Well, here we go. I haven’t written anything about baseball since this piece, on July 20, 2015. Shortly thereafter, I resigned from FanGraphs, ending what had grown to be an eight-year-long “career” of writing about baseball, and dropped off the face of the proverbial baseball-following earth. And here I reemerge all these years later, to talk about minor league baseball in some fashion again. For how long? Who knows. Maybe eight more years, maybe eight more posts. I really don’t know.
The landscape of prospect analysis, and minor league baseball in general, has obviously changed dramatically in those six years and nine months away. Obviously, not only is the sport just emerging from a lockout, it’s only one year past the highly unfortunate contraction of the minor leagues and the amateur draft, and just two years past the pandemic that shut most professional baseball down entirely for a year. But if you think back to July of 2015 in prospect analysis, it’s almost immediately prior to the advent of the spin rate revolution making its way into popular discourse, as well as things like launch angle and exit velocity receiving increased emphasis on the hitting side. I’ve stayed reasonably up on a lot of the developments, though my attention on the sport has admittedly waxed and waned many times in the years I wasn’t professionally involved with covering it.
But here I am again. And I guess the obvious questions to answer, then, are what am I doing here, and why am I doing it? I’ll tackle them in reverse order.
Why Now?
I left baseball writing in 2015 for many different reasons (there are probably, like, eight main ones), and I won’t detail all of them here. The biggest one, though, is that in the fall of 2014, I began pursuing my Ph.D. in Communication at the University of Maryland. I had been writing about baseball prolifically in the two prior years while I got my M.A. at Wake Forest University, and I (naively) expected that doctoral studies would only be a small step up in academic rigor and commitment. Nope; getting a Ph.D. is damned hard, and quite psychologically draining. When the 2015 minor league baseball season began, near the end of my first year of Ph.D. school, I just didn’t have the energy to haul myself out to minor league games five times per week. Those games had been an incredibly exciting experience to attend in 2012-14 when I had the amount of space in my life to spend that much time, energy, and effort on baseball analysis, but I couldn’t do excitement in the summer of 2015–I needed to just recover from the grind of the academic year and steel myself for the next one. The same would’ve been true of any of the next four years, and then there was a global pandemic, and I finally got my dissertation done in the fall of 2021. That milestone, important as it was, isn’t why I’m back to writing this now, though.
By the time it was the late summer of 2015 and I’d only managed to get myself out to fifteen or twenty games over the preceding three months, I knew my apathy to the grind of the scouting* trail wasn’t going away anytime soon. Perhaps I could have just scaled down my efforts or just downshifted to writing a blog like this, but for me, it was kind of all or nothing. I was either going to really get after it or I was going to quit.
*Permit me the word, just for ease of communication; “prospect analysis trail,” etc. is super awkward. I’m well aware I’m not a professional scout. I was attempting to do scouting-style stuff, is all.
When you spend eight years working to get better at analyzing baseball players, every year, you realize how much you didn’t know the year before. Thus, the prospect of reverting to a lower-effort, less-refined level of knowledge and still creating content as if nothing happened just didn’t sit well with me. The world didn’t need any more half-assed prospect takes, and I wasn’t about to phone any in; doing so would be insulting to those who put in the real, necessary work. I wasn’t going to just go to one game a week and occasionally pull up some milb.tv footage and try to turn that into reasonable analysis. Why would I, anyway? My life was full with other stuff, and as huge a role as baseball analysis has played in my life, part-time prospect coverage isn’t remotely close to a financially worthwhile endeavor. There’s a reason the people on the part-time live-game-looks beat are often in their early twenties–they are in a place in life, like I was from 2012-2014, where there’s room to pursue that hobby to the fullest, either for fun or in hopes that it’ll get you toward a full-time job either inside or outside team front offices.* In that way, and I didn’t realize this until I literally started writing this sentence, it kind of mirrors minor league baseball itself.
*Another part of the reason I eventually stopped was that I never really could mentally settle on which of these goals I had; I always felt kind of caught in between the uncompromising purity of the former and the financial reality of the latter. Functionally, I kind of always was doing it for fun; I certainly didn’t do anything to *try* to get hired by a team, self-promote, anything like that. In the back of my mind, there was always the “maybe a team will come calling someday” thing, though, sure. I would’ve taken an interview or listened to an offer, not that I ever received even the slightest hint of interest.
From 2015-2021, I’d have somewhere between a week and a month a year where I missed writing about baseball, where life’s waters would part enough for me to kind of get back into things and miss having an outlet. The rest of the time, I was thankful that I didn’t have an extra obligation. I couldn’t do live minor league coverage now even if I wanted to–I live in western Pennsylvania, about two hours away from any teams.
