There R Giants #16: David Villar
Photo Credit: Kirk Nawrotzky | Richmond Flying Squirrels
We’re into the There R Giants Top 50. Over the winter months, I’ll write a post on each of the fifty players in my rankings, leading us back to the much-needed spring. Our list of previously covered players is getting a little long, so from here on out I’m moving the links for the full list down the bottom of the post.
Today’s There R Giants Top 50 profile is a Free For All! There won’t be too many of these, so if you like what you see, by all means subscribe for regular There R Giants content delivered straight to your inbox.
There was a post going around Twitter last week:
I didn’t participate in that particular exercise (I was a little squeamish about publicly calling out players I’m “lower” on), but if I had, I think we all know the subject of today’s post would definitely have been on my answer sheet. David Villar vaulted himself up my personal list with some substantial development advances in 2021. He made the leap from a low minors player whose power came mixed with far too many strikeouts into a polished upper minors, middle of the order, performer.
Those changes didn’t just take place in his stat line — he made real process breakthroughs improving the quality of his at bats and his swing decisions, and like boats in a rising tide, his entire offensive game was borne up on the wave (which seems like an appropriate metaphor for a south Florida kid).
Baseball America’s Kyle Glaser has frequently made the point that every year, young under-the-radar prospects in the lower minors pop up and receive significant attention from the prospect community, while older under-the-radar- prospects do the same in the upper minors and are universally ignored. But it’s that latter category that has produced big league regulars like Jared Walsh, Jake Cronenworth, Randy Arozorena, Luke Voit, and many more. Advanced age often causes the prospect savvy to dismiss these players, but their ability to breakthrough against more advanced competition should cause observers to pay closer attention. Villar is just such a case study, with a major step forward in his age 24 season in Double A — which is exactly why Glaser included Villar in an article he wrote last month on players who aren’t “top prospects” that we should we paying more attention to.
So, let’s ALL pay more attention to what exactly David Villar did last year to merit such high ranking on There R Giants’ Top 50!
Note: Not a place where RHH hit HR at the Diamond!
Background
Villar grew up on the ball fields of baseball-rich Southern Florida. He played at the prestigious American Heritage High School, whose famous alumni include Eric Hosmer, Zack Collins, top Red Sox’ prospect Triston Casas, and former Giant Shaun Anderson, who was an upper classman when Villar entered the program. Villar talked with me last year about the many, many friends and acquaintances he runs across on virtually every team he faces as a pro — kids he’s played with since youth league travel ball teams.
Naturally, he was taking part in the showcase circuit from the time of his earliest teen years — and he built up quite a stockpile of “All Tournament Team,” and “Showcase Top Prospect” honors along the way. He received strong scouting reports for virtually all aspects of his game — from his soft hands and strong arm on defense to the ability of his short, sharp swing to produce hard contact. If you look at his Perfect Game player page, there’s a note right at the top that says he “showed big time bat” at the National Underclassman showcase event.
And yet, despite impressive showings virtually everywhere, Villar didn’t quite manage to standout from the crowd. He failed to make Baseball America’s Top 500 draft prospects coming out of high school (Perfect Game had him at #500 exactly), and wasn’t plucked even with a late round pick. Long noted as an excellent student, most scouts assumed he’d head to college and work on refining his game in a campus environment. He chose the nearby University of South Florida — not one of the two state powerhouses, but a solid mid-major that consistently produced professionals.
There, over three years, Villar did, in fact, refine his game, improving from a rough .239 average and .696 OPS as a freshman to a sterling .374/.463/.638 line as a junior. He particularly showed tremendous power growth over his college career. After hitting just five HR as a freshman, he whacked 12 longballs as a junior. That came after he’d bashed 13 in a wood bat league the summer before — though it was in keeping with Villar’s story that that summer league wasn’t the prestigious Cape Cod League. He’d spent his summers in the smaller, slightly off the path New England Collegiate League and the Northwoods League, played in upper Wisconsin and Minnesota.
Villar was, in other words, just like so many other players who litter the third day of MLB’s draft — a baseball lifer with legitimate skills and abilities who consistently toiled in a second tier group of his contemporaries. His strong junior season was well-timed to maximize his exposure, however, as one of his USF teammates, Shane McClanahan, was one of the nation’s best left-handed pitchers and ended up being selected at the end of the 1st round of the 2018 draft. With scouts pouring in to watch McClanahan’s starts, Villar’s best year was played out in front of a capacity crowd of industry scouts. That included the Giants, who were impressed enough to make Villar their 11th round pick in the 2018 draft — a draft that came with big expectations as the Giants hoped to replenish a farm that had gone fallow.
