2009 N.L. Rookie of the Year Projections and Speculation

(Update Aug. 16, 2009: For a more up-to-date analysis of the 2009 Rookie of the Year contenders, check out my recent posts detailing the N.L. pitchers and position players still in contention)

I covered most of the candidates for the A.L. Rookie of the Year a while back, and now it's time to take a look at the N.L. candidates. I might be missing some eligible players, so if you think I should add anyone, just let me know.

When we looked at the A.L. candidates, I came up with the following chart of hitters that have won the award since 1990.

Using the averages at the bottom of the chart, we'll look to see which N.L. R.O.Y. candidates match up the best and narrow down the field. We'll also do the same thing using the following chart of pitchers that have won the award since 1990.

I think it should be noted that the odds of a pitcher winning the rookie of the year are very low. It's not impossible, but it looks like it only happens when the rookie position players are unusually below average. It's also worth pointing out that of the 8 pitchers that have won the award since 1990, two were Japanese pitchers with considerable experience at the professional level, and 3 of the above pitchers spent considerable time coming out of the bullpen. That means that a starting pitcher coming straight from the minors has roughly a 10% chance of winning rookie of the year any given year. Pretty tough odds.

Ok, so now we can make up a list of hitters and pitchers that are likely to meet the requirements for rookie of the year in the National League this year and come up with some basic projections to see what kind of shot they have at winning the award. (The following projections are based off of a combination of the projections given by Bill James, CHONES, Marcel, Oliver, Zips, and my own projections.)


There isn't really a standout among the group. I think Gamel might have the best shot, but everyone else in the group is completely capable of having a solid year and posting R.O.Y. worthy stats. I think McCutchen and Rasmus will probably come up short, and Gamel may not get enough playing time, so if I had to narrow down the field, I'd include Maybin, Fowler, and Sanchez. Overall though, I think this year's position players provide a relatively weak field of candidates, which opens up the opportunity for a pitcher to win the award.

So, let's take a quick look at the rookie N.L. pitchers.

Not really much going on there either. There are a few other N.L. players that have been mentioned as candidates for the R.O.Y. award (including John Mayberry Jr. and Jordan Zimmerman), but I think we've covered the names that are mentioned most often.

So, who's it gonna' be? I really can't single out any one player that I feel is going to stand out this year, and it might come down to who gets more playing time and doesn't screw up a whole bunch. To narrow it down, Kenshin Kawakami has the best shot at R.O.Y. simply because he has a secure starting role with major league team.

The N.L. field is wide open this year as far as the rookie of the year award is concerned. There are no clear cut stand-outs, and it's very likely that a player currently under the radar could spring to the forefront and win it. Be on the lookout for older players getting their shot at a major league roster spot due to injury or trades, especially power hitting corner outfielders or corner infielders. Also, look out for talented relief pitchers, especially closers, that could come in and save 25 or more games for a team in a division race.

If anyone can think of a player that has not been mentioned, be sure to let me know, and we'll throw him in the mix. I'm sure there are plenty of sleepers out there that no one is even considering right now. We'll check back in a few months and see how things look.

Edit: Pablo Sandoval is NOT eligible for Rookie of the Year (145 at-bats in 2008). Thanks for the heads up on that one Jim.

...Read more

When Power Goes Sour: The Bo Jackson Theory

When I was a kid, I was convinced that Bo Jackson was probably the greatest baseball player ever. My friends and I would spend hours working out baseball card trades based around a handful of Bo Jackson cards, arguing over how many Steve Avery cards a "Bo Breaker" card was worth. Maybe it was all the ads Bo was in (Bo knows everything), or maybe it was the hype of a 2 sport star, but we thought Bo Jackson was incredible.

We never worried about stats or actual production, we just loved the idea of a guy who played football hitting home runs and breaking bats on the baseball field. Sadly, as we got older, the numbers became more important to us, and we soon realized that in fact Bo did not know everything. After 8 major league seasons, Jackson too called it quits on his career, taking home his lifetime .250 batting average, 141 home runs, and 841 strikeouts with him.

