Send In Your Questions for the Next Free For All Mailbag
What’s on your mind, fellow Giants’ prospect fans? It’s time for my weekly AMA anything call for the next mailbag. By the way, I’m going to be on assignment for a couple of weeks later in the month — Minor Lines will be covered, don’t worry, but there will be a little break in the Mailbags for a couple of weeks. So if there’s anything on your mind — get it in now and I’ll see what I can do to answer it.
Old man shouting at clouds question:
Am I the only one concerned about the spreadsheet-ization of prospect coverage?
Don't get me wrong, I want the Giants brass to use whatever data is available to make the best decisions for the health of the farm system/strength of the big club.
But when I read/listen to pods about prospects I want to hear poetic descriptions of these young athletes tools /makeup/projection/performance. What I don't need some one reading off literal yearly lists of 6 different prospects' IVB or chase percentages.
Incidentally, what I want is for all prospect coverage to be like your Giants prospect coverage. Gimme a little Roger Angel romance. It's baseball!
AZ
One thing I am hearing Eno Sarris and Mike Petriello talking a lot about lately is the importance of bat speed. Namely, that it can make up for a lot of other profile deficiencies. I recall, for example, a discussion about how one of the things that makes Ohtani so good is that his bat speed can make up for swing holes by allowing him to make contact “late in the zone”, or as the ball gets closer to the catcher. Turns out, bat speed seems to be super important. And it’s improvable! To that end, I am curious if you sense this to be important in Giants player development policy. The Red Sox famously were early to weighted bat training and that seems to be working out well for them. As far as I can tell, the Giants don’t have a clear policy to making technical, batting improvements beyond standard approach/strength training goals (or if they do, it’s not clearly working). As a second part to this question, I have observed that the last several international amateur classes have landed players who are either conspicuously short or physically mature for their age. You acknowledged this in your interview with Joe Salermo, but once I had this idea in my mind, I could not help but notice the size of this trend. A lot of 5’10”s and below! Along with this, some of the DSL/ACL players who had success last year seem to be the ones who are physically mature, which both makes me question their upside and place a significant part of their success on their strength rather than on other, more reliable long term indicators. Level, Guzman, Macares, Barreto, Tejada, Alexander, even Velasquez strike me as examples of this. Do you think this is, deliberate or not, a consequence of an altered calculus or ideology? For instance, maybe a renewed focus on contact ability or performance floor (rather than ceiling) in general? To make a final comment on the interconnectedness of these observation, Sarris made the point that bat speed is, while improvable, highly correlated with player height. To my mind, then, it seems like we should be placing more emphasis on traditional measures like height, not less. Anyway, I am curious what you make of these trends individually, as well as their intersection. Thanks!