5/24 ML Gameday Thread: Johnson, Ball & Jimenez pitching

Spot opened up by Miller to Pawtucket yesterday.

I'm not a Ball hater - in fact I don't get into judging prospects below AAA at all - but I don't consider 3 BB 2 K a good outing for any pitcher at any level.

Hmm ... the three walks (and a wild pitch) came in a stretch of five batters in the middle of the outing, which suggests a temporary loss of mechanics rather than command difficulties. There were no line drives hit at all. He went into the fifth working on a one-hitter, which was an infield single, and then gave up singles to four of his last seven hitters -- another infield single, and three fly balls. Infield and fly ball singles are almost never hit hard, either.

I think that if 18 guys hit the ball off you and none makes hard contact, that's a good outing. Most A-ball hitters do not have the patience to lay off pitches that look good but really can't be hit hard, and it's hard to strike guys out when they hit the first or second strike weakly into play.

Of course, this hypothesis will be impossible to test, because by the time he faces better hitters, he'll presumably have improved his own stuff. But I would never get discouraged about a prospect well-regard by scouts (check Chaz's re-tweets) who is succeeding in the low minors with a legitimate BABIP skill rather than strikeouts. At worst, I'd stay agnostic with a wait-and-see attitude.

Well, I certainly should have said "appears to be succeeding so far" via the skill. And it's true that minor league batted ball discriminations between fly balls and line drives are sketchy. But he has a 6.9% LD% since his first start of the season, which is 11.4% for three starts and 4.2% in his last three. To put that in perspective, Alex Cobb led MLB qualifying pitchers last year with 16.4%, and Pat Neshek led those with 60 IP or more with 11.2%.

As sketchy as those batted ball judgments are, I think it's seriously unlikely that he allowed 19 line drives in those six starts and had 11 scored as fly balls instead (including 12 line drives with 9 gifts by the scorer in his last three starts)-- which would bring his LD% up just to match Cobb's. IOW, his variance from average has been much larger than the error bars in the metric.

You're grossly overestimating the accuracy of minor league batted ball numbers. Check out the list of Carolina League pitchers with 75+ IP last year-- the median LD% is about 14.5%, which is way, way lower than the MLB average. The Salem Red Sox stringers are particularly bad-- the SalSox dominate the leaderboard I just linked to, with Justin Haley at 7.4% LD, Corey Littrell at 9.9%, Mercedes at 10.5%, Cuevas at 11.2%, Kukuk at 11.8%, Martin at 12.1%, Light at 14.4%. If you think those are their actual rates of hard contact, I have a bridge to sell you.