I didn’t watch much baseball from when I quit to the start of the pandemic in 2020. I put whatever free time I had when I wasn’t occupied with grad school into other interests, which I enjoyed exploring after the prior decade of baseball-centrism. I actually got very into college basketball over those years, another sport that has a vast player universe with interesting development patterns. I started dating, got engaged, and then married my wife. We moved twice. After a decade of owning one, I finally learned how to semi-competently play the guitar. My main connections to baseball in that time period were following the statistics of the A’s minor league players–I’ve been an A’s fan since 1999, when I was nine–and following a few prospects I had seen live and talked up in various pieces.* Oh, and playing some MLB The Show and Out of the Park Baseball every year; the latter game in particular would eat up like a month of my free time like clockwork every spring.
*Someday, maybe I’ll recount in ridiculous detail the July 16, 2017 outing by Julio Pinto for the Idaho Falls Chukars against the Missoula Osprey. It’s the only time I have ever been emotionally moved by seeing a statline.
Anyhow, to make a long story…at least a reasonable length, I fell into watching minor league game footage a bit more at the onset of the pandemic, when I suddenly had a boatload of free time and decided to edit together a custom, as-accurate-as-I-could-get-it MLB The Show 20 roster with more prospects and fewer Triple-A types. I enjoyed the experience of watching minor league baseball enough that a couple weeks after it finally resumed in 2021, I found myself watching a couple A’s affiliate games on milb.tv here and there. Then my wife decided it would be fun to watch the games together, and so we started having them on basically every night starting around the end of June. By the end of the minor league season last year, I had developed pretty sophisticated opinions on the various A’s prospects. Sure, milb.tv isn’t quite the same as an in-person look, but it does have the virtue of allowing a far bigger sample of viewing. I’m certainly more informed on players after three dozen milb.tv looks than I ever was watching them for one three-game series live back in the old days.
It occurred to me at the outset of the 2022 season that some of the information I had gleaned from watching the games was information that isn’t really publicly attainable any other way. For instance, if you search for information on Shohei Tomioka, the Japanese pitcher who the A’s signed out of a tryout in 2020 and who was one of High-A Lansing’s better starters in 2021, you’ll find a lot of articles saying how he touched 95 mph at the tryout and that he throws three other pitches. That’s more or less it, as far as I can tell. If you found his story interesting, you’d want to know: Is 95 legit–was he throwing that hard in 2021? What’s his best pitch? Does he look like he actually has a shot? Well, having watched him throw about 50 innings, I can tell you! Yes, he topped out at 95 mph in many 2021 outings, sitting 92-95 on his best days and 89-93 at his worst; his changeup is slightly ahead of his cutter among the offspeeds, with the curve lagging a touch behind; he’s a very nice organizational pitcher, and I wouldn’t really disagree with you if you called him a fringe prospect.
This sort of dearth of information is pretty common when it comes to players who aren’t high on prospect lists, which themselves are usually updated by outlets only once a year. The thought that I actually might have some fairly novel information to provide is why I created this space–it fills a void I kind of felt when I was just following the A’s system from afar. I’d always want to know what guys like Matt Milburn, Jesus Zambrano, or Reid Birlingmair threw, and it was pretty hard to track down anything beyond the occasional vague tweet, even for guys like that who were having significant minor league success. Perhaps I’m literally the only audience for such a thing; if so, fine. But my governor as a writer has always been that if I find something interesting, there is probably something interesting about it. If nobody else finds it interesting yet, maybe I can change that. Anyway, now that I’m spending three hours a day, six days a week (or so) collecting baseball input, so to speak (watching film of minor leaguers), it’s a lot more reasonable to think I can create fairly unique and interesting output (writing).
So, What Now?
I guess I should start by referring back to what I said at the beginning: I have no idea how long my interest in writing stuff here will last. My brain has a funny way of getting really into a particular interest for a month or two at a time, where it’s the main thing I’m focused on every day, and then one day just disconnecting from that interest and shifting to another one. I’ve been heavily interested in baseball since I was six years old, so it’s not like I won’t cycle back around again, but I’d guess that my output will be somewhat sporadic. Who knows. But I’m creating my own space, rather than trying to join a writing staff somewhere, in part because that means there’s no pressure on me; if I need to take a long break, I can, and this space will still be waiting for me.
That important caveat aside, I have several different ideas. The first is a direct response to the information gaps I mentioned above: I’ll be working up some basic scouting-type rundowns on basically every full-season player in the A’s minor league system. This creates a kind of database where anyone interested can get information on any of the players beyond just their statistics. I’m talking quick rundowns–like 1-3 paragraphs per player. As long as I’m active with the site in general, I’ll be updating those as things change.
