Mullins earning a 2nd chance

[Can_of_corn]

Just now, Aglets said:

Buck used to say all the time:

"The biggest jump in all of professional sports is from the pitching you see in the Minors and the pitching you see in the big leagues."

Not saying that Buck always spoke the Gospel truth but I tend to think he knew what he was talking about with this.    

Another big data point missing from your assertion Drungo is innings.  What % of MLB innings are your 'bottom 30% of MLB pitchers' throwing?  I'm guessing far less than that number?

I've seen other folks say the biggest jump in baseball is from A+ to AA.

Considering that Buck put up a 886 OPS in A ball and spent parts of six seasons in AA (726 OPS) might be some truth to that.

[Redskins Rick]

3 minutes ago, Can_of_corn said:

I've seen other folks say the biggest jump in baseball is from A+ to AA.

Considering that Buck put up a 886 OPS in A ball and spent parts of six seasons in AA (726 OPS) might be some truth to that.

depending on your college level of difficulty or coming out of high school ball, Single A can be a big jump.

Jeter's book detailed the difficulties he felt, even to the point, that the scouts in the org was second guessing their selection of him.

[Aglets]

So here's the main way that Drungo's stat can be deceiving.   Let's consider the 2018 Orioles since that is a full season sample size.

We used 30 pitchers in 2018.    

So the 'bottom 30%' of Orioles pitchers would be the 9 worst guys..........i'll use WAR to make that selection.

Tillman, Phillips, Araujo, Carroll, Ortiz, Rogers, Means, Jace Peterson, Cortes Jr.      If you want to exclude the position player than Scott subs in for Peterson.

Point being, these guys were all various degrees of dumpster fires.

So if you are selecting for guys that have been truly awful, then yea I suppose I can buy Drungo's argument....they are basically AAA fodder.  But you aren't facing guys like this very often....right?

Those 9 guys pitched 100 of our 1431 innings in 2018...... roughly 7%.    If you make the Tanner Scott sub than that number goes up to 11% of our team innings.

So that's not a very typical thing for a batter to be facing those AAA fodder type guys.

[OsFanSinceThe80s]

Mullins needs to keep producing for another three weeks at a high level, before I consider calling him up. If he keeps hitting well at Norfolk, when Mullins does get the call up hypnotize him to think he is still facing AAA pitching, lol.  

[DrungoHazewood]

1 hour ago, Ohfan67 said:

Most of us don't want to admit it, but a not insignificant amount of baseball performance is like a lucky knockout in MMA. Thirty or more percent of performance is pretty random. That might be an underestimate. There must be a Monte Carlo type simulation that takes random AAA players (and their variation in performance) and plugs then into the majors to estimate performance. If you did that 10,000 times, then the same player might have a couple of thousand career trajectories. 

Talent wins out over a very long time.  But given the small differences in talent between the 200th and 600th best MLB players it's not uncommon for bad luck to be the determining factor in who has a career and who doesn't.  There are probably dozens of players similar to Ryan Flaherty whose major league careers will have zero to 50 PAs instead of the nearly 2000 he'll probably get.  And career earnings of a few $hundred thousand instead of Flaherty's nearly $10M.

[wildcard]

4 hours ago, LA2 said:

SSS! But I notice that he's walked a lot (7 in 30 PAs!) and isn't K'ing (just 3). 3 SBs too.

Just because its a SSS doesn't stop GMs from making moves.

Austin Wynns played 9 games in the minors and then Elias DFA's Sucre and recalled Wynns. That's right, 9 games was enough for Elias to evaluate that he wanted Wynns and was willing to show Sucre the  door out of the O's organization.

The decision to recall Mullins would not be as drastic.   Wilkerson,  Rickard and Wilkerson all have options so the O's can move those guys up and down to the minors without losing them.

Right now Rickard, who has replaced Mullins in center, has a 634 OPS.   That is the bar that Mullins has beat to be recalled IMO.  If Elias thinks Mullins play in the  minors has helped him start hitting and that it may continue in the majors then Elias recalls Mullins.  Mullins has more range than Rickard so that could help the O's defense. 

Wilkerson has a 571 OPS.   He can be optioned.

Its might work.  It might not.  But what does Elias have to lose?   Not as much and calling up Wynns after 9 minor league games and DFAing Sucre.

[Andtothewall]

2 hours ago, Frobby said:

And yet it seems like some players don’t experience much of a hiccup going from the minors to the majors, while some do.    That’s always been a mystery to me.     But put it this way, I might agree that the bottom 30% of major league pitchers are indistinguishable from AAA pitchers, but that still leaves the other 70%, and they get more than 70% of the work.    

How much of this is advanced scouting? There's just so much effort invested in studying major leaguers now, and although I'm sure teams put together fairly comprehensive scouting reports on guys in the upper minors, pitch profiles and the like can't really be assembled in the same way when a guy is facing even slightly worse pitchers. 

