Rosenthal @ The Athletic: Why top hitting prospects are having a harder transition to the majors than in the past

[Moose Milligan]

 

https://theathletic.com/5481059/2024/05/09/mlb-top-hitting-prospects-majors/

I probably should have bumped the Jackson Holliday thread with this, after all the article leads off with a picture of him.

Obviously can't post the whole thing, but it's a decent read.  I'm including the Elias quotes, anything Orioles related and any other good points.

Also, there's no mention of leg kicks.  Anywhere.  No mention of leg kicks being a problem for transitioning to the majors.

Quote

While J.D. Martinez was building up in the minors, a Triple-A coach with the New York Mets asked him how he was feeling at the plate.

“OK,” Martinez replied. “But I haven’t seen any velocity.”

To Martinez, a 14-year-veteran who signed with the Mets in late March and missed nearly all of spring training, the lack of quality arms at Triple A was instructive, even alarming.

The difference between the quality of pitching at Triple A and in the majors is nothing new — Cleveland Guardians president of baseball operations Chris Antonetti recalls former manager Terry Francona mentioning it to him a decade ago. But as the struggles of several top hitting prospects this season demonstrate, transitioning to the highest level might be more difficult than ever before.

 

Quote

“It’s hard to replicate the stuff up here. That’s why you see so many of these kids get called up and struggle,” Martinez said. “This is where the dawgs come. This is the big boy league.”

So, while service-time manipulation is not entirely a thing of the past, even under new, collectively-bargained rules designed to discourage the practice, some teams simply prefer their prospects to get additional reps in the minors. Early success in the majors can be elusive. And this season, it seems, top hitting prospects are getting particularly humbled.

The Baltimore Orioles’ Jackson Holliday, the No. 1 overall draft pick in 2022, returned to Triple A after starting his major-league career 2-for-34. The Pittsburgh Pirates’ Henry Davis, the No. 1 pick in 2021, also is back at Triple A after batting .162 with a .486 OPS.

Quote

Those rookies had varying levels of experience at Triple A. Some likely will recover the way the Orioles’ Gunnar Henderson did last season, winning American League Rookie of the Year after producing a .651 OPS through May 12. The San Diego Padres’ Jackson Merrill, who not only jumped to the majors straight from Double A, but also did it while playing a new position, center field, might follow Henderson’s path after breaking out of a recent 0-for-20 slump.

Quote

Then again, linear progression for prospects hardly is assured, especially when major-league pitching is so much better than it is at Triple A. Stuff+, a metric that judges pitches by their physical characteristics (spin, velocity, movement), portrays the difference vividly.

Through Monday, the average Stuff+ of every pitch in the majors was 100. At Triple A, it was 86, down from 95 last season. Among major-league starting pitchers, that’s roughly the difference between Mitch Keller and Griffin Canning. Only 29 major-league starters had thrown 50 innings with a Stuff+ score of 86 or worse.

“You’re going from a place where there’s a few guys who have played in the big leagues, some people who might one day, to every single person is a big-leaguer and there are no breaks, there are no easy at-bats,” Guardians manager Stephen Vogt said. “You have the best defenders in the world trying to catch the ball and now all of a sudden you’re seeing pitches in situations that you’ve never seen before. A lot of people misrepresent that. They don’t understand how big of a jump it truly is.”

Quote

Minor-league parks are equipped with devices such as Rapsodo and Trackman, which provide real-time information about the velocity, spin and movement of a baseball. Yet, Orioles general manager Mike Elias likened the leap from the minors to the majors to “going from tiddlywinks advance scouting to every laser pointed at you imaginable.”

“If there’s a bigger gap than normal, probably my strongest hypothesis would be that advance scouting and planning is getting so technically robust and so concentrated,” Elias said. “You go from sort of doing a little bit of that in the minors with lower-quality info and less intensity, and then all of a sudden you’ve got 29 advance teams and pitchers who are able to execute those plans way better. The impact of that has compounded or accelerated in the last few years.”

Quote

The St. Louis Cardinals’ Matt Carpenter was taken aback by the minor-league schedule when he spent the first part of the 2022 season at Triple A with the Texas Rangers. Teams at all levels now play six-game series, a format the sport implemented in 2021 to reduce travel during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“If the big leagues adopted that schedule, offense would go through the roof,” Carpenter said. “When you’re facing the same guys all the time, the advantage goes to the hitter.”

Carpenter might be onto something, as evidenced by the OPS and runs per game figures at Triple A in series of six or more games since 2021, according to STATS Perform.

Games 1-4: .778 OPS, 5.35 rpg

Games 5-7: .787 OPS, 5.47 rpg

The splits, in smaller samples, are even wider this season. Hitters, once they reach the majors, do not always get the benefit of multiple looks at a reliever in a three- or four-game series. And they never get two looks against one starter.

Quote

Teams use internal projections to forecast how their prospects might perform in the majors. Those projections do not always prove accurate — the Orioles, for example, surely did not anticipate Holliday going 2-for-34. But besides determining where a player stands in his development, teams must also evaluate how he might fit on their roster. “Those two things have to align for guys to get to the major-league level,” Antonetti said.

 

Quote

“It feels like the gap between Triple A and the big leagues is as great as it’s ever been and it’s that much harder to assess a hitter’s readiness as a result,” Rays president of baseball operations Erik Neander said.

“Speaking mostly on our own experiences, when providing a young hitter major-league opportunity we have to feel confident that they are well prepared to take a step back before they take two steps forward, and that your major league team is in a position to support that journey, too.”

The journey is not getting any easier. Orioles rookie Colton Cowser, who earned an AL Player of the Week honor in early April, was in a 4-for-35 slump before going 2-for-4 with a double and a sacrifice fly Wednesday night. The good ones always come out of it. But the task is more difficult in the majors than the minors, where a pitcher who dominates at one level gets promoted to another.

