Photo Credit: Kevin Cunningham | Giant Futures
The story du jour yesterday afternoon was the possibility of Michael Conforto needing an IL stint and maaaybe getting replaced by Luis Matos. By the end of the day, it didn’t appear that would be the outcomes, but it did take me right back to yesterday’s conversation about not everything necessarily needing to be “perfect” before being “ready.” It’s all a work in progress.
And speaking of Matos, Eno Sarris pointed me to an article yesterday that jumped into some gory math and tried to quantify the development advantage of being young for a given level. You can read the quantification process for yourself if you’d like, but the bottom line was that the author, Nathaniel Stolz, found that being young for a level can be considered to be worth the equivalent value of an extra 25 points of wRC+ per year of deviation from the league average. To put that another way, Matos put up a 135 wRC+ during his time in Richmond, but as a 21 year old at a level where the average age is 24.4, you can “translate” that number as being the equivalent of a 210 wRC+ — more than 100% better than a league average performance, which is obviously a very different level of impact.
Of course, there’s a world of caveats that need to be piled onto that paragraph. Weighted Runs Created itself is a problematic stat to apply to the minors, since it was created for and tested in the major league environment, where the level of competition is more even and consistent from year to year. It’s an imperfect fit for the mutability of the minor leagues. Also, every player’s development journey is unique — I could apply that same logic to Heliot Ramos, circa 2019, when he was a 19 year old in a level where the average age was 23, and it would be obvious to all that a budding superstar was on our hands. Still, the bottom line is: when we see a 21-year-old Matos excelling in Double A, and, at the very least, holding his own in Triple A, it can be more meaningful than watching a 23 year old do the same in Low A by comparison.
That same lens helps contextualize what we might consider to be “struggles” for Aeverson Arteaga. But as a 20 year old in High A (average age a little over 23), his numbers look very different if we give him an extra 75 wRC+ for being young for his level. That extra bump for age lifts him from an 85 wRC+ to 160 — and the year looks very different (the same for fellow 20-year-old Adrian Sugastey). This isn’t dogma and it doesn’t apply equally to everybody, but it’s another lens to have in our back pockets as we do try to do our tricky Crystal Ball act.
And one more bit of pre-Minor Lines context, since I’m on the topic of context. I was texting with a scout yesterday, and I asked if he had any theories on why the NWL has been such a stumbling block. His thought was that this really is a new reality of the minor league restructuring. The elimination of short season ball has created an influx of very low level pitching into Low A ball. So while it seems like guys moving from the Cal to the NWL are facing a lot of the same guys from one year to the next, they’re also getting that lower tier of arms stripped away and mostly replaced by 25-year-old veterans repeating High A. If that’s, say, a third of the pitchers they see, year to year, the difference can be vast and shocking. This scout also thought that the difference in travel schedule from the relatively compact Cal League to far more spread out Northwest League can be a shock to the system. Ultimately, his advice was: trust the development process, and don’t ride the roller coaster of day to day or month to month results too much.
That said, let’s ride the danged roller coaster at least a little, shall we? Just enough to have some fun! Because that’s what we do here at There R Giants! And let me just say, the day to day results were particularly intriguing last night!
HITTER of the NIGHT: Anthony Rodriguez (SJ), 3 for 3, 2 2b (2), 3b (1), 2 R, 2 RBI
PITCHER of the NIGHT: Carson Whisenhunt (Eug) 5.0 IP, 1 H, 0 R, 0 BB, 7 K, W (1-0)
Buckle up! It was a big night coming at you next!
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