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Post by Chris Hatfield on Dec 14, 2015 15:28:00 GMT -5
I really disagree. For reference, here is a probably mostly accurate list of the youngest players who (probably*) ended the season in High A in 2015, sorted by birthday: (* - I used the current rosters on the teams' MILB.com pages, which is a bit problematic at this point given player movement - the better way to do this would probably have been to use B-Ref's team pages) Junior Fernandez (P-STL), 3/2/97 Gleyber Torres (SS-CHC), 12/13/96 Ruben Castro (C-HOU), 7/10/96 Bobby Bradley (1B-CLE), 5/29/96 Alex Verdugo (OF-LAD), 5/15/96 Enrique Chavez (P-HOU), 4/13/96 Spencer Adams (P-CWS), 4/13/96 Rayder Ascanio (P-SEA), 3/17/96 Franklin Barreto (SS-OAK), 2/27/96 Fernandez had a call-up similar to Espinoza's, pitching in two games and throwing 6 2/3 in Palm Beach after pitching in the GCL. One wonders if the reason he skipped right to the FSL is that Palm Beach is 30 minutes south of the STL complex. Torres had a seven-game, 23 at-bat call-up to Myrtle Beach. Castro played in 32 games all year, 13 in High A and 19 at the complex. No clue what his deal is. Bradley played in 2 games at High A after spending the year in the SAL. Verdugo is probably the oldest player who got a legit call-up to High A, 96 PA in 23 games after getting called up in mid-August. Chavez pitched in 3 games at the level, 6 2/3 innings, after pitching in the DSL and GCL. Adams made five starts in Winston-Salem after a mid-August call-up, so he's comparable to Verdugo. Ascanio was in Bakersfield from June 2 onward. Barreto played the entire season in Stockton, so he started the year as the youngest at the level. Now, Espinoza's birthday is 3/9/98, so to compare, you'd pretend it's 3/9/97. So if our "time displaced" Espinoza had been called up to High A this year, he'd have been the youngest player to play at the level by a few days, and if it happened mid-season as you postulate, he'd have been by far the youngest player to see significant time at the level, by about 9 to 11 or 12 months depending on how you want to define it. My point here: Espinoza can still be a top 25 or higher prospect if he spends the entire season in Greenville. He's going to be incredibly young for that level, never mind the next one. I believe the STL Cardinals have both their GCL & FSL teams in the same stadium/complex (Jupiter)....It would have made some sense though by staying in the same stadium setting & simply putting on a different uniform. By doing this though he skips 2 levels. Good call. The team is called the Palm Beach Cardinals but they play in Jupiter at the stadium they share with the Marlins in ST and the Jupiter Hammerheads (Marlins affiliate) during the FSL. Makes even more sense then.
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Post by philsbosoxfan on Dec 15, 2015 12:45:33 GMT -5
You're probably right about him making Salem but if he's the prospect many think and hope he is he will make Salem by about mid year... Age be damned If he goes Greenville/Salem 50/50 this year & Portland/Paw 50/50 next year, wouldn't that put him in MLB by age 19 or 20?....I can only think of Dwight Gooden to make it that fast. I know there has been a few others. Maybe Porcello, Fernandez, not sure of who else. Won't be unheard of. I do believe the Sox won't rush this kid. 5 or 6 years of control will start when he's 19 or 22, won't matter. They just want the best 6 years they can control. The only way they push him through is if he absolutely dominates every level. King Felix debuted at 19 and put up a 2.3 WAR in only 84 innings. There was a guy in the 60's, sorry don't remember his name (Morgan maybe) that got his first start for the A's at age 18. To some extent it was a publicity thing by their unusual owner Charles Finley but he also happened to be a serious prospect. If I remember right, they burned him out fast and that was pre-TJ time. Urias, btw, is ahead of Espinoza in the age advancement scale but has an advantage. His birthday is in August which meant he turned 17 during the season and was therefore eligible to pitch as a 16 year old, in his case the Mexican League Dodger team.
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Post by Chris Hatfield on Dec 15, 2015 12:56:22 GMT -5
Well, before it gets taken out of context, let me be clear about my point: I was not saying that Espinoza could not possibly advance past Greenville this year. My point was only that he could still be a top 25 or maybe even top 10 prospect if he spends the full year at Greenville. You could then extrapolate that point to the notion that if he is able to advance even faster, we could have a Felix-level uber-prospect on our hands, or at least a Urias-level one.
