comp does. There's no way in hell that Halladay's 2000 can be described as a sample size fluke. Obviously he has made real improvements as a pitcher since 2000. I don't mean to imply that players never get better or worse; that would be a patently ridiculous proposition. However, I do want to make two points:

1. Using a player's actual statistics, it is possible to calculate confidence intervals for that player's true level of performance. No predictive value is implied over and above the predictive value that we normally grant to statistics. Cash didn't have many PAs in the bigs last year, so his CIs would be pretty wide, but it is still the case that even the high-percentile numbers are terrible.

2. More importantly, there were much better reasons to expect a breakout from Halladay in 2001 than from Cash in 2004. Pitchers are inherently less predictable than hitters. Halladay had always had excellent scouting reports, and he had had success at a number of levels at a very young age. He was 2.5 years younger in 2000 than Cash was last year.

That being said, PECOTA gives Cash a pretty good forecast for next year (roughly a .700 OPS), so perhaps I'm being too harsh.

Looking at Cash I keep hoping for more but that .142 average was scary. Looking at the Lahman database I found that before 2003 there have been just 269 times that a player had 100 AB's or more and hit below 150, many of whom were pitchers. Removing pitchers (20+ IP's I used as a cutoff, leaving just two guys who pitched at all) we have 96 player seasons. That is since 1871, or less than one a year.

Cutting out those from the dead ball era and earlier (pre-1920) we are now down to just 44 players over an 83 year period or around 1 every other year. 5 of these players did it in the 90's. These 5 were Jose Oliva & Scott Hemond ('95), Darryl Strawberry ('93), Jose Gonzalez & Mike Benjamin ('91). Notable names before that were Lee Mazzilli (88), Joel Skinner (87), Dave Martinez (86), Harold Reynolds (85). Jose Oliva never played in the majors again, nor did Scott Hemond. Jose Gonzalez had 55 more AB's left (182), Mike Benjamin played a lot of seasons and finished 229/277/339 over 1926 pathetic AB's as a utility IF. Strawberry was going through his drug period and would recover to have a few more productive seasons. Mazzilli had 126 more AB's (1/2 in Toronto) hitting a weird 206/380/389. Skinner had a few more years in him, lifetime 228/269/311.

On the good side we have Harold Reynolds who was called up too soon (222 next season, all star year after that), Dave Martinez rebounded with a 292/372/418 over 459 AB's the next season (called up a season too early). Thus is it possible that Cash just had horrid luck and was rushed. Stan Jefferson in '88 did the trick and had a lifetime line of 216/276/326 (832 AB). 88 also produced Mike Laga's only 100 AB season (on the nose) and he finished 199/241/355 over 423 AB's. Chris Bando is the only other player since '85 to pull the trick and he did it after a breakthrough season of 291/377/505 and finished 227/
300/329. Butch Davis (never had 100 AB again) and Don Money (final season) also pulled off the trick in '84 and '83 respectively

So, for guys who hit under 150 over 100 AB's or more over the last 30 years (not counting anyone else who pulled the trick in 2003) we have 14 players. 3 had productive (ie: better than 230 avg in at least one season of 100+ AB) careers after that. The other 11 were, at best, the definition of 'replacement value' or worse.

If anyone wants to look further the other players since 1920 who pulled off a sub-150 average were Luis Pujols, Pat Rockett, Johnnie LeMaster, Bill Plummer, Ray Fosse (301 next season), John Vukovich, Rich Reese, Dwain Anderson, Vic Harris, Maury Wills (final season), Ellie Hendricks, Bob Didier, Dave Duncan, Tom Egan, Ray Oyler, Wayne Causey, Mike Hegan, Johnny Goryl, Norm Sherry, Tom Brown, Cliff Cook, Neil Chrisley, Ted Kazanski, Andy Anderson, Marv Rickert, Billy Holm, Norm Schlueter, Dixie Parsons, Frankie Pytlak, and Eddie Delker.

Btw, Cash is consistant. 143 in 2002 and 142 in 2003. Anyone for 141 in 2004? :)

Great post, John.

Cash was 25.8 years old in August, so it's hard to imagine that he was really rushed. This is not to say that he won't improve, but we're not talking about Harold Reynolds here.

Two more articles out of the Star this morning. Mr. Griffin unloads on the rotation, claiming Halladay and Towers are the only two that line up against the league in their respective spots in the rotation with an article entitled Jays batting .400 when it comes to rotation.

Also in today's Star is Mark Zwolinski column called Call him Doctor Fitness, about Halladay's amazing work ethic helping the Jays' rookies in camp.

It's the guys in the middle that fuel the fire of Jay doubters.

Griffin of all people should know that if you choose to be a "Jay doubter," it's easy to find fault just about anywhere. Perhaps, just for a change, Rich should try on a "Yankee doubter" hat and examine the creaky, old Kevin Brown, the guy (Jon Lieber) who hasn't pitched in over a year after surgery and the overpaid sophomore of indeterminate age who was in the bullpen most of last year. All of a sudden that rotation is just as full of questions. Optimism is also a necessity on a $200 million budget.

