Dylan Bundy (Begins Throwing Program)

[Satyr3206]

When the Orioles drafted Ben McDonald he has the highest scout ratings of any pitcher up to that point including Gooden. He ended up being an average starter. You never know how young pitchers will develop and no one can predict injuries. It's always been a crapshoot and probably always will.

[Aglets]

First problem with that is that the Orioles' leader in pitching fWAR from 2000-present is Erik Bedard with 15. 2nd is Sidney Ponson with 14. Then Rodrigo Lopez, Jeremy Guthrie, then Daniel Cabrera. So of the top five either three or four were home-grown, depending on how you categorize Lopez who came to the O's as a rookie. For that matter Guthrie came to the O's as a rookie, too. Mike Mussina's 2000 season alone puts him 8th in Oriole pitching fWAR from 2000-2015.

The Orioles top closers of that period were Jim Johnson, Britton, and BJ Ryan. The first two were drafted by the O's, and Ryan came to the Orioles with 2.0 MLB innings under his belt.

The Orioles of 2000-2011 were a bad team with a terrible farm system. But much of the value that existed in their pitching came from players they drafted or acquired with almost no MLB experience. If you're going to indict the player development system, you should place equal or greater blame on acquisition since they actually got less value from acquiring established MLB players than from the draft and trades for inexperienced pitchers.

It's an open question whether it's relevant to today's team. The people running the team in 2000 were totally different from those running the team in 2007 and again totally different from today.

First of all, I'm not entirely interested in who the top 5 were in our system relative to our own players. I care much more about how they are relative to the rest of MLB. That's how they should be judged.

I just ran the numbers using bb-ref (i'm just more comfortable with that site than fangraphs) and according to my arbitrary definition of Valuable Contributor, I got the following results:

Rodrigo Lopez

Ponson

Bedard

Guthrie

Jim Johnson (gave a slight nudge since they give him 2.4 WAR in 2012)

Tillman (gave a similar nudge to help him out for 2014)

Ponson came to us waaay before 2000.

Bedard was drafted in 1999.

Rodrigo Lopez came to us after already logging 600+ innings in the minors with San Diego. So no, I give our system 0 credit for him.

Guthrie looks like he had over 700 minor league innings in the Indians system. So again, 0 credit for our development.

Jim Johnson gave us 2 and exactly two valuable seasons, so we get credit for him.

Tillman spent similar amounts of time in Seattle's system as well as ours. He has also given us two valuable seasons.

So basically our system has drafted and developed one solid starter since 1999 (Bedard), and Tillman might sorta kinda give us partial credit. We've also developed one good reliever (2 since Britton seems to be legit).

Compared to Tampa Bay's roster just last two years alone, and we have Cobb + Price, and Matt Moore looming. Starting pitchers are obviously much more valuable than relievers to develop.

Now you make a very good point, it's not fair to lump all the failures of the 2000-2011 era necessarily in with the current regime. Honestly I don't know all of the ins and outs of how things changed once Duquette took over. So maybe we should look at resetting the clock on that.

He has done a fantastic job in acquiring talent through trade and international signings, which is awesome and cannot be understated. No way we are competitive in 2012 and 2014 without those additions.

I do know this though, the next Valuable Contributor pitcher that comes up as a product of our development during the Duquette era will be the first one.

[Stotle]

As much as people want to live in a directly causal universe, I think the most likely explanation here is a combination of a very high natural attrition rate among pitchers and bad luck. I'd be willing to bet that if you brought in an external auditor to go through the O's pitching development program there would be no major red flags, they'd be very similar to everyone else. No one wants to hear this, they want "do ABCD and all your prospects will pan out", but in the absence of other evidence I think the best way to "fix" the O's pitcher development system is to press on and hope for the best.

I cannot speak directly to Baltimore's developmental system because I do not speak directly to folks in charge of pitcher development. But I know enough people in enough organizations to know that teams' approaches to pitching development varies greatly. You may be correct that it's mostly luck, but we should be clear the case being made is that different approaches to development are mostly meaningless, and not that most teams are doing similar things. I think that's a pretty important distinction to make.

[DrungoHazewood]

I cannot speak directly to Baltimore's developmental system because I do not speak directly to folks in charge of pitcher development. But I know enough people in enough organizations to know that teams' approaches to pitching development varies greatly. You may be correct that it's mostly luck, but we should be clear the case being made is that different approaches to development are mostly meaningless, and not that most teams are doing similar things. I think that's a pretty important distinction to make.

Thanks. My intent was saying that there is large agreement about overall, high-level development philosophies. Details will certainly differ.

But we don't have some teams telling prospects to try to go 9 innings a start, while others are hard limiting all starters to 60 pitches, or something like that. I would imagine almost every team teaches mechanically sound, repeatable deliveries. They urge pitchers to do fairly similar conditioning and exercise routines, tailored to the individual pitchers. They impose reasonably similar workload constraints. I'm guessing few/any teams are regularly exposing their pitchers to conditions another organization would find alarming or damaging. Is that a reasonable set of assumptions?

[vab]

I wonder how many HS pitchers the best pitching development organizations are drafting high. It seems to me these 95+ mph HS pitchers are just overthrowing and ruining their arms to get drafted high and get that big payday.

