Thinking Through Various Development Scenarios
None are perfect, but there are ways to use 2020
Good morning. It’s June 1. The Players’ Association sent a thoughtful, well-reasoned plan to MLB last night for restarting the season. Let’s check in and see how owners are responding (Artist’s Rendition):
Ok, well that’s gonna take some work then, guys. But perhaps there’s a path forward in the next few days.
I wanted to start the week by picking up on the conversation that Kevin Cunningham and I had on last week’s podcast. You probably saw, a couple of weeks ago, Andrew Baggarly’s piece in The Athletic exploring this same topic, in which Kyle Haines, the Giants’ Farm Director said:
“We’re trying to play out in our brains with what we can or won’t be able to do. Nothing has been off the table and no decisions have been reached on the minor leagues at all. But we’ll have to be creative.”
So let’s get creative ourselves, and explore some possible scenarios and what they might mean in terms of development opportunities.
Scenario 1: The Major League Taxi Squad
If MLB manages to restart the 2020 season with a jumbo-sized roster, the Giants will be in a position of trying to balance fielding a big league club for the year (taking into account the depth needed to cover injuries, double-headers and potentially trades), and trying to develop their best prospects (even if that means just having them work out with their elders). This is the trickiest scenario in a lot of ways because every decision becomes a zero-sum game. As Mark Sanchez explained so well: you want Will Wilson on the roster? That means Yolmer Sanchez or Zach Green is gone from the club. Alex Canario on? Joe McCarthy or Joey Rickard looks for opportunities elsewhere. And while getting Canario and Wilson work is clearly the greater long-term need, you do actually have to have the bodies to fill out the season in front of you (because if 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that we shouldn’t assume the future is actually going to arrive).
I tend to think Sanchez walked that line just right. On the taxi squad: Joey Bart, Heliot Ramos, Marco Luciano, Hunter Bishop, Alex Canario, Seth Corry, Sean Hjelle. Not quite making the cut: Luis Toribio, Will Wilson, and Luis Matos (which really hurts). I’d probably put Melvin Adon and even Camilo Doval in the pen (they’re the easiest guys to give some game action to).
As Kevin and I noted, this is all predicated on the rules of the game. Does 2020 start a typical three-year options clock running or is it considered an administrative aberration, allowing teams to reset the 40 man once the year is over? My guess would be the latter (since MLB is unlikely to carry a 50-man roster forward past 2020) so there shouldn’t be a danger of ultimately losing players down the road because of this weird season. Possibly an extra option year is added (as was the case with Conor Gillaspie, for instance).
The bigger question is how exactly the year would be utilized as a development tool. As we discussed on the podcast, there are many ways of implementing this taxi squad — will they be camped in Scottsdale working out and waiting for phone calls to fly up to Oracle? Or will the full 50-man travel together, working out at stadiums and setting an “Active Roster” before each game?
In either case these players will have access to big league work-out facilities, technology (discussed below) and staff, which will help shape their development. They’ll also get to interact with big leaguers and see what the best players in the world do to get themselves ready, which is significant. Some sort of live pitching drills, simulated games, or possibly even scrimmages (intersquad or vs. other teams’ taxi squads) would help replace missing reps for the youngsters.
Scenario 2: Technology Only Development: VR, Rapsodo, Blast, K-Vest
Late last year, Travis Sawchik, one of the co-authors of The MVP Machine, caused a minor stir with an article he penned for FiveThirtyEight called “Do We Even Need Minor League Baseball.” This article was an extension of The MVP Machine in that many of the innovators Sawchik and Ben Lindbergh spoke with for that book talked about prospect development being a system that was ripe for disruption thanks to the power of big data and technology. Probably even Sawchik didn’t imagine his thought-experiment might have a real world application quite so soon.
But this is where we are now. With no minor league happening, what can technology and big data do to replace them? Giants Manager Gabe Kapler made reference to this in Baggarly’s piece:
“I think we can also use technology, whether that’s VR, Rapsodo, Blast, K-Vest or anything else to work on specific skill development and specific design or tweaks that someone is working on. We don’t necessarily have to train everything all at once.”
All of the pieces Kapler references above use some combination of biomechanical data collection (taken from a player’s anatomy in motion) and real world modeling of the outcomes of that motion to help prospects make subtle tweaks to their mechanics that can lead to more efficient, effective, productive swings or deliveries. Virtual Reality, of course, has been floating around for several years — absent swings off live pitching VR can give players the visual simulation of seeing real pitches.
You’re no doubt aware of Rapsodo, that suddenly ubiquitous camera system that reads not just velocity, but spin rate, spin axis, and spin efficiency. Armed with this information and an understanding of a pitcher’s biomechanics teams and players are now “pitch designing” — creating the perfect pitch for the pitchers’ body and kinetic chain. Rapsodo systems (uploaded to MLB’s database) are essentially taking the place of game-scouting for this year’s draft and have moved to the forefront of the game’s method of evaluating and developing pitchers.
K-Vests and Blast Motion are equivalent systems to help hitters improve their swings. K-Vest precisely measures the entire kinematic sequencing chain throughout a hitter’s swing helping players maximize the impact of each link in that chain (at several key locations in their body). Blast Motion reads swings and models a “post-swing outcome” helping players visualize the kind of hits their swing is producing.