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Post by philsbosoxfan on Dec 15, 2015 13:08:48 GMT -5
I think it's safe to say there is a very low chance Espinoza starts the year in Salem. He threw one poor game in Greenville to end the year. That game was just to give him a taste of where he will start out this year. He'd have to have a crazy spring to even think about skipping Greenville and even then cooler heads would prevail and let him make at least a couple starts there. I'm guessing you didn't see the game, he was excellent. The linescore doesn't tell the story. A few well placed dribblers and a few airmailed catcher throws didn't help the box score scouting. That being said, he didn't throw any curves and his velocity topped out at about 94-95. His mound presence was way beyond his years and it looked like he was hitting the catchers mitt all day. He was definitely controlling the at bats.
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Post by philsbosoxfan on Dec 15, 2015 13:34:57 GMT -5
One other somewhat related note relative to the development steps is that none of the modern day 17-18 yr old phenoms went on to have early arm issues. (SSS understood)
Here's the laundry list and the ages that they came into national prominence:
Urias 16 Felix 17 Espinoza 17 Pedro 18 Gooden 18 FRod 18
ADD: Just noticing that 3 of the 6 are from Venezuela. Time to get more scouts down there. We can order up extra flack jackets and combat helmets.
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Post by Chris Hatfield on Dec 15, 2015 13:46:41 GMT -5
One other somewhat related note relative to the development steps is that none of the modern day 17-18 yr old phenoms went on to have early arm issues. (SSS understood) Here's the laundry list and the ages that they came into national prominence: Urias 16 Felix 17 Espinoza 17 Pedro 18 Gooden 18 FRod 18 ADD: Just noticing that 3 of the 6 are from Venezuela. Time to get more scouts down there. We can order up extra flack jackets and combat helmets. Ray, I'm not sure what criteria you're using here to determine "national prominence" or who is on this list, but to put Espinoza in this company based on a great DSL/GCL season is kind of insane.
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Post by philsbosoxfan on Dec 15, 2015 13:57:19 GMT -5
One other somewhat related note relative to the development steps is that none of the modern day 17-18 yr old phenoms went on to have early arm issues. (SSS understood) Here's the laundry list and the ages that they came into national prominence: Urias 16 Felix 17 Espinoza 17 Pedro 18 Gooden 18 FRod 18 ADD: Just noticing that 3 of the 6 are from Venezuela. Time to get more scouts down there. We can order up extra flack jackets and combat helmets. Ray, I'm not sure what criteria you're using here to determine "national prominence" or who is on this list, but to put Espinoza in this company based on a great DSL/GCL season is kind of insane. Agree 100% but I'm basing it on scouting not statistics. Compare the scouting reports on Felix vs Anderson. We'll see when the BA rankings come out but for reference Hernandez was #30 after his age 17 season and Urias #51 after his age 16 season. ADD: The above are the only 16 through 18 year old pitchers I could find in BA's Top 100's. Gooden was pre BA but he's always been the phenom poster boy, as a 19 year old he pitched 218 innings for the Mets. ADD2: You can make pretty quick work of it by cross referencing with Baseball-Reference.com because they list any BA rankings in their headers. I also used the season age as defined by them. ADD3: Understand my orientation here, I was looking for comps to Espinoza when BA comes out with their Top100. I was specifically looking at people that played pro ball at 17 like Anderson to compare with how they fared in BA's rankings. My original comment though was that none of the young phenoms who took his route (or Gooden who is American) seem to have developed arm issues early in their careers.
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Post by Chris Hatfield on Dec 15, 2015 15:06:50 GMT -5
Gotcha. So what's your cutoff? Entering their age 18 season? Maybe just, say, for the 2015 list, born in 1997 or later? I believe you're missing Michael Ynoa, for one example off the top of my head, who'd be an example of someone who did have arm issues. Handy reference: www.thebaseballcube.com/prospects/Looking quickly, you're missing Ynoa and Martin Perez in 2009. Both have had TJ. Jose Pett in 1993 (although who the hell knows why on earth he was on there, being from Brazil and not having pitched yet). But those were just using the "list year minus 18" method, which wouldn't even include the likes of Pedro or Rodriguez. I'd bet there'd be a bunch more if you went even broader. EDIT: Moved the Espinoza tangent into his thread. Made more sense there than to hijack the projections thread. EDIT2: More on Jose Pett, who appears to be more a case of hype than anything: www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Jos%C3%A9_Pett
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Post by rjp313jr on Dec 15, 2015 16:53:27 GMT -5
To stay in the same conversation as possibly one of the best pitching prospects in the game, ace caliber I would think he'd have to continue to be very impressive and dominate. If he does so, I would be surprised if he was not in Salem. Maybe not half way through but certainly by the end of the year making more than one or two starts. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the will say he's young so let him dominate. Personally, I think that'd be dumb. Age shouldn't matter at all. His performance should.
