2009 Season Review: State College Spikes

by Charlie Wilmoth on Sep 8, 2009 4:07 PM EDT

To put it mildly, 2009 was a far better year for the Spikes than their disastrous 2008 season, as State College finished at an even .500. The 2008 Spikes were undone partly by a weird concentration of good players on the left side of the infield and partly because the Pirates didn't sign any early-round pitchers in the 2008 draft, at least not soon enough to play. But the big problem was that Dave Littlefield didn't leave the Bucs with anything, either from Bradenton or from Latin America.

That wasn't an issue this year. The Spikes got excellent pitching performances from 2009 draftees Jason Erickson and Phillip Irwin, along with Littlefield-era holdovers Kyle McPherson and Ricardo Paulino. Unfortunately, those players will have to move quickly to become real prospects, and it's a little unclear to me why, for example, McPherson was allowed to return to State College after pitching decently there in 2008 and acceptably at West Virginia early in 2009. Maurice Bankston, too, is young enough to be a prospect and was at least passable at West Virginia, but the Pirates sent him back to State College anyway. It seems a bit premature to treat these guys as organizational players. The midseason additions of Brett Lorin, Aaron Pribanic, Hunter Strickland and Quinton Miller to the West Virginia rotation undoubtedly made it hard to keep McPherson and Bankston starting there, but Lorin and Rudy Owens could have been promoted without much trouble. Also, Owens was up against an innings limit, and another Power starter, Gabriel Alvarado, was routinely pitching four- and five-inning starts, so the Power might have gone with some games in which there were effectively two starters, one for the first four or five innings and one for the last four or five.

The Bucs might have found any number of more creative solutions to the West Virginia rotation crunch, and only they can know whether the more obvious solution they found was the right one. Maybe it was. In any case, it was a good problem to have.

The best pitching prospects for the State College team were probably actually a few guys whose numbers stuck out a bit less: 2009 supplemental pick Victor Black, who struck out a batter an inning and posted a 3.45 ERA; fifth-rounder Nate Baker, who made six appearances; and 12th-rounder Jeff Inman, who made two good appearances at the end of the year.

The Spikes had a ton of player movement throughout the season, so much so that their roster at the end of the year didn't look much like their roster at the beginning. The Spikes used 23 different position players, and their lineup looked forceful by the end of the year, in spite of the departures of Tony Sanchez and Starling Marte, because many of their hitters improved as the year progressed. 2009 third-rounder Evan Chambers, for example, posted a .735 OPS before the All-Star break and an .846 OPS after. Ninth-rounder Brock Holt had a .738 OPS before the break and a remarkable 1.052 OPS after. And 11th-rounder Aaron Baker hit for a .681 OPS before and an .897 OPS after. These trends may or may not mean anything, but they're the sorts of trends you hope to see from players in their first exposure to pro ball. Chambers, Holt and Baker all bear watching at West Virginia next year.

Unfortunately, the Spikes had few other genuine hitting prospects, at least not that stayed with them for any length of time. That's probably to be expected, though, given the dearth of talent there last year, and the three prospects who stuck around could join catcher Ramon Cabrera, shortstop Benjamin Gonzalez and outfielder Rogelios Noris of Bradenton in what could be a pretty interesting West Virginia Power lineup in 2010.

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Question

How critical to a player’s development is being in the right league at the right time?

IOW, if these guys (McPherson & Bankston) start next year at WVa and do well enough to advance to Lynchburg a month or more before the end of the season, is there reason to believe that their long-term prospects have been harmed? Or is it a matter of doing things “right” under the assumption that the “right” way is, in fact, right? Or is it simply not wasting players’ years at too-low levels?

I’m not trying to cast aspersions here – it’s a real question. It’s obvious to me how moving a player too fast is harmful; it’s less clear to me how harmful the opposite is (within reason – they could develop bad habits from playing against inadequate competition, but presumably a guy who’s doing that well will get promoted, Owens notwithstanding).

Another general question: my understanding is that there’s a decent jump between Bradenton and State College; are any of the other jumps especially big or small?

by JRoth95 on Sep 8, 2009 4:52 PM EDT reply actions

A to AA is generally considered the biggest jump in the minors. The only jump bigger is the one to the majors.

by matskralc on Sep 8, 2009 5:05 PM EDT up reply actions

Those are good questions that don’t have any clear answers. If a team holds a player back for too long and then the player doesn’t succeed when he’s finally promoted, you might read it as the team messing up the player’s development, or you might read it as the team being right about the player in the first place. If a team rushes a player, the results are more clear-cut; the team liked the player, but he failed anyway.

Maybe the team likes McPherson and feels there are things he can learn from spending more time at State College. I really don’t know. But my general idea is that there are a lot of things a player needs to learn to get to the big leagues, and in general the quickest way to learn those things is to face the best players he can capably handle.