Sent from my XT1049 using Tapatalk

[DrungoHazewood]

I wonder how many HS pitchers the best pitching development organizations are drafting high. It seems to me these 95+ mph HS pitchers are just overthrowing and ruining their arms to get drafted high and get that big payday.

Or it could be that those pitchers who throw 90+ or 95+ are an overwhelming majority of future MLB pitchers. But 80% or 90% of them are going to see their arms shredded. The remaining 10-20% are what we call Major Leaguers.

[mdbdotcom]

Kevin Brown threw 83 mph out of high school.

[weams]

Kevin Brown threw 83 mph out of high school.

And then he used Winstrol.

[Barnaby Graves]

By the way, who's ready for those threads when Bundy pitches a clean inning and everyone says he's the next Jake Arrieta and how could the Orioles give up on him

Seriously, does anybody want to comment on this.

Because I'm mentally readying myself for 30 threads on it in 2018.

[DrungoHazewood]

Kevin Brown threw 83 mph out of high school.

But is that typical, or unusual? We need data.

[Aristotelian]

First of all, I'm not entirely interested in who the top 5 were in our system relative to our own players. I care much more about how they are relative to the rest of MLB. That's how they should be judged.

I just ran the numbers using bb-ref (i'm just more comfortable with that site than fangraphs) and according to my arbitrary definition of Valuable Contributor, I got the following results:

Rodrigo Lopez

Ponson

Bedard

Guthrie

Jim Johnson (gave a slight nudge since they give him 2.4 WAR in 2012)

Tillman (gave a similar nudge to help him out for 2014)

Ponson came to us waaay before 2000.

Bedard was drafted in 1999.

Rodrigo Lopez came to us after already logging 600+ innings in the minors with San Diego. So no, I give our system 0 credit for him.

Guthrie looks like he had over 700 minor league innings in the Indians system. So again, 0 credit for our development.

Jim Johnson gave us 2 and exactly two valuable seasons, so we get credit for him.

Tillman spent similar amounts of time in Seattle's system as well as ours. He has also given us two valuable seasons.

So basically our system has drafted and developed one solid starter since 1999 (Bedard), and Tillman might sorta kinda give us partial credit. We've also developed one good reliever (2 since Britton seems to be legit).

Compared to Tampa Bay's roster just last two years alone, and we have Cobb + Price, and Matt Moore looming. Starting pitchers are obviously much more valuable than relievers to develop.

Now you make a very good point, it's not fair to lump all the failures of the 2000-2011 era necessarily in with the current regime. Honestly I don't know all of the ins and outs of how things changed once Duquette took over. So maybe we should look at resetting the clock on that.

He has done a fantastic job in acquiring talent through trade and international signings, which is awesome and cannot be understated. No way we are competitive in 2012 and 2014 without those additions.

I do know this though, the next Valuable Contributor pitcher that comes up as a product of our development during the Duquette era will be the first one.

If you don't count Tillman for the O's, then you should count Arrieta. EdRod also looks like he will join the list.

I don't know if the O's results are good or bad. There is a tremendous amount of uncertainty with 18 year old kids. You look at the Cardinals draft lists over the years, and they hit on Wacha and Miller but missed on a lot of guys too, and they are supposed to be the best.

One thing to consider is that if KG turns out to be our biggest success, he was drafted out of college instead of high school. Teams always want to draft young, and maybe that is true with position players. Maybe if you draft college players they are closer to being ready for the big leagues and stronger. Who cares if they are older? You will still get them for their prime years. They will just have a shorter career for another team after they hit free agency. Maybe college pitchers are the way to go?

[Can_of_corn]

Seriously, does anybody want to comment on this.

Because I'm mentally readying myself for 30 threads on it in 2018.

I expect 2018 to be dominated by threads on getting Markakis back so he can retire as an Oriole.

[mdbdotcom]

But is that typical, or unusual? We need data.

I think we need data that shows career length of pitchers by fast ball speed at different ages.

[Barnaby Graves]

I expect 2018 to be dominated by threads on getting Markakis back so he can retire as an Oriole.

I feel like he'll be competing with Nolan Reimold for a roster spot.

[DrungoHazewood]

One thing to consider is that if KG turns out to be our biggest success, he was drafted out of college instead of high school. Teams always want to draft young, and maybe that is true with position players. Maybe if you draft college players they are closer to being ready for the big leagues and stronger. Who cares if they are older? You will still get them for their prime years. They will just have a shorter career for another team after they hit free agency. Maybe college pitchers are the way to go?

I've seen data from Baseball Prospectus and others, probably five years or so ago, that showed in the first ~25 years of the draft college players had a significant advantage over high school kids. But that more recently that advantage had mostly or even completely disappeared.

I think we need data that shows career length of pitchers by fast ball speed at different ages.

I know there is a fairly strong, positive correlation between fastball velocity and performance at the major league level. Haven't seen similar data for minor leaguers or draftees. It's probably difficult to find accurate velocity data for thousands of amateur players, and you really need a huge swath of information across everybody to try to eliminate selection bias.