Once in pro ball, Villar continued to show off his power stroke, crushing 13 more dingers in his short-season debut with Salem-Keizer. However, that stroke started producing more breezes than jolts, as he also struck out 27% of the time at the low level. On defense, he made highlight level plays but also showed too great a proclivity for mistakes, making 13 errors in just 55 games. He followed that up with an injury plagued year in San Jose that was more of the same. While he launched 13 more home runs (apparently, the number “13” had some sort of magic attraction to Villar’s stat line), he also struck out a brutal 144 times, pushing his K rate over the 30% line.
As the pandemic shut down the game in 2020, Villar’s career was taking on an “org player” look. There were clear skills — he made highlight level plays on defense and a bat that produced both power and a decent amount of line drive contact. But the swing and miss threatened to overwhelm his game and the game to game performance just wasn’t consistent enough to stand out. With the looming challenge of Double A awaiting, Villar seemed like a player who was about to hit his development plateau.
Scouting Report
Just like those teenage showcase reports said, Villar still uses a simple swing that is very direct to the ball and flat through the zone. Ironically, observers going back to his amateur days have thought the swing was likely to produce a “hit over power” profile. He keeps his hands close in and almost rests the bat on shoulders, using almost no load and a very simple leg lift to kick start his swing.
If you pause on the first frame of that video, you can probably identify the source of his power, however. Dude’s got some serious strength in his forearms and hands — sort of the classic old Steve Garvey model of power hitter.
With his strong hands and simple setup, Villar can generate serious power on impact and crushes balls on the inner half. Not surprisingly, that’s given him a pull heavy approach. Prior to last season, nearly all of his power and hard contact had come to the pull side. Here was his spray chart from 2018-19 seasons.
Not surprisingly, the source of his trouble has come from the other side of the plate — and particularly from breaking balls on the outer half over his career. However, as he detailed on the podcast last summer, he spent 2020 working on subtle tweaks to his swing that would put him in position to make better swing decisions and cut down on the strikeouts (his primary focus of improvement coming into the year). Villar also noted that he had to focus on attacking balls on the outer half with intent if he ever wanted to see pitches thrown in his inner half happy zone again.
“I really [focused], probably the last five or six weeks [on] hammering the outer third of the zone. Because after the first week and a half or two weeks [when I started off hot], teams were not going to give me those fastballs and I was going to get a lot more breaking balls and off speed. And I struggled with it. I’ll be honest, I struggled with it for two or three weeks. I couldn’t figure it out…I had to make a conscious effort to say ‘I have to attack this outer third pitch if I want to get anything on the inner third.’ And if I don’t show them that I can hit the breaking ball, the offspeed [pitch], the fastball away, they’re just going to eat me alive this entire season… [Now] I’ve been able to hit the breaking ball the other way, I’ve been able to hit fastballs to right center field and it just opens the field up more for me.”
He successfully made that adjustment during the course of the 2021 season and, not surprisingly, began showing much more power to the CF and RF sides of the field — as with his record setting HR #20 shown at the top of the post. Intentionally attacking pitches on the outer half was part of major improvement in his swing decisions overall that saw him chasing less as the 2021 season went on, leading to more walks, fewer strikeouts and much more consistent contact over the second half of his Double A campaign.
Defensively, Villar has all of the tools necessary to be an adequate major league 3b. At his best, he shows good lateral quickness, soft hands, and a strong accurate throwing arm. As tends to happen with MiLBtv, the camera couldn’t quite follow this dazzling play in Bowie, but I caught this one from behind the 1b bag and it was one of the better web gems I saw last year.
However, Villar needs to improve his defensive consistency, as he’s been prone to far too many errors as a pro. As we’ll see in a minute, his 2021 season put him among the league leaders in an impressive variety of categories. But one “achievement” that I’m sure he was unhappy with was leading the league in errors with 19. As far as I can tell, nobody else in the Double A Northeast League topped 14 last year.
On a brighter note, he showed off some corner versatility, picking up the 1b glove and showing a natural affinity for that position. It’s not as valuable as making himself a quality 3b, of course, still having the versatility to fill in at both corner spots could help him stick on a roster at some point. His work at 1b got him a spot on Sports Center when he added the final bit of flair to the best play of Richmond’s season:
This Season
Villar was assigned to Double A Richmond and immediately took up position in the #3 spot in the lineup — a spot that would predominantly be his home throughout the year, though he also saw time in the cleanup spot. The adjustments he’d spent the lost summer working on had him feeling good coming out of spring training and he hit the ground running. His 1st inning double on opening day brought home the club’s first run of the season and for the first two weeks he was the team’s hottest hitter, going 12 for 40 with three HR and nine RBI. This, for the opening week of the season, is a good example of his ability to get to balls on the inner half, as he pulled his hands inside a quality fastball from Rockies’ 2018 1st round pick Ryan Rolison and delivered it into the parking lot.