Secondly, I’ll be doing my customary long-winded prospect analyses when I get a good idea for one. I imagine these will mostly* consist of A’s prospect stuff initially, though I might branch out into other stuff as time goes on, if I’m staying consistent with this, if it gets any traction, etc. Part of the reason that I’m currently planning on being fairly A’s-centric–something I was loath to do in my earlier writing career, being tied down to one team–is that it’s more self-contained and less overwhelming, thus probably making me less likely to just disengage for three years or what not. But I’ve always been way more a general baseball enthusiast than an A’s fan, and so if it makes sense at some point to mix in more stuff about other prospects or other baseball subjects entirely, then I will. Who knows. Again, the beauty of having this space to myself.
*I do mean “mostly,” not a euphemistic “only.” I strongly suspect that a fair number of the longform things will wander around like this piece I did at FanGraphs, which is ostensibly about a single player but actually runs through a statistical study.
As long as I’m being self-indulgent here in this statement of purpose, I do want to talk a little bit about what my ethos as a writer is, and kind of always has been. Why does everything I write stretch into some overblown opus? Why does my work tend to center on random organizational players nobody pays much attention to? What am I actually trying to do? My writing has often diverged pretty radically from the typical way minor league analysis is presented, and it’s worth taking some time to actually explain why.
Like most people who write, my content creation is highly informed by my content consumption. As you might guess, I’m a big fan of deep dives into things. I’m the sort of person who is fascinated to watch 10 hours of behind-the-scenes interviews and making-of stuff about TV shows I otherwise have zero interest in watching. Fundamentally, I’m interested in how things happen, and I enjoy the feeling of building up a sort of complete chain of understanding about how something works.
But also, as a consumer of content about stuff I know a lot about (baseball, college basketball, communication theory, vocal styles in European power metal, etc.), I’m knowledgeable enough to vet the points made in them. I have to admit I’m a pretty critical reader, and a stickler for details. In particular, I will basically never simply trust someone’s opinion. There are, of course, a great many people in the baseball writing space whose opinions I respect tremendously, and even if I disagree with or am unsure about a particular point or piece, I maintain my appreciation for the person’s work and perspective. But as a consumer, I find myself especially frustrated when somebody who I know is a good analyst articulates an incomplete argument that has a logical jump in it somewhere.* I find myself wondering: do they have a good reason here that just went unstated, or did they not fully think it through and therefore miss something? I just can’t take stuff on faith, generally speaking.
*My academic specialty within the field of communication is argumentation theory. Go figure, right?
Since I don’t take stuff on faith, I never for a moment expect anyone reading my work to take anything I say on faith. Why the heck would you? What gives me the authority to say anything about baseball? Not only did I not play the sport professionally, not only did I not play in high school, I didn’t even play Little League. I don’t really have any other real credentials, either: I haven’t, like, gone to scout school, or even really studied with/been mentored by notable figures inside or outside of the industry. My path has always been almost shockingly self-directed,* which has its pluses (nobody’s ever accused me of not being an independent thinker) and minuses (I’ve always been pretty isolated, and probably missed out on some learning opportunities). A lot of that is probably my own doing; it’s a mix of the uniqueness of my approach and skillset, but also my stubbornness (refusal to take stuff on faith; I end up learning everything the hard way) and social awkwardness.
*This isn’t to say that there aren’t many people whose work I’ve learned from, or to whom I have significant gratitude toward for giving me professional opportunities in the past. I just have never really been “taken under someone’s wing,” nor do I have any big “watershed moments” in my writing career, necessarily. Maybe it’s just my own perception, but I don’t seem to have had the typical sabermetric or minor league writer experience. I do have these sorts of things in other areas of my life, just not baseball writing. Actually, I have a 50+ page document on my computer that talks about (among many other things) how my randomly starting to write about baseball exactly when I did (March-April 2008) ended up indirectly being kind of life-saving. At some point, maybe parts or all of that document will be published here, or see the light of day some other way. I don’t know. It’s extremely personal.
The extreme length of most of my work is a combination of these two factors. I like long, involved stuff, and because I hate trying to parse logical leaps, I will never take for granted that someone will just trust my opinion because it’s me saying it. I mean, I guess some people probably do, and hey, that’s what the short-form blurbs about the A’s prospects are for–if you trust that I know what I’m talking about, there your tl;dr version, and at the very least that puts more than zero information out there about a lot of these players. But in short, the length of my writing is a product of the need I feel to spell my thinking out fully (because that’s what I’d want to read) and my general preference for long, involved stuff in the first place. Even if you disagree with my analysis in a given piece, you can at least see how I went about thinking stuff through.