Wasn't it at this same point last year that Jays management was touting Halladay, Cory Lidle, Mark Hendrickson, Tanyon Sturtze and Justin Miller as the rotation that would surprise the AL and allow the Jays to compete?

Uh, no. Everyone without a tedious agenda to bash the team was hoping that they would be league-average as a group. Management, in the form of J.P., never even suggested that the 2003 Jays would compete; it was Year 2 of the rebuilding process. Carlos Tosca made a remarkably accurate prediction of his team's success, underestimating their final win total by one. Of course, the Jays did surprise the AL, especially in May, despite the disappointments. Had a healthy Lidle matched his Oakland form and if Hendrickson made more progress, they would have been competitive into September, two full years ahead of their "touted" arrival.

Paul DePodesta's hiring had generated a tidal wave of "the age of sabermetrics is here" articles. The National Post has one but is available to online subscribers, or readers, only. Jeff Blair also gets into the act. There are also a dozen other across North America's newspapers.

Jeff Blair has another informative piece in the Globe this morning, about the growing Oakland influence on baseball. He quotes Moneyball author Michael Lewis on the difference between J.P. Ricciardi and Paul DePodesta, who supposedly turned down the Toronto GM job because his fiancee didn't want to come here.

"Paul is an intellectual, and J.P. has a lot of street savvy and a little more in the mix with baseball people," Lewis said. "J.P. has a real, natural ability to manage people and is comfortable communicating with people in confrontational situations. I'm not sure that's going to come as naturally to Paul."

No disrespect to DePodesta, but I don't believe he could have turned around the Jays as quickly and effectively without a "baseball man" of J.P.'s calibre advising him. Mr. Godfrey got the right guy.

There's a new thread for today's articles now. I was actually putting together the thread when Gerry and Coach were in this thread. Coach and I have good tastes in quotes.

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Rany Jazarelyi unveiled his Top 50 Prospects (featuring 6 Jays) at yesterday's BP Pizza Feed in Chicago. Anyone have the scoop?

BP has its prospect list up. Any premium subscribers care to share the Jays' rankings?

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BP has its prospect list up. Any premium subscribers care to share the Jays' rankings?

The list doesn't come out until late next week. Those two articles were just a discussion about the players who may be on it.

Worth reading if you're a premium subscriber. Some of the BP guys aren't as high on Rios as many of the Bauxites (but then again, who is) and Russ Adams PECOTA list was pretty amusing.

Cheers,

Mike

At the risk of getting in trouble, one of Adams' comps is Rance Mulliniks. I know that PECOTA uses height and weight as factors in its predictions; I'm not sure about moustaches.

Regarding Rios: It should be noted that PECOTA uses the player's totals from the last three years in calculating its forecasts. (Or it did when it was introduced in 2003.) That's why Roy Halladay's 50th percentile forecast for 2003 was 192 IP with a 4.33 ERA. There's no disputing that PECOTA is the class of the statistical prediction field, and it's probably as smart as or smarter than expert consensus on most players, but it's got a bit of a blind spot when it comes to guys whose level of performance has changed a lot in the last two years.

Which is not to deny that we might be overrating Rios ;)

one of Adams' comps is Rance Mulliniks

I know it's hard to believe, but Rance was a pretty highly-regarded shortstop - at 21, people thought he was going to be a star. California eventually got rid of him because after that first year he just didn't hit a thing, and the Royals (who got him) didn't need him because they had U L Washington. So he wound up as a utility infielder before coming to Toronto.

Of course, Rance did eventually hit, and hit well. If Adams had a career as good as Mulliniks's, I'd be pretty pleased. Mind you, I'd rather he squeeze that value into the front of his career rather than the back!

John, I seriously doubt that PECOTA is better than a panel of experts in projecting pitchers. I don't know if you are familiar with Tango's experiment from last year, but the result was that systems had much more trouble in predicting pitching performance than in predicting offensive performance.

As for Rios, you did the PR Winter League Translations. Somehow, I think that these translations are more important to where Rios is heading (obviously combined with his 2002 and 2003 performance) than his performance in 2001 in Low-A ball. Unless Cat and Sparky show up in casts too, Rios will start the year in Syracuse, and his performance there will tell us when he's ready, and what are reasonable expectations.

Mike: Sorry -- I should have said "position players," not "players."

I think Joe Sheehan's quote regarding Rios is particularly telling: "big leaps forward might sometimes be confused with small leaps forward-plus-good luck." (Am I allowed to do that?) A lot of Rios' value is in his BA which has only been that spectacularly high for a year. He's certianly a better prospect than both Mark Quinn and Ken Harvey were, due to his athleticism and in Quinn's case age, but I'm afraid of MLB having the same effect on his offensive production that it had on theirs.

If Adams had a career as good as Mulliniks's, I'd be pretty pleased.

Ditto. If he were playing today he would definately be a JP type of player.