“If it was 1999 and you were facing Pedro Martinez and Randy Johnson, they would be in another league if they could be,” the Orioles’ Elias said. “But in the major leagues, there is nowhere else for those guys to go.”

 

No leg kicks mentioned!  

[Sports Guy]

This goes with the tweet I posted yesterday about the quality of fastball Holliday saw.

People laughed and acted like it was some flippant response but it’s true..you can’t learn to hit ML pitching in the minor leagues. You have to see it and adjust to it.

[interloper]

Great stuff here. AAA sure sounds like Little League these days. Holliday had the full force of multi-million-dollar analytics systems pointed at him - in the 9-hole for crying out loud. 

[Too Tall]

Very informative read. Required for all who think AAA success can automatically translate right away to the majors. I think the part where it says the team must have/be able to afford the time for the player to adjust needs remembering also. Thanks for posting, Moose!

[Just Regular]

Rookie integration taxes are higher but you gotta pay to play unless you can live with using Adam Frazier or Ramon Urias or Jorge Mateo in October.

I guess Sigbot could check the ask for its kin Alex Bregman if he came to market..

Everybody said what was gonna happen if the Astros didn't win the division...I guess we'll never know!

[24fps]

2 minutes ago, Sports Guy said:

This goes with the tweet I posted yesterday about the quality of fastball Holliday saw.

People laughed and acted like it was some flippant response but it’s true..you can’t learn to hit ML pitching in the minor leagues. You have to see it and adjust to it.

The extent of the difference is what I find most surprising. 

[now]

While all of this sounds true, I wonder what the other side of the equation is. The majors also has all the world's best hitters, with their analytics teams breaking down the opposition pitching. So couldn't you argue that AAA pitchers will have an equally steep adjustment to the majors when they first arrive? It doesn't negate the argument made here, but seems it would duplicate when it comes to young pitchers getting called to the Show. Yet what we hear is only, "The jump from AAA to MLB pitching is the biggest jump in sports."

[DrungoHazewood]

I haven't read the article, just the snippets in the original post. But I'm guessing there's no study to accompany this, where they show a bunch of statistically significant samples of rookie performance in their first X games in, say, the 1970s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, and then compare the data to the 2020s with a clear trend line that it really is more difficult to break in today?

Because without that, this is more-or-less a fluff piece speculating on the causes of an effect that nobody has shown to actually be true.

[DrungoHazewood]

22 minutes ago, now said:

While all of this sounds true, I wonder what the other side of the equation is. The majors also has all the world's best hitters, with their analytics teams breaking down the opposition pitching. So couldn't you argue that AAA pitchers will have an equally steep adjustment to the majors when they first arrive? It doesn't negate the argument made here, but seems it would duplicate when it comes to young pitchers getting called to the Show. Yet what we hear is only, "The jump from AAA to MLB pitching is the biggest jump in sports."

Remember when expansion supposedly diluted pitching? When I'd ask why expansion didn't dilute hitting just as much the answer was usually something along the lines of "well, it's obvious that there are all kinds of effects that the scarcity of pitching shows that there's just more hitters in the pipeline and kids these days can't see that the training and stuff isn't like the ways that the people did it back in the 50s and all that... yea."

Until someone shows me relevant data confirming Rosenthal's hypothesis I'm going to assume he has no idea if it's true or not. But his article will now be cited as evidence by any number of people who claim it is.

[Can_of_corn]

1 hour ago, Sports Guy said:

This goes with the tweet I posted yesterday about the quality of fastball Holliday saw.

People laughed and acted like it was some flippant response but it’s true..you can’t learn to hit ML pitching in the minor leagues. You have to see it and adjust to it.

Which is something some of us have been saying this whole time.

 

[RZNJ]

3 minutes ago, Can_of_corn said:

Which is something some of us have been saying this whole time.

 

Has anyone ever said that you can learn to hit ML pitching in the minors?

[Frobby]

The point Elias made about the quality of advance scouting and game-planning made a lot of sense to me.   There’s not much incentive to invest in that at the AAA level.    

[Sports Guy]

6 minutes ago, Can_of_corn said:

Which is something some of us have been saying this whole time.

 

Yep.  It’s a very basic and simple point but people seem to be offended when you say it.

[OsFanSinceThe80s]

This article confirms my suspicions that any pitcher worth a damn isn't going to be wasting away in AAA ball. Adley and Gunnar both went through their own adjustment periods. Ultimately once Holliday has the mechanics of his swing worked out he needs to be called up because the only way to hit against MLB pitchers is to face MLB pitchers.

 

 

Edited May 9 by OsFanSinceThe80s

[OnlyOneOriole]

1 hour ago, Moose Milligan said:

 

https://theathletic.com/5481059/2024/05/09/mlb-top-hitting-prospects-majors/

I probably should have bumped the Jackson Holliday thread with this, after all the article leads off with a picture of him.

Obviously can't post the whole thing, but it's a decent read.  I'm including the Elias quotes, anything Orioles related and any other good points.

Also, there's no mention of leg kicks.  Anywhere.  No mention of leg kicks being a problem for transitioning to the majors.

 

 

 

No leg kicks mentioned!  

Good post.   Makes sense.

 

In JH's case, I do think the leg kick has something to do with it.   And it goes back to the first quote in the OP about velocity.   In the majors there is just more of it.  You don't have near as much time (baseball speaking) to decide whether to swing or not.  So the timing with the leg kick may work in the minors where velocity is less, but in the majors he may be a tad slow with it compared to the speed of the pitches he is seeing.

Looks like he is back into the swing of things at Norfolk so lets hope he made an adjustment and will be back up at some point.