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Do we even need minor league baseball
gerry
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Post by gerry on Sept 13, 2019 15:13:08 GMT -5
Have to agree strongly with costpet and danr. I played multiple sports as a kid, all with the minimal coaching of that era (late 40’s - 60’s). With basketball and football the height of the hoop, the need for helmets and pads, the concept of working as a team, meant we all started playing those games competitively at a much later age than baseball. Baseball started in the backyard with catch and stickball. Sandlot baseball included idyllic short handed days of “hit the bat” and playing catch in a local field or empty lot, gave us constant reps at very young ages. The learning process of this complex game takes years.
I didn’t realize this distinction until I started coaching. I learned that athletic pre-teens and teenagers with some related experience could become good basketball and football players, even starting as a junior in HS. Not so much with baseball which seems to require more accumulated reps in so many different areas of skill. This includes the basic “5-tools”, which most Major Leaguers, the best in the world and millionaires all, still haven’t perfected and never will.
Even worse, specialists like SP and RP make players with the best hit-tools in the game fail 70% of the time. The best arms in baseball make frequent bad throws. The fastest runners often get caught stealing or make mental mistakes which lead to a team loss. ETC.
All this, AFTER 2-5 years of professional coaching and competing at several levels of the minor leagues. miLB = learning to use these skills appropriately as part of a team effort to score and prevent runs during a brutal 162 game, 6 month season of screaming fans, crazed media, almost weekly road trips, plane rides, hotels, etc. Wow. Tough game. Tougher environment. Requires skills beyond reps.
IMO, continuing the reps which improved baseball skills as a kid remain essential to the most talented pro. But success at baseball’s highest levels requires an environment in which raw, young talent can not only improve those skillsets, but can learn to fail, recover, grow and mature as individuals and teammates, and with fans and their communities. It’s a process as complex as hitting. That’s the minors, both grad school and finishing school.
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Post by James Dunne on Sept 13, 2019 15:19:36 GMT -5
I think that quote and the supporting evidence (and lack thereof) is what people are most upset about. There are a lot of insightful bits about using training space and sensor technology to better measure players, but he doesn't show any example-- not even one anecdote--of a player who was able to move more quickly or identified using this technology.
Also, the chart suggesting that Triple-A wasn't important because the players who didn't play in Triple-A had better numbers drove me nuts because it's obviously the best prospects who are most likely to skip levels. Like, Juan Soto being so good that he skipped Triple-A doesn't mean that Brock Holt didn't need it! And skipping Triple-A is obviously NOT the reason Juan Soto is better than the guys who played there. I made the causation/correlation joke in the MLB thread, but hoo-boy that's much worse. If 70 players who skipped Triple-A are playing better than the ones who had to go to Triple-A then I'd say they're doing a good job figuring out who doesn't need Triple-A and "perhaps minor league resources should be spent trying to identify and develop those players" is nonsense because they're already doing that, but instead of moving resources around to figure it out it's just like "yo this Soto kid is ready, send him up!" Also, too Triple-A is in many ways the most important minor league, even if the jump from Double-A is less, because it acts as a holding station for players nearly good enough to play in the majors. You're not going to get, like, Marcus Walden and send him to a camp to teach him to pitch. You're going to sign him and maybe tweak him and get him reps and put him in games and let 6,000 to 8,000 people pay to watch him.
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Post by Chris Hatfield on Sept 13, 2019 15:32:38 GMT -5
Fair.
Let me add that I'm not vouching for the quality of the piece. I think it had a good point to make and didn't flesh the points out well, and also had some silly ideas like the above.
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Post by sarasoxer on Sept 13, 2019 16:17:07 GMT -5
So I'm a little late to the party here, but my thoughts: Maybe I'm missing something, but I took a very different point from this article than many seem to have taken. To me, reading this and having the takeaway being "there should not be minor league baseball", or at least that it should be contracted, is like reading Moneyball and taking away the main point as "walks are good." For me, the key is this quote: To me, the question raised here (which could have been better raised) is why does every team have a minor league farm system comprised of the 4 full-season level affiliates, 2-4 domestic short-season affiliates, and 1-2 DSL affiliates? All have, more or less, the same coaching staff, plus the same roving instructor positions. More or less, based on my understanding. We're starting to see some shifting. The Fall Instructional League is one area. As I reported on the podcast episode we released this afternoon, the Red Sox will not be playing other clubs this year. Instead it'll be a camp in which the players on the roster will be coming and going at different times in order to receive more direct instruction. On the instruction side, as noted, Brian Bannister's department has added a whole new frontier of pitch design that is already paying enormous dividends. The org added a full-time assistant as a fourth coach at each level in the past 5 years or so as well, which makes perfect sense. There are also player dev interns at most of the affiliates, I believe, for tasks involving things like video. Making the headline "Do we even need minor league baseball?" is a provocative way to raise the issue, but I don't think anyone is advocating doing away with the minor leagues in this piece. It's more wondering why there aren't more questions about why things are set up this way, where innovation can give clubs the advantage, etc. Yeah, I agree with this. The article title threw people to the absolute. What Houston has done is make things more efficient. It hasn't eliminated minor league ball. It cut two of 9 teams in hopes of speeding/increasing development. Trust in your talent evaluators and concentrate development on the better players. If there are 30 players at each level only 3 of which have a chance to make it, spreading instruction among them is not the greatest use of resources. It's also unfair to falsely encourage the low talent guys who obviously can't make it. No question that games are important. But I think doing more with less has some merit. It also pits up and comers against more skilled competition. And, I don't think for a second that what Houston is doing is a cost cutting measure. It appears to operate out of the staid old box...looking for that competitive edge while other clubs are still munching on Red Man...relatively speaking....
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Post by Chris Hatfield on Sept 13, 2019 22:59:16 GMT -5
Honestly, I've never understood the orgs that have both Short-Season A and Advanced Rookie affiliates (or, for that matter, what the difference between those levels even is...). There is so much chaff in rookie ball that I don't understand how the Yankees field two GCL teams as well.
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