From Blast Motion’s product page.
None of these systems fully replace the value of taking swings off live pitching, or trying of fool live hitters, but they do help put players in a better position to succeed when live games return. Essentially, this is moving “winter development” into the summer.
However, from a “Development in the Time of Coronavirus” standpoint, they all suffer from the same issue — most minor league players don’t currently have access to this technology in their homes. I’m sure the Giants would love to send a K-Vest and a Rapsodo to all 200 or so minor leaguers in their system, but as of now that’s not an option. As long as players are stuck at home and left to their own resources, we’re going to have a tremendous imbalance in sophistication of their training methods.
Scenario 3a: Instructional League without games (Summer-Fall)
While the prospect of a minor league season as we know it, played out in small towns across America can be assumed to be a no-go at this point, it is seeming distinctly possible that teams might be able to get players into their minor league facilities at some point this summer. Nobody knows what that might look like at this point — how many players will be allowed into each camp? 20? 50? 100? But some collection of minor league players at the complex in Scottsdale is likely going to be possible before the summer is over.
That leaves open a couple of different development possibilities. The first takes advantage of the kind technology described above. While players left to their own devices somewhere in Utah or the Dominican Republic might not be able to design pitches using Rapsodo, if you can get all your players to the minor league camp suddenly everybody has access to the best technology and Kyle Haines and team can get the players on even footing. The Giants are at something of a disadvantage at their minor league camp, which is old, cramped and crowded and not at all social-distancing friendly. Sadly the world-class minor league facility they’re building at Papago Park won’t be ready until next spring. However, they did just complete a state-of-the-art upgrade for the big league camp at Scottsdale Stadium, and presuming the big league club and taxi squad isn’t in Arizona using it, that facility could become a real life-line, allowing the club to get more minor leaguers working out with more and better facilities (whether in weight room, taking swings, or working on pitches).
Scenario 3b: Instructional League w/games (Summer-Fall)
And, of course, if you can have players in camp working out, that opens up the possibility of some sort of hybrid between the Arizona Rookie League and the old Fall Instructional camp. If Giants minor leaguers are working and training in Scottsdale, and Rockies’ or D’backs’ or Cubs’ or White Sox’ minor leaguers are doing the same right down the road: then why not get together and play some games? This goes on to some degree with the kids who stay in extended spring training after full-season ball begins. It’s the basis for the existence of the Arizona League at the complexes and for many years games were a part of Fall Instrux as well (though instructional leagues have changed significantly the last several years, with more of a focus on instruction and weight training and less on games). Traditionally during spring, teams will craft four rosters (roughly equivalent to the four full season levels) and teaming up with another organization for the day they will play two games at each facility (for instance, the Cubs bring their AAA and AA to the Giants camp, while the A+ and A groups play at the Cubs’ camp).
So if we get a critical mass of players into the Scottsdale area, there will be the opportunity for live game experience as part of that. Of course, one significant drawback to this is, as veteran observers of the AZL know, it’s pretty much hot as hell in the Valley of the Sun from now through October. AZL games universally start at night and game time temperatures are still normally in the triple digits. So trying to get in a lot of game activity during the summer months could be problematic. One solution to this might be focussing more on the training and facilities through the heart of the summer and shifting more towards game activity as the fall approaches. The other question here, as noted, is how many players would be allowed into camp. If it’s limited to say 50, then teams are really just focusing on their best prospects amalgamating into one big “team” environment and leaving a lot of other kids who need developing out in the cold. Yet another step towards the contraction of talent that the minors are undergoing.
Scenario 5: Super Prospect League
Every fall the very best prospects in baseball head to the Scottsdale area for the Arizona Fall League. The AFL traditionally has six clubs, each one of which takes a handful of prospects from five different organizations to field a full roster. Whether or not the souped up Instructional League described above happens, I do think we’ll see some kind of Super-sized AFL this year. Instead of joining with four other clubs to make up one roster, the goal would be for each team to field their own roster made up of the Best 30 or so prospects in the organization and run a 6-8 week league against the best 30 or so prospects in every other organization.
Of course, such an upgrade from the AFL would cost money (which we know MLB owners aren’t keen on right now) and be a big logistical lift. Would you try to get all 30 teams into Arizona, or split into an Arizona Prospect League and a Florida Prospect League as Baseball America has suggested? The more we hear about teams (like the Angels and the A’s) who would simply prefer not to play at all this year, or not hold the draft at all, the more it seems likely that at least some organizations would refuse to participate in such a Prospect League, preferring 2020 to be the Year of Self-Mutilated Noses. But certainly enough MLB clubs would be invested in the success of the prospects they’ve paid sometimes millions of dollars to acquire that something could be (and I think will be) put together. The caveat above of leaving a lot of players out in the cold applies here as well.
