1) Pedro Alvarez, 3B, Grade A-: If things turn out the way they should, no one will remember the contract hassle with Boras. Has superstar hitting ability if he stays healthy and doesn’t lose the strike zone.
2) Andrew McCutchen, OF, Grade B+: Power has been a bit disappointing, and he still needs more polish on the bases, but defense is coming along and he’s improved his plate discipline. Still very young, you can still make an A- case.
3) Jose Tabata, OF, Grade B+: I know people are starting to wonder about him, but he’s still extremely young, just one year out of high school in North American terms. If a 2007 high school draftee hit .348/.402/.562 in a 22-game late-season trial in Double-A, people would be salivating.
4) Bryan Morris, RHP, Grade B-: An aggressive grade from me, but I’m impressed by how well he did one year after TJ surgery.
5) Daniel McCutchen, RHP, Grade C+: Looks like he could be a nice fourth starter, but possibly more dominant if used in pen.
6) Neil Walker, 3B, Grade C+: Slippage in strike zone judgment is worrisome, but he’s still quite young and adapted well to third base. When Andy LaRoche gets hurt again, Walker could have a brief window of opportunity before Alvarez is ready.
7) Jimmy Barthmaier, RHP, Grade C+: Overlooked refugee from Astros system still flashes good potential and did well in Triple-A.
8) Evan Meek, RHP, Grade C+: Love the power sinker and he’s shown signs of improved control, although it didn’t show up in brief major league trial.
9) Robbie Grossman, OF, Grade C+: Very toolsy, could be a Seven Skill guy if he maintains the patience he showed in very brief rookie ball trial. High ceiling, could rank much higher a year from now.
10) Jim Negrych, 2B, Grade C+: I don’t completely buy into the Carolina League power spike, but he should continue to hit for average.
SYSTEM IN BRIEF
The Pirates system is quite thin, but showing signs of improvement.
During the Dave Littlefield years, they avoid heavy investment in the draft and usually went with polished, cheap college guys, unfortunately without a lot of success. The killer was the choice of Moskos over Wieters in 2007. The new regime put a lot more money into the draft in ’08, going after guys with questionable signability but higher upside like Grossman, Freeman, Miller, and Cunningham. At the same time, they also mixed in college types like Mercer, D’arnaud, and Hague.
Repoz
Posted: January 02, 2009 at 02:44 AM |
23 comment(s)
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I'm guessing no for the same reason I'm pretty sure Frank and Brooks Robinson aren't related.
Would you have guessed Barack Obama and Dick Cheney are related?
Grossman seems pretty interesting....certainly more so than anyone else outside the Top 3.
That deal (for Nady) was never really awful. It was the Bay deal that looked suspicious, as it depended very heavily on LaRoche and there were a number of people here (particularly Mike E) who were down on LaRoche. Nady and Marte were pieces of value, but not really franchise building type players. The fact that the Pirates were able to flip them for a fairly high ceiling guy like Tabata is impressive.
For example, a thought experiment: if you had to take just two of these guys from those two trades, who would you take right now?
a) Andy LaRoche
b) Craig Hansen
c) Jose Tabata
d) Brandon Moss
e) Bryan Morris
f) Jeff Karstens
g) Ross Ohlendorf
h) Daniel McCutchen
I think Tabata has to be the first guy on that list you would take and then it's really a toss-up between Morris and LaRoche, but I'd be leaning towards LaRoche.
And isn't Tabata 19 or 20 at this point (Still young, but not 17)?
Yep. People have always seemed to overrate Nady because he was a high pick and a Boras client and a Met for a while, but other than the first half of last year, there really isn't as much production on your record as you'd think. His Marcel for next season is .283/.341/.467, and while that's not bad for a 1B/OF, it's nothing to jump up and down over, either.
That's why the picture of Chad Hermansen was included. Maybe a picture of Ruben Rivera should be included, also. I loved (and still love) the Nady deal; trading something that has value to another team at the height of that value, getting organizational value back. Nady wasn't going to be a franchise cornerstone, incredibly unlikely to be re-signed, but Tabata is the kind of guy who could become exactly that, and Karstens and Ohlendorf are decent flyers if nothing more than organizational depth. I even liked the Bay deal; thought Laroche and Hansen would improve and that Moss was pretty much suffering from a glut of depth. Could still be wrong about all of them.
I don't think there's much question that Tabata is currently ahead of his hypothetical twin who was a first round draft choice out of high school in 2007.
The question is whether that twin would close the gap. In other words, will Tabata (a) improve just as much as his twin over the next few years and thus wind up better because he started from a higher point or (b) not improve as much as his twin because his growth curve will slow (or even flatten) as he approaches his potential ceiling?
As to the answer, I have no idea...
Not only that, it was a 22 game stretch tacked on to a much less impressive (248/320/310) 79 game stretch in the same league. His overall line in the Eastern League was ~268/336/360.
B+ strikes me as a notch high on Sickels' grading scale, but he does still have star potential, and getting anyone with that for a couple of solid regulars (unless you think Nady's 2008 is a sign of things to come) is a good move for a team like the Pirates. Probably not enough to forget the drafting of <strike>Sam Bowie</strike>Daniel Moskos ahead of Matt Weiters, but at least it's a start.