It's indicative of what the hopes and expectations are for this kid. Realistic or not, that's the view of him. He's the Sox Urias. Sickles says "could be the best pitching prospect in baseball by the end of the year".
This doesn't mean it'd be a failure of a year or that he would be a failure, etc.
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Post by Chris Hatfield on Dec 15, 2015 17:27:10 GMT -5
Gotcha. So what's your cutoff? Entering their age 18 season? Maybe just, say, for the 2015 list, born in 1997 or later? I believe you're missing Michael Ynoa, for one example off the top of my head, who'd be an example of someone who did have arm issues. Handy reference: www.thebaseballcube.com/prospects/Looking quickly, you're missing Ynoa and Martin Perez in 2009. Both have had TJ. Jose Pett in 1993 (although who the hell knows why on earth he was on there, being from Brazil and not having pitched yet). But those were just using the "list year minus 18" method, which wouldn't even include the likes of Pedro or Rodriguez. I'd bet there'd be a bunch more if you went even broader. EDIT: Moved the Espinoza tangent into his thread. Made more sense there than to hijack the projections thread. EDIT2: More on Jose Pett, who appears to be more a case of hype than anything: www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Jos%C3%A9_PettAnd keep in mind, of course, that part of the reason pitchers (and players generally, frankly) becoming top prospects by age 18 is so rare is because by definition you are limiting yourself to international players. And for a player at age 16 to be so considered, he needs to have been so considered upon signing, basically.
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Post by James Dunne on Dec 15, 2015 17:30:44 GMT -5
A lot of the talk about Espinoza reaching Salem quickly revolves around him meeting only token opposition in Low A. That's a pretty big thing to take for granted. He's going to be facing hitters who aced Short Season-A and a good number of college hitters. If he does it, yeah, awesome. But let's not set ourselves up to be disappointed by him putting up pedestrian numbers like a 2.75 ERA and 3.0 K/BB ratio as a 17-year-old with Greenville and him sticking around there the whole year.
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Post by rjp313jr on Dec 15, 2015 18:21:58 GMT -5
James we are way past setting ourselves up for disappointment...
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Post by pedroelgrande on Dec 15, 2015 19:09:58 GMT -5
I do think we will have to see if Dombroski will bring the aggressive nature of promotions that characterize the Tigers.
I think Low A should be a good challenge for him, I think he faced like two different teams in the GCL. But just reading the reports about his stuff, advanced knowledge of pitching, and watching the limited video out there its hard to hold the enthusiasm about him pushing the envelop on his way to the big leagues.
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nomar
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Post by nomar on Dec 15, 2015 19:26:06 GMT -5
I have a feeling Hazen will have as much if not more to do with the farm than Dombrowski.
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Post by philsbosoxfan on Dec 15, 2015 20:18:28 GMT -5
First, rip, my posts weren't an attempt to compare him to any of the mentioned pitchers. Second, Chris, yes, I know it's pretty exclusionary.
When I did this, I wasn't being overly scientific and I did it for my own edification. I did it after watching his Greenville game and I can say without any hesitation, he was the best 17 year old I've ever seen and there is nobody close. On the other hand I'm not a scout. I've attended maybe 100 minor league games in my life and watch several more on MiLB.TV but until recently that's been very limited. The only other phenom I've seen pitch in the minors (TV) was Urias at 18 and I was impressed but more impressed by Espinoza. Realistically, it was one game.
I became curious, how many pitchers followed an approximate path to Anderson and how were they viewed AT THE TIME. What are the point in time comps. There are precious few, he's a rarity but we all knew that. For the pitchers I didn't mention that Chris did, Yona, Perez, Pett, none pitched at 17, leastwise not according to Baseball Reference. If they pitched in foreign leagues at 17 they aren't similar in terms of what I was looking for because the mass of scouts wouldn't have seen them. I actually only found two, Felix and Urias.
My next step was to expand it a bit. to age 18. The problem there though is that you start bringing in high school kids who just make a cameo after graduation. That isn't similar in terms of what I was trying to determine (again, just for myself). That step really just brought me Martinez & Rodriguez.
Again, my orientation was to see how Espinoza fares when compared to similarly situated pitchers when the rankings come out. Nothing overly scientific here and it's so rare that there's no way you can do any meaningful projecting from it.
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Post by philsbosoxfan on Dec 15, 2015 20:36:12 GMT -5
From articles and interviews, the pitcher he gets comped to most (at similar advancement levels) is Pedro. That seems like the natural because they're similarly sized and Pedro was a Red Sox. I also have seen comps to FRod which are also somewhat of a natural since he broke FRod's Venezuelan signing bonus record.