Scenario 6: Dominican Complex
Finally, there is the Felipe Alou complex in the Dominican Republic, which is itself a state-of-the-art facility complete with dorm, cafeteria, classrooms, and all the necessary baseball training ingredients. Similar to Scenario 3a/b above, at some point it seems likely that they’ll be able to use the Dominican complex for training players and potentially getting them some games against other organizations, just as happens every summer in the Dominican Summer League (which is simply a foreign version of the rookie league in Arizona). The Dominican complex also holds instructional work before and after the “official” DSL season, so there’s normally work going on there throughout much of the year.
The twist here is that while the Dominican complex could simply provide a training facility for Dominican players who aren’t yet advanced enough to come stateside, it could also provide a opportunity for domestic players who can’t use the Scottsdale facility (if, for instance, the Giants are only allowed to bring two or three dozen players into Arizona due to health regulations). Sending US-born players to the Dominican complex is not unheard of. Kyle Haines told Andy Baggarly that the team has sent players down in the winter to broaden their cultural horizons and and make connections with the younger players (a good idea as there can be some real cultural barriers between the two groups when they come together in the camp at Scottsdale or as teammates later on). Brandon Crawford described going down to the Dominican Instructional camp to get some work in after his pro debut was shortened by injury. The facilities are excellent and this could provide a great option for players who aren’t able to see action stateside this summer. The weather in the Dominican can make playing near impossible in the late summer/early fall when hurricane season is in full flight and rain is a ubiquitous experience. But, on the positive side, in the winter it becomes an ideal setting for baseball (we may see a much greater participation level in Winter leagues this year as well).
None of these scenarios are ideal — and all of them likely leave some players on the outside looking in (and possibly, on the cutting line sometime later this year). But likely, some or all of these are going to be utilized to keep 2020 from being a lost year for the Giants’ future talent.
I should note, there is one small side-benefit to not having minor league development going on right now. In Kiley McDaniels and Eric Longenhagen’s new book Future Value, they note that:
“[T]he best organizations have a link between amateur scouting and player development. Many teams still don’t, or it’s an inconsistent one handled at a high level (CP of scouting and development) that can sometimes only focus on top prospects. We’ve mentioned many times at FanGraphs that the New York Yankees are seen as leaders in this area, but the Los Angeles Dodgers and others also excel. The key is to have open communication and aligned goals between departments, which is more rare than it should be.”
One presumes the reason that that communication is rare is because both groups have so much on their respective plates at roughly the same critical times of the year. One of the things that should be happening right now (and thanks to an interview Kyle Haines just gave to Cullen Holt with the Greenjackets, we know it is happening), is using this unique time to strengthen the communication between those two key departments heading into next week’s draft.
On this Day in History
As my brother correctly messaged, the 2012 Augusta Greenjackets were the answer to last Wednesday’s lineup quiz. They dropped a 5-4 heartbreaker by allowing two in the 9th against Savannah.
Name the team and the year:
Bocock, SS
Gillaspie, 3b
Neal, LF
Posey, C
Kieschnick, RF
Villalona, 1b
Noonan, 2b
Lormand, DH
Jordan, CF
Clark, SP
1972: Gary Thomasson rapped out four hits including his sixth home run of the season in leading Phoenix to a 12-4 win in Tacoma. The 20-year-old 1b would hit just .282/.356/.450 in the PCL, but that would be enough to get him to the majors in September. From 1973 on, Thomasson would be a staple of Giants lineups, playing 1b, RF, LF, even CF (LOL!). After setting career highs in HR (17), RBI (77) and OPS (.809) in 1977, Thomasson would be a centerpiece in the 6-player deal for Vida Blue the next spring. Oakland would move him three month’s later to the Yankees, allowing Thomasson to make his lone World Series appearance against the Dodgers that Fall and collect himself a ring.
1975: The Portland Mavericks opened their first season in the Northwest League by holding an open tryout camp to anyone who wanted to play pro ball. The independently operated Mavericks, were the brainchild of Bing Russell, B-movie actor, impressario, and father of actor Kurt Russell (who himself would play with the Mavericks). The story of this team is told in the rollicking Netflix documentary, The Battered Bastards of Baseball. Check it out!
2015: Victor Concepcion tossed six scoreless innings and Robinson Madrano’s three hits led the DSL Giants to their first win of the year. Evening their record up at 1-1, the team would never again have a losing record, ending the season with a league best 59-13 record. They’d win a dramatic three game series over the Yankees and then sweep the Rangers in a best of three to take the Championship. Concepcion would allow just 2 Earned Runs on the season over eight starts, and start the elimination game against the Yankees. But he’d pitch just 65 innings over the next three years before being released after the 2018 season.
Final Thoughts
The invaluable Giants fan Twitter account GPT had a great thread yesterday paying tribute to each of the 20 Giants minor league players released last week. You can read them all in the following thread:
That includes Brandon Lawson who was also the subject of a feature article by Hank Schulman in the Chronicle. Every name is a life-story all its own.
More importantly, after a crazy and frightening weekend in America, it’s a little heartening to see so many major leaguers speaking up and taking their part in the conversation about race that is constantly necessary in this country. You’ll see a lot of those comments if you check out Sean Doolittle’s twitter feed right now.
Reach out. Listen to each other. Only Connect.
Is the team the 2009 San Jose Giants?