Where these factors intersect is that, in being a fan of behind-the-scenes kind of stuff, a lot of my work ends up exploring how I came to my opinion. Since current opinions on prospects are just snapshots in time, writing about prospects in this way also allows for some reflection on what discussions a player is part of, and what following their career helps and will help us learn. For instance, the first thing I’ll be writing when I’m done with this (which will be published concurrently with this) will be a piece on lefthander David Leal. A former 38th-round pick, Leal has never showed up on a prospect list, for a lot of good reasons. My basic opinion of Leal is that he’s a good organizational pitcher, and maybe we could talk ourselves into thinking he might become an Alex Claudio-esque reliever. That’s not really interesting, right? But there are a lot of discussions he fits in that are fascinating. Consider:
He has nearly unprecedented low-minors numbers (career 139/11 K/UIBB as I write this).
He throws like 83 mph, and he’s not some trick-pitch sidearmer. His primary offspeed pitch is a breaking ball that’s often in the 60s, and it’s not particularly sharp.
How rare are each of those things?
How the heck is he able to produce those numbers with that stuff?
How do we go about projecting somebody with such extreme performance attributes?
How damning, exactly, is the lack of velocity for a pitcher like this? Can it be overcome?
How does a pitcher who is so extreme compare to a more “ordinary” finesse pitcher?
Every player is their own case study. Leal is a particularly fascinating one because he’s so unique, but every player’s career inevitably connects into discussions of something. Thus, what I set out to do when I write a piece like what I’ll be doing about Leal is to go about writing the definitive* analysis of what that player is at that point in time, and how that analysis might progress with time. In explaining myself as fully as I can, I also give more of a window into that analysis, so that readers can more readily identify any areas they might disagree with or more easily conduct their own investigations, if they are so inspired.
*This is the goal. I’m not saying I always, or even ever, achieve it.
A lot of the reason my work often tends to focus on lesser-known players like Leal is that they’re the ones where I think my analysis is most valuable. In 2013, the first full season I lived in North Carolina, Wil Myers was the #1 prospect in baseball, and he played in Triple-A Durham, a reasonable 75-90 minute drive from where I lived. People were always telling me to go out there and see him. I’m sure he was a sight to behold, but I never saw the point–what value was there in my being the thirty-fifth prospect writer to anoint him and run through the superlatives? I found it far more exhilarating to be the first prospect writer to “discover” and talk up a player. Not that I wanted to rush in and shout “first!” like a YouTube commenter, but I’ve always felt most valuable as a writer when I’m starting a conversation, not merely chiming in to affirm some previously-held opinion or even push back on one.
Finally, one thing I’m going to be doing here that I haven’t really done much* of in the past, but that I feel is going to be really helpful in creating in-depth analyses of players without actually being able to attend games live, is that I’ll be keeping some pitch charts on many of the games I watch. As of now, I’ve been compiling pitch-by-pitch data for A’s minor leaguers that includes pitch type (for batters, I’m just categorizing pitches they face into fastball/breaking/offspeed; for pitchers, I’m differentiating between all pitches), handedness of opponent, pitch location (low/mid/high, in/mid/out, in zone/close to zone/way out of zone), and result (ball, called strike, swinging strike, foul, and if in play, ground/line/fly, soft/med/hard, fielder, out or hit). I’ll also note pitch velocity in the few games where it’s available on the broadcast and reliable. The charting will be by no means complete–I don’t watch every single A’s minor league game (some A-ball games don’t even have video feeds, and I watch less Triple-A stuff than the other levels) and I’m not going to chart every game I watch. I’m sure I’ll make occasional errors or have little inconsistencies with it, too; I’m only human, working off often suboptimal broadcast angles at that. But the idea is that with a reasonable sample of pitch data, I won’t have to just rely on my eyes to diagnose what each player is excelling at and struggling with. I’m not currently planning on having any actively updating tables for all players or anything like that, but it’ll be handy data to use when appropriate in the longform analyses.
*I did dabble in this kind of thing in a couple of my FanGraphs pieces back in the day and found it to be a really helpful sanity check. I amassed a big enough sample of video of Lewis Brinson and Nick Williams at-bats in my many trips to Hickory in 2013 that I was able to test out my thoughts that Brinson really struggled with offspeed stuff and that Williams wasn’t as undisciplined as his K/BB suggested.
I think that more or less covers what I’ll be writing about here, how I’ll be writing about it, and why I approach it in the manner I do. If this space or my approach evolves in a different direction, or I remember anything else that gives important context to any of the above, perhaps I’ll add a few additional notes about that below. For now, I’m going to turn to actually writing about baseball. Time will tell how long that lasts.
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