[scOtt]

1 hour ago, Tony-OH said:

One day hopefully we will have the same statcast data available to us in the minor leagues as the major leagues and then we'll have more definitive data to base our analysis on that forms our opinions. Until then, we'll can be happy that Mullins is hitting and getting on base in AAA, but realizing it really means nothing without all of the data on how it's being done and against what kinds of pitches and pitch locations.

 

 

 

Just a side question, Does Elias (or other ML teams) have that data? Even if only AAA?

[HowAboutThat]

3 hours ago, Frobby said:

Six games.    For me the fundamental question is why did he hit so poorly at the major league level last September and this April.    Was it just a prolonged slump where perhaps he started pressing and his demotion has allowed him to relax and break out of it?     Or does he have some fundamental weaknesses that major league pitchers are able to exploit but AAA pitchers cannot?

Exactly my question.if the answer is the latter, Mullins will never be a useful major leaguer.

Tony? Luke

Corn?

what say you?

[Can_of_corn]

2 minutes ago, scOtt said:

Just a side question, Does Elias (or other ML teams) have that data? Even if only AAA?

He should have the information for all the home games played by the various affiliates.

[DrungoHazewood]

29 minutes ago, Aglets said:

So here's the main way that Drungo's stat can be deceiving.   Let's consider the 2018 Orioles since that is a full season sample size.

We used 30 pitchers in 2018.    

So the 'bottom 30%' of Orioles pitchers would be the 9 worst guys..........i'll use WAR to make that selection.

Tillman, Phillips, Araujo, Carroll, Ortiz, Rogers, Means, Jace Peterson, Cortes Jr.      If you want to exclude the position player than Scott subs in for Peterson.

Point being, these guys were all various degrees of dumpster fires.

So if you are selecting for guys that have been truly awful, then yea I suppose I can buy Drungo's argument....they are basically AAA fodder.  But you aren't facing guys like this very often....right?

Those 9 guys pitched 100 of our 1431 innings in 2018...... roughly 7%.    If you make the Tanner Scott sub than that number goes up to 11% of our team innings.

So that's not a very typical thing for a batter to be facing those AAA fodder type guys.

But how much better are the next 20% or 40%?  On any given day how much more effective is Dylan Bundy or Alex Cobb?  How many times a year does your average #3 starter or your random 7th inning guy have a dumpster fire outing?  How often does a terrible pitcher pitch pretty well?  

My larger point is that major league pitchers aren't unhittable. It doesn't take Ty Cobb and Willie Mays to get a hit off of Clayton Kershaw.  An average AAA hitter would still hit .210, .220, .230 in the majors.  If you know for certain that Adam Jones can't hit a low-and-away slider (and everybody knows he can't, and he'll swing at it anyway), he can still be an above-average MLB hitter for 15 years because the average MLB pitcher can't throw a good, non-hanging slider six inches off the plate at will.  

[Can_of_corn]

Just now, Philip said:

Exactly my question.if the answer is the latter, Mullins will never be a useful major leaguer.

Tony? Luke

Corn?

what say you?

I haven't seen much to make me think he will be a useful ML player.

[scOtt]

1 hour ago, Aglets said:

Another big data point missing from your assertion Drungo is innings.  What % of MLB innings are your bottom 30% of MLB pitchers' throwing?  I'm guessing far less than that number?

Well our entire staff is 1 of 30. That 3 1/3%. Add Miami and KC and there's 10% of MLB.

[Tony-OH]

3 minutes ago, scOtt said:

Just a side question, Does Elias (or other ML teams) have that data? Even if only AAA?

It's my understanding that statcast is available at at all minor league parks, but only the clubs at this point have access to the data.

[HowAboutThat]

1 hour ago, Tony-OH said:

Let's be clear here, this is your opinion. Can you show us the fact to back up this 30% number? I think you are seriously degrading the difference between the major leagues and any minor league. 

As for Mullins, can you break down what pitchers were doing to him at the major league level vs minor league level to prove your theory or is it just that, a theory? I'll be happy to have this conversation, but one, we don't have the data from the minor leagues to see how they are pitching him vs the major league level and I'm willing to guess that neither us have watched video of all his games down in Norfolk to know one way or the other.

Now I would tend to agree with you that there is not a pitching characteristic for someone to bat .197 in the MLB vs .348 in AAA, but who here thinks Mullins is a .348 hitter in AAA? He's a .348 hitter over 6 games after going 3-for-5 last night.

I'm glad to see Mullins hitting. I'll have to go watch video to see if he's going to the opposite field or if pitchers are busting him in like they were at the MLB level. I don't know whether these were screaming line drives or ground balls "with eyes?" We don't know if pitchers were grooving more pitches to him like they weren't in the big leagues.

One day hopefully we will have the same statcast data available to us in the minor leagues as the major leagues and then we'll have more definitive data to base our analysis on that forms our opinions. Until then, we'll can be happy that Mullins is hitting and getting on base in AAA, but realizing it really means nothing without all of the data on how it's being done and against what kinds of pitches and pitch locations.

 

 

 

Well it seems that you answered my query-and Frobby’s-before I asked it.

thanks