But, as Villar detailed above, Double A pitchers are too smart to keep getting themselves beat up on the inside corner, and soon began the long slide as the competition avoided his hot spot assiduously, and got him to expand the zone with both outside breaking balls and high fastballs. For about two months, Villar struggled to force pitchers back into his Red Zone. Though there were occasional outbursts of power, he hit just .223 and struck out 30% of the time from May 15 through July 13. But as he began looking for balls he could attack the other way or up the middle, he also did a better job of bringing his chase rate down. Identifying which pitches were ripe for damage on the outer half seemed to help him identify which pitches he should lay off as well and he began to show markedly better swing decisions.
That improved process showed up in his walk and strikeout rates. Through July 13, Villar was striking out in 28% of his PA. Over the second half of the season, that number was cut down to 21.6%. His final K rate of 25.1% was actually slightly better than the league’s average (25.6%). At the same time, he pushed up his walk rates from a 1st half standard of 9.4% to a 2nd half mark of 11.3%, putting him in the league’s 20 best walk rates.
Those improved swing decisions lifted his entire offensive stat line, making him one of the most dangerous hitters in the league. Over the second half of the season, Villar hit .306/.410/.567 and by the end of the year, he was top 10 in the league in OBP (6th, .374), SLG (6th, .506), OPS (7th, .881), Isolated Power (10th, .231), HR (8th, 20), 2b (5th, 29), BB (10th, 46) and Runs (3rd, 70) — all despite playing in one of the worst hitting environments in the entire minor leagues. He became the first Flying Squirrels player to ever reach the 20 HR mark, setting a new franchise record despite playing 25 fewer games than Jarrett Parker had when he originally set the previous mark (18).
Or, if you’re of the “completionist” bent of mind, might I recommend a one-stop viewing of all 20 of Villar’s home runs from the year? It takes awhile to work your way through the entire set but you might find it worth the time investment.
One of my very favorite images of the year came from Hartford pitcher Garrett Schilling, whose reaction to one Villar blast (off of a hanging curve) seemed to speak for every pitcher in the league:
What was that, Garrett? Oh, yeah! That was a bad one — best not to look.
It was, in every way, a revelatory second half: product spurred on by improved process. From a prospect on the edge of oblivion, Villar had put himself clearly into that “late bloomer” category that has brought the Walshes and Cronenworths to big league success. Or, perhaps, it’s best to look to more modest models like the Giants’ own Jason Vosler, another small school, late round type who has consistently improved his control of the strike zone the last few years, bringing him a late-20s major league career that could still have another gear in it.
The Future
It’s axiomatic that everyone in Double A is a really talented baseball player — and that anyone who can succeed at that level can succeed at the highest one. But “can” is carrying a lot of water there. The difference between the guys who make it and those who don’t is often not something that appears on the scouting card. It’s the ability to maintain a certain level of consistent focus from game to game or pitch to pitch. It’s the ability to keep your body strong and healthy through the long season. It’s dealing with the mental tax of dull routine without losing the competitive edge. It’s the ability to process failure emotionally without letting negativity get its teeth in you.
In one of my favorite parts of my podcast with Villar, he talked about a technique he uses to ride out tough stretches:
I have a couple of voice recordings — and this was a piece of advice from my agent. He said, “when you’re feeling really good, make a voice recording of yourself and tell yourself what you feel and what you’re doing and how you’re feeling.” So that way, when you hit that cold spell, you hit that mini-slump, you have something to go back to and understand what you were doing before, to kind of feel that feeling again.
I love that idea — of preserving your best moments and sending them to yourself as a gift to help survive the tough times. That’s the kind of thing that often defines the difference between a successful path and a long winding journey. Baseball, the ultimate skill game, often demands that players live in opposing modes at all times — relaxed, yet responding to insanely fast movements, routine-oriented and yet driven by a competitive hunger, even-keel but high energy. To play the game is to live in state of contrast. You can’t really overstate how much of success in this game takes place in the mind.
With his most successful year behind him, Villar will report to the level that often plays the cruelest tricks on players psyches — the one that is so SOOO close to the dream but frustratingly far removed at the same time. He should show up in Sacramento for Opening Day, once again installed in the middle of the order for the Triple A team. There, he’ll have the opportunity to force issues with more of the kind of improvements we saw in 2021 — better swing decisions, more control of the strike zone, leading to better outcomes. There’s always more work to do. Vosler posted the best strikout and walk numbers of his career in 2021, and still managed to hit just .178 in his big league call ups.