So, what happened with Bo? He had a couple of good years, plenty of athletic skill, speed, and some power, but he never seemed to put it all together. The same could be said for a lot of other perceived power hitters, too. Why didn't they become the players we thought they were going to be? And how can we tell the "good" power hitters from the "bad" power hitters?

While there's probably no sure way of predicting a power hitter's future success, I want to suggest a few basic stats that are highly indicative of a slugger's future major league success. I call it:

The Bo Jackson Theory

The origins of the Bo Jackson Theory came during an analysis of a childhood hero. Though my memories of Jackson may have been based around an image of a brute strength power hitter, when I began looking at his stats, I realized 2 things. One, he actually wasn't much of a power hitter at all, and two, his strikeout to walk ratio was way out of whack. His lack of success wasn't due to an inability to run or play defense, but simply that he missed a lot of pitches, and even when he did make contact, he usually didn't put much into it. It's a basic concept, and I guessed that if it could bring down the mighty Bo Jackson, surely I could find other examples of power hitters that bombed for the same reason.

So, to test out my theory, first I picked 50 hitters (some still in the minors), and ranked them by their average IsoP at the minor league level. For anyone unfamiliar with IsoP, it is a stat the "isolates" a hitter's power production from his batting average by subtracting it from his slugging percentage. In other words, IsoP is a simple measure for a hitter's pure capacity to hit for extra bases.

Here's the list I came up with for average minor league IsoP.

A bit of an interesting list. I was surprised to see guys like Dale Murphy and Carlos Beltran so low, but overall, I think all of the big name sluggers got into the top 20 or 30. But to be fair, I wanted to also have a ranking system to adjust for each player's age (it's obvious that an 18 year old in the minors is generally going to have less power and a lower IsoP than a 22 year old), so I made up a similar chart ranking each player by their average age at AA ball. Note that some players either skipped AA, played at AA for multiple years, or had some other type of abnormal career path, so I tried to adjust for that.

Obviously, some of the players on the list haven't played above A ball yet, so I approximated their expected age at AA.

Now we have a rank for IsoP as well as a rank for age. The last ranking I wanted to adjust for was minor league strikeout to walk ratio, so I made up one more chart.

Just as with the IsoP ranking, there were a few hitters that surprised me (I didn't realize that Ryan Klesko was such a balanced hitter), but in general it looks like most players are about where they should be. I would agree that Albert Pujols is probably the most disciplined hitter out there, and guys like Wily Mo Pena and Billy Ashley are pretty much the worst.

Alright, so now we've got a rank for IsoP, an age rank, and a K/BB ratio rank. To keep things simple, I took each ranking for each category and averaged out each score (lower scores are better than higher scores). Here's what I came up with.


As with the other lists, there were a few players that I felt were either too low or too high, but I think overall the better power hitters ended up at the top of the list, while the not so good power hitters found their way to the bottom. I could have weighted each category differently and messed with the formula until the list looked better, but I'm really only interested in creating a basic model that everyone can understand that doesn't require much thinking, and is generally accurate.

To ensure that this basic formula is dependable, I took the career home run totals for players on the above charts (I used only players that were either retired or were 35 years of age or older), graphed them out, and then added a linear trend line.

Obviously, it's not a perfect way of evaluating power hitters, but the general trend shows that the idea at least provides us with a range to project future potential. Of the players that either far exceeded or fell short of the trend line, most of them dealt with extenuating circumstances during their career (Strawberry did drugs, Fielder had to play in Japan, McGwire and Canseco did PEDs, Billy Ashley and Jose Oliva both had very short careers with few shots at a starting position).

So, what does the IsoP vs. Age vs. K/BB Ratio formula tell us? Essentially, it says that Bo Jackson was destined to be a very bad power hitter (and in the case of the 50 hitters on our chart, he was the worst). Jackson generally had the lowest power production, worst plate discipline, and was the least advanced in terms of age of all the players on the chart.