Edit: fixed formatting
I read this a lot, but I don't see it where it's coming from. Alvarez doesn't strike me as either a big batting average guy or a big power guy. I see him as much more likely to be something like Hank Blalock, with Troy Glaus as the absolute upside.
Moss doesn't have the power you want from a corner OF and doesn't have the contact skills that you need to be successful when you don't have that kind of power; he is basically Ryan Howard without the ability to hit 50 HR. I've made my argument about LaRoche many times - he needs to be more aggressive at the plate, in my judgment. Hansen's got the same problem from the pitcher's side; he doesn't trust his stuff enough to come after hitters. Morris is IMO the best player the Pirates got in that deal. To answer Russ's question, I'd take Tabata and Morris without any hesitation whatsoever.
-- MWE
This, to me, is a problem with the Yankees' player development staff in the minors (which IMO needs to be overhauled top to bottom).
-- MWE
MWE, care to expand on that a little? Is it instructional issues on the position player side? Pitchers seem to be developing OK.
Or is a discipline/control thing?
In general, I recall reading a lot of folks opining that Marte and Nady would've yielded more if moved seperately, rather than as a packaged deal. Zeth was one, in particular. Folks also felt that Tabata was merely interesting because he was so young (sort of the Tory Spelling Principle), and that once the youth was gone, there'd be nothing left to be excited about.
To me, at least, the fact that, once out of an environment where "the soil had gone sour," Tabata scorched the ball for the last month or so is a pretty good sign.
I liked the trade then, and I still do. I'm really eager to see how he performs this year.
Agreed - though in the end, for 08 at least, Cashman has to work with the hand he had been dealt. I would hope that his "focus on youth" includes not just risk-taking in the draft, and hoarding the prospect they have, but also remolding the player development process already in place. There's a big difference between drafting the next Derek Jeter or Andy Pettitte and actually watching them suceed in the big leagues. The late-nineties/early 2000s drafts actually contained a fair number of high-reward types, the problem was that a lot more turned into Drew Henson and Randy Keisler than turned into even acceptable major league players.
I'm not sure that I'd agree that "pitchers are developing OK". Hughes and Kennedy don't seem (to me at least) to have any idea how to set up hitters. Maybe that's an individual thing; pitchers can be stubborn beasts who need to have their heads handed to them a few times before they listen. I guess I want to wait and see what happens with both of those two and with the lesser-known decent arms that they have.
As far as the rest of it goes - I don't have a lot to go on other than what I see when I watch the AAA and low-A teams (which are usually the only teams I see during the course of a season). I get the sense that the Yankees don't stress instruction nearly as much - certainly their managers and coaches are less active than I see from other teams.
-- MWE
I can't comment on specifics of Yankee development methods or philosophies, but in a general sense I couldn't agree more. I've bothered many of my fellow Yankee friends and relatives by criticizing our player development skills over the past six or seven months. I think the Yankee system has been consistently overrated for the last few years because of Cano and Wang.
Cano as a minor leaguer was thought to have a good bat, but probably not enough bat for third or a good enough glove at second. Granted, his regression last year raises a lot of questions and he's always been a hot/cold hitter. But when he is hot at the plate he looks like an MVP and in 2007 he looked damn good in the field as well. No matter what the future holds it's safe to say he dwarfed the expectations he set in the minors.
Wang was a high priced international signing out of Taiwan with a strong arm, but his numbers were always mediocre and he never impressed scouts as much as one would expect of a pitcher who threw as hard as he did. Then he suddenly started throwing one of the hardest sinkers around and dwarfed his expectations as well.
Joba coming up and hitting triple digits on the radar gun after making some mechanical tweaks (as detailed by Chad Bradford Wannabe) helped, too, of course. But Joba was a consensus top ten talent befoe the draft whose work ethic and eating habits turned out to be underrated by scouts.
Austin Jackson has developed well, but as a kid ranked by baseball america as the best 14 year old in the country and a prospect who doesn't exactly look like an MVP it's hard to say if he's really any better now than he would have been in another organization.
In the meantime, it's not like the Yankees have lacked toolsy prospects with the sheer talent to play ball. CJ Henry had extraordinary tools, Eric Duncan was supposed to be able to hit, Drew Henson never had a reputation for a lack of talent. Now Tabata struggled in his development enough that he was dumped to an organization that immediately turned him around (in spite of not having the best reputation for developing players itself) while the talented Dellin Betances (who I still really like) seems to have progressed gained little polish since joining New York two years ago.
Now, this is probably unfair. It's hard to tell what players may have done in other organizations and many of the Yankee flops may have sucked with other teams, too. (Henry was unimpressive enough with the Phillies that they seemingly raised no fuss when he screwed them over to return to the Yankees.) But with the Hughes and Kennedy flopping at the major league level and the Yankees seeming to specialize in identifying low risk low reward pitchers lately I see many reasons to doubt their minor league staff.
1)He looked a big. Not just tall and strong, but a bit slightly chubby. Not fat, mind you, but you could see why scouts worried he might put on weight eventually.
2)He was incredibly athletic. He may not be a speedster, but man could he move for a guy his size. I've never seen a player his size get so many positive murmers from a croud after running hard on a routine grounder.
I also pissed off my Yankee friends and relatives last year by immediately disliking the Nady/Marte trade.
Are these still the "Tampa" guys running the minors? Has Cashman made any changes?
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