But Villar’s tackled a big challenge successfully now and put himself in a position to start knocking on the door. With Evan Longoria’s contract coming to an end in 2022, the Giants will surely be keeping an eye on internal options they might be able to turn to in 2023. Keep knocking loudly enough, and eventually they’ll answer.
News and Notes
A couple of bits of info floating out of the ongoing CBA talks are worth commenting upon briefly — though, of course, “talks” is not “news” and we have no way of knowing how any of this is going to end up. Still, this was something of a bombshell the other night:
The current domestic reserve list is set at 180 — just enough to have 30 players available for six teams. There was talk during 2020 that MLB would set this limit at 150, which would make it virtually impossible for a club like the Giants to field multiple rookie level clubs. According to the Jeff Passan story above, MLB wouldn’t institute a lower number in the upcoming year, but they want the power to reduce the number of domestic minor league players in upcoming years. Reading between the lines, as MLB owners are forced, screaming and kicking, to begin to spend a little more money on their minor league players (through things like housing provision or hopefully things like spring training pay and higher salaries), they are making it clear that their response will be to lower the number of minor league players they have to pay.
Let’s start with the most obvious objection — you don’t treat people this way! And if employees (and yes, the minor leaguers are employees; employees who typically have no say in their choice of employer) are required to be present for a work function, they need to get paid for that function (without even getting into the issue of off-season training). Beyond that, this is an incredibly short-sighted view of the game’s future. Player development is the best process for putting a great product out on the major league field and treating those players humanely is a good way to get the best out of them.
Beyond that, I would argue this is self-defeating even from a cheapskate angle. One of the major reasons why major league payroll has been in decline for years is that teams are having more success at getting production from their farm systems — and especially from the lower round or lower bonus types like Villar. Getting production out of more minor league players actually saves them substantially more money at the big league level, and creating a better, healthier environment for more minor leaguers seems like a good way to accomplish that first goal. That they would be so incredibly ham-fisted about squeezing together the few coins that we’re really talking about to improve the lot of minor leaguers, at the cost of many failed multi-million contracts at the big league level, is frankly mind-boggling to me. But that’s clearly the path they’re set on.
For those who are interested, the former 1st overall pick Mark Appel shared a series of thoughts on the issues involved with minor league pay, work, and survival yesterday on twitter. I’d recommend reading the entire thread as he had several excellent suggestions, but the crux of his thoughts can be summed up in these two tweets:
At the end of the day, that is an excellent approach, Mark. Not surprised that came from a Stanford guy!
A very different (and less aggravating!) morsel came from a potential change in regulations that might come out of the CBA that could impact the way many teams, including the Giants, utilize their 40-man.
In a further tweet, the players have suggested the limit be capped at four times. While leaning on minor league options to create more flexibility for the big league roster is a highly productive strategy for teams like the Giants, the players themselves do pay a real cost for life on the shuttle — seriously, you try watching your weekly pay check get entire digits lopped off it and see how enjoyable you find it. It’s hard on the players and their wives or girlfriends, their kids and their families. And very hard on their mental health. So, it’s not surprising the players would like to see the Triple A Shuttle scuttled a bit.
As The Athletic’s Grant Brisbee detailed yesterday, the Giants had four players who were optioned more than four times last year, topped by Vosler and Thairo Estrada who each headed back to Sacramento on seven different occasions. It’s not an overwhelming obstacle that the front office won’t be able to handle, but it will require a little more creativity. I’m personally in favor of such a rule both from a ‘quality of life’ perspective for the players on the tilt-a-whirl, but also as a way to reduce what to me is the game’s over-reliance on anonymous middle relievers, which I see as harming the game as an entertainment product. Hopefully, this is the first step in a series of constraints on the mushrooming pitching staffs we’ve seen over the last decade.
Lastly, I’m expecting (imminently) an announcement of the Giants’ 2022 Development Staff. If that comes today, we’ll have a full writeup on Friday. Otherwise, we plunge on with the Top 50 and move into the top 15! Back to the mound we go…
So let's see...You have 15 spots left on the list...checking mine, (like Santa, checking it twice) I have only 12 names left. Therefore, using math, there are three names that will pop up on your list where I will smack my head and say "Oh, THAT guy." I do have a fellow, Ryan Walker, who got an honorable mention but I think he's too much of a longshot. So my guess is Nick Swiney.
Next guy Gregory Santos? With his mostly lost season it's hard to know whether he still has a high rating or dropped off completely. And with that slight reference of Villar to one trait of Steve Garvey's, it kinda made me think there is more than just large forearms to make one think of Garvey. Wouldn't that be something...