OBP in the minors

[Frobby]

39 minutes ago, RZNJ said:

I guess my point is that those K rates in High A and Low A need to come down at some point.    There may be a player or two who can succeed striking out that much but, generally speaking, it's not good.

Just thought I’d throw the league averages into the hopper:

Low A East 25.5%
Hi A East 27.1%
AA Northeast 25.5%
AAA East 24.1%

Your earlier post talked about K/AB but the above are K/PA.   On the latter measure, here’s where some of our guys fall: 

Stowers 32.3%

Daschbach 32.1%

Henderson 30.4%

Handley 30.3%

Hall 30.1%

Grenier 29.4%

Dorian 27.4%

Rizer 26.8%

Watson 26.6%

Westburg 25.4%

Welk 24.1%

Mundy 23.5%

Haskin 21.6%

Neustrom 18.9%

Hernaiz 17.7%

Rutschman 15.8%

 

[Filmstudy]

2 hours ago, Frobby said:

We have stats that assign the proper weights to these things, like wOBA, wRC+, rOBA, Rbat+ and RC/G.  They just don’t get referred to in everyday discussions because the average fan can’t calculate them easily.  OPS has the virtue of being a pretty good statistical measure that is easy to understand and calculate.    

In the late 1980s when people started referring to OPS, I was infuriated by it.  If you're going to add 2 things that don't have the same relative value, why not just add fielding percentage and batting average!

Now I'm more amazed that the baseball public is still willing to accept OPS as a critical comparative statistic.  OPS+ is better, but it's still just normalizing the total of the 2 elements and not trying to weight OBP (and inherently outs used) properly.

STATS INC did a lot of good things to make baseball information public, but I think their annual was the first place I saw OPS.

wOBA is explained here:

https://library.fangraphs.com/offense/woba/

Edited August 24, 2021 by Filmstudy

[Tony-OH]

35 minutes ago, Filmstudy said:

In the late 1980s when people started referring to OPS, I was infuriated by it.  If you're going to add 2 things that don't have the same relative value, why not just add fielding percentage and batting average!

Now I'm more amazed that the baseball public is still willing to accept OPS as a critical comparative statistic.  OPS+ is better, but it's still just normalizing the total of the 2 elements and not trying to weight OBP (and inherently outs used) properly.

STATS INC did a lot of good things to make baseball information public, but I think their annual was the first place I saw OPS.

wOBA is explained here:

https://library.fangraphs.com/offense/woba/

wOBA in my opinion is the best way to understand the effectiveness of a hitter with current stats/metrics. OPS is the easiest and quickest way to have a general idea of how good a hitter is, but as it's been pointed out, it's no where near perfect. 

I love looking at Baseball Savant and use the expected stats in order to get an idea of how hard and what angles the hitter is consistently hitting the ball at along with EV and barrel%. 

Then it's onto their stats against different pitches to see if they are struggling against high velocity, off-speed or both.

[Just Regular]

3 hours ago, Aglets said:

To be honest I'm not sure there actually is a lot of correlation between K's and run production.....although obviously there is a threshold somewhere.

Maybe we can call it like the Jo Adell line.   Especially if we end up getting to weigh and measure Elijah Green for a season.   For sure somewhere it is disqualifying for a batter to be MLB-viable.

The other thing I believe about A ball is if you are an advanced bat (even one without AAA let alone MLB ability), if you want a walk you can get it because the pitchers aren't good enough yet.

The Rays striking out a lot are to me examples of warts they can live with if the fielding, baserunning and contact-to-damage ratios are there - those are the undervalued commodities when you gotta maximize those $$$/WAR.