I second matsralc’s comment that A+ to AA is the biggest jump. AA to AAA doesn’t seem especially huge, and player movement between Class A and the short season leagues seems to be pretty fluid as well.

by Charlie Wilmoth on Sep 8, 2009 5:15 PM EDT up reply actions

McPherson’s a finesse guy and they’re not big on finesse righties, unless there’s a lot of projectability. I doubt they see that in McPherson. He’s probably going to have to be lights out to advance. Posting a 4.94 ERA as an extreme flyball pitcher with a very low K/9 in low A, like he did in the first half of this year, probably doesn’t qualify as lights out. Hence, he got bumped down.

Bankston’s kinda similar. He throws in the low 90s, but he doesn’t have a good offspeed pitch and doesn’t fan anybody.

Basically, I don’t think there’s anything more complicated going on than them pushing (or trading for) guys with higher ceilings. The goal is to develop prospects for the majors. We’re not used to seeing the system run that way.

by WTM on Sep 8, 2009 6:06 PM EDT up reply actions

they could develop bad habits from playing against inadequate competition

That’s actually a pretty important reason for why you don’t want to hold guys back too long. Pitchers at low levels have control issues (as they are generally still attempting to master breaking pitches). Hitters have poorer grasps of the strike zone (generally because of little experience facing quality breaking pitchers…the vast majority of high school/college pitchers never play professionally because they’ve got junk breaking stuff). It’s not that difficult to learn to take advantage of either of those things when left to face them for too long: a hitter will get better at identifying bad breaking pitches and stop swinging at them, and a pitcher will get better at fooling inexperienced hitters with his breaking pitch.

Your hitter, when finally promoted, will then have to learn all over again how to identify a good breaking pitch, because as he advances, more of those pitches will be strikes. Meanwhile, he’s settled into a habit of ignoring breaking pitches and waiting for a 3-1 fastball. And a pitcher, when finally promoted, will have to learn how to actually fool somebody who will not be as easy to fool. And all this is going on as the player’s physical ability clock is ticking: the human body, in general, peaks in the late 20s.

One of the most effective ways of learning anything, really, is to defeat incrementally smaller challenges.

by matskralc on Sep 8, 2009 5:27 PM EDT up reply actions

Thanks, guys

Good answers.

I guess my one hesitation about “One of the most effective ways of learning anything, really, is to defeat incrementally smaller challenges” is that it can prove too much – push a guy who isn’t ready up a rung, he fails, and all you’ve proven is that he wasn’t ready. But there’s no way to unmake the move (I can only assume that, as a general rule, guys who move down in a system get a big fat black mark on their files).

Point being, it makes sense to me that, if you can already see a guy’s weakness (like Bankston’s lack of an offspeed pitch), give him time to work on it at a lower level so that he actually has that tool in his arsenal before he moves up, rather than hoping that the tougher competition forces him to develop it.

That said, it seems to me that the current regime gets that – they aren’t about advancing players based on a sense of “readiness,” but on concrete goals and metrics. We’ll see.

by JRoth95 on Sep 8, 2009 6:14 PM EDT up reply actions

One more thing

This is where age for a level really becomes a useful metric – people look at it, but I also get the sense that so many guys are moved along because “it’s time” that there’s huge amounts of noise. To take a tired example (sorry), Neil Walker has been moved right along, and always been at least a bit young for his levels. At the same time, he has (famously) never had a breakout year (he’s had 1 solid, but not spectacular, season, when he was bumped from AA to AAA). So the question becomes, is he not quite good enough, or has he always been moved along (just a bit) too quickly? Would a half-season delay back when he was in A-ball have given him the maturity/ability/skills to mash at each level (and still at a suitable age), rather than to perform adequately at each level?

This argument isn’t about NW at all, but he’s a useful model of a guy who’s been passed right up the line, a level per year (more or less), but rarely because he was “forcing” the team to do so.

by JRoth95 on Sep 8, 2009 6:20 PM EDT up reply actions

Yeah, it's certainly not easy

Failing is OK in small doses. Yet another powerful learning tool. :-)

I think the real problem is that general rule you perceived: that moving down a rung is a black mark on your permanent record. I think you’re probably right that teams generally look at it that way, largely because the player’s failure also reflects poorly on whoever’s decision it was to move him up. Better, in their eyes, to let the player fail (so you can blame him) than it is to admit you made a mistake and put him back where he belongs.

Back to my first sentence, failing is OK, to an extent. After all, that’s what learning, at it’s core, is: figuring out how not to fail anymore.

Neil Walker is a great example of a guy pushed along for PR purposes who was hardly ready for any of those moves. Neil was never really afforded the opportunity to master his most basic challenges before having another level of them dumped on his head.

It sounds easy to say “don’t push them too fast, but don’t bring them along too slowly” like I am, but after all, those are the decisions NH is paid the big bucks to make! (Or delegate to somebody else!)

by matskralc on Sep 8, 2009 7:11 PM EDT up reply actions