When I put it all together, I quickly saw why Jackson struggled so much in the majors, and why he never had a "break out" season. In simple terms, he actually did put all of his skills together and reached his ceiling, it just turns out his ceiling and group of skills never were that great in the first place. And that's why I decided to call this basic approach to analyzing power hitters the Bo Jackson Theory.

Right now, I don't have a true numerical formula for the Bo Jackson Theory, but I'll try to work one out. Then, anyone who is interested can apply the formula to any minor league player and deduce a basic score to analyze their future power potential.

Well, that's it for now. If anyone else has a formula to relate IsoP to plate discipline and age, feel free to post it. Also, please keep in mind that this approach to analyzing hitters is strictly to compare the power potential of each player. It does not take into account on-base percentage or capacity to hit for average. We'll save that for another day.

Cameron Maybin

Whenever you look over a Top Prospects list, there's always a good chance that you'll see at least a few players that despite not having out performed numerous other prospects, are still considered "one of the best" out there. Often times, a lack of significant production by these players is overlooked because the guy is "a 5-tool player with a limitless ceiling" and of course he reminds scouts of a young Ted Williams/Ken Griffey Jr./Albert Pujols or whoever else they can come up with (scouts say some really inane things). If the prospect in question doesn't hit for power or lacks plate discipline, you can usually find some comment about how he has a really projectable body or shows lots of promises during certain at-bats. Some scouts rely too much on small sample sizes and think that just because a guy had a good night that he'll be able to reproduce those results every night.

Anyways, what I'm getting at is that there are a lot of prospects that get noticed simply because scouts like what they see, even if it means the scout has to ignore other things that should not be overlooked. Take Cameron Maybin for instance, who was called up to the big leagues after an official in the Tigers organization saw him hit a few home runs in AA ball. Maybin got called up that very same week to the major league club and went on to have a very depressing pro debut before being shipped off to the Florida Marlins. I'm a big fan of getting young players to the majors and letting them experience baseball at the highest appropriate level, but it was ridiculous to think that moving Maybin up so early was appropriate on any terms. In the case of Maybin, we have a young player that played well at age appropriate levels for two years in a row, but really hasn't performed at a level that justifies giving him a starting position on a major league team. He is definitely a solid hitter, and he has speed and some power to go with it, but he's no where near ready for major league pitching and he could just as easily fade away into obscurity as develop into an everyday big league center fielder. Before I get into this much deeper, let's look at his stats.



You can tell that Maybin has promise, and he'll develop into a solid hitter if things go right, but he isn't there yet. His numbers are good, but they aren't unusual for a young power hitter playing at those levels at 19 or 20 years old, and it's obvious that he still needs time to polish his plate approach and make the most of his at-bats. He strikes out a little too much, and a full 300 at-bats at AA would have given him a great opportunity to improve on his BB/K rate. But instead, Maybin struck out 21 times in 49 at-bats with the Tigers and ended the year with an average of .143. To add a little perspective to this argument, I'll give you player stats from some 20 year old hitters that were a little more developed than Maybin.

Other than Pujols, each of the above hitters went on to play a full year at AAA ball, and then struggled in the majors until the age of 23 or 24 years old. If we assume that Maybin continues to start for the Marlins, he'll have about 3 years of ineptitude in the majors before we see him put together a full productive season. By then he might be able to maintain an average above .300 and he might hit 25 or 26 home runs, and that's certainly something to look forward to, but I would argue that in the meantime he should have a few more chances to work on his plate discipline and approach in the minors.

So, in conclusion, the next 2-3 years of Maybin's professional career will most certainly be dictated by what level he plays at. I'm not down on him as a player, but he's at least 2 full seasons away from being major league ready. In the prime of his career he'll be good for a .315 average and 30 to 35 home runs a year with ample steals -- think Alfonso Soriano -- but he could face some very tough times between now and then.