I also want to add that afterwards, I was curious as to how the scouting compared. I didn't find anything on Pedro at 18 but from what I could see, the closest comp is Felix Hernandez. FB about equal but Anderson is faster, Felix had more sink. Anderson seems to have a better curve but on the other hand Felix also threw a slider(4 pitch pitcher at 17). Change they appear to be about equal in terms of development and projection. Keep in mind though, I'm an amateur comparing scouting reports from mostly people I don't know.
The best way to say what I was trying to accomplish was putting Espinoza in historic perspective.
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nomar
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Post by nomar on Dec 15, 2015 20:37:21 GMT -5
Do we know how much sink Espinoza has on his fastball? Because his ground all rate is absurd.
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dd
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Post by dd on Dec 15, 2015 22:44:55 GMT -5
Well, before it gets taken out of context, let me be clear about my point: I was not saying that Espinoza could not possibly advance past Greenville this year. My point was only that he could still be a top 25 or maybe even top 10 prospect if he spends the full year at Greenville. You could then extrapolate that point to the notion that if he is able to advance even faster, we could have a Felix-level uber-prospect on our hands, or at least a Urias-level one. Pitchers and catchers report in 65 days ... but who's counting?
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Post by myleskennefick on Dec 15, 2015 23:18:28 GMT -5
Is there any concern that Espinoza ends up as a reliever?
I'm afraid we're getting way ahead of ourselves here.
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ericmvan
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Supposed to be working on something more important
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Post by ericmvan on Dec 16, 2015 0:48:06 GMT -5
I just want to note that we do have ways of translating performance between minor league levels. I have a method that I developed c. 2005 using a lot of data that wasn't easily available back then. And there's obviously no reason to think that the formulas wouldn't work for a guy like Espinoza. They sometimes fail for a guy whose arsenal plays much better against inferior hitters, but those are always guys with bad scouting reports. Neo's the opposite.
And (as I pointed out earlier, and someone can probably find the post) those numbers from his last stretch in the GCL do say he would have been one of the better pitchers in high-A, and actually able to pitch in AA (although not be above average). Now, it's quite possible that what we were seeing over the course of his season was random variation rather than improvement. But if it was improvement, then the only thing keeping him back from a fairly quick promotion to Salem will be actual regression. And that, too, is possible; sometimes a guy grows physically and his command goes backwards.
I will say that based on the scouting reports and his GCL game log, it would be rational to say that he has better odds of pitching his last game of the year for Portland than for Greenville. Whether that's actually true or not I'm entirely agnostic. There are too few guys with scouting reports like his, and it is difficult to differentiate between random variation (or a "hot stretch") and genuine improvement.
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Post by jimed14 on Dec 16, 2015 7:20:36 GMT -5
I'm super excited to see where he lands in top 100 lists. I bet he cracks top 20 for some.
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Post by sox fan in nc on Dec 16, 2015 9:22:37 GMT -5
I do think we will have to see if Dombroski will bring the aggressive nature of promotions that characterize the Tigers. I think Low A should be a good challenge for him, I think he faced like two different teams in the GCL. But just reading the reports about his stuff, advanced knowledge of pitching, and watching the limited video out there its hard to hold the enthusiasm about him pushing the envelop on his way to the big leagues. I'm probably being a nervous nelly, just concerned about the jump from DSL/GCL to Greenville as a 17/18 year old. Though he will be facing more polished older hitters, I'm sure his pure stuff will play up.
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Post by burythehammer on Dec 16, 2015 12:52:53 GMT -5
Is there any concern that Espinoza ends up as a reliever? I'm afraid we're getting way ahead of ourselves here. Any pitching prospect could end up as a reliever. Right now there's still a greater chance that Espinoza never even gets to the big leagues. That doesn't mean he's not one of the best prospects in baseball.
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radiohix
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'At the end of the day, we bang. We bang. We're going to swing.' Alex Verdugo
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Post by radiohix on Dec 16, 2015 15:20:52 GMT -5
In low A ball, if you have a big fastball that you can throw at both sides of the plate, you can dominate (Matt Barnes as an example) and I think AE can do that so barring injuries, he won't be pitching in the SAL for too long.
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Post by James Dunne on Dec 16, 2015 15:44:35 GMT -5
In low A ball, if you have a big fastball that you can throw at both sides of the plate, you can dominate (Matt Barnes as an example) and I think AE can do that so barring injuries, he won't be pitching in the SAL for too long. Matt Barnes was four years older when he hit the SAL than Espinoza will be in April.
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