He's a switch hitter. That's another little plus, I guess.

Interesting stuff, Darren - thanks.

It's also worth keeping in mind the aging rule of thumb: about 25% of players peak before age 28, 50% peak from age 28 through 32, and 25% thereafter. So most likely this guy has some upside yet. I'll root for him.

He's a corner OF. So far he's hit a little better from the left side, but small sample size. Seems like he was hurt for the first half of 2009.

Nice find. Anyone know any more about him?

OleP: really? I thought 27-28 was generally accepted as the peak age for position players.

Nava's a pretty cool story - not only was he turned down when he first tried to walk-on @Santa Clara, but he was, like, 5-4 110 as a prep. BA (he was their top indy prospect the year you signed him) and a few other outlets have run stories on him.

Love me some Daniel Nava. Soxprospects is all over him, and I think there's a bunch of stuff on him over there (interviews, threads, etc). There was also some stuff on him at Fangraphs.

Hey, it's our annual "corner guy who could hit .240/.330/.400 in the Majors". Adam Hyzdu and Chip Ambres say hello.

Who knows, maybe there is another Mike Easler out there

Hey, it's our annual "corner guy who could hit .240/.330/.400 in the Majors"

Sure, but think how much better that is than Wilton Veras!

Red Sox minor leaguers continue to K at alarming rates.

Who knows, maybe there is another Mike Easler out there

Easler cracked the major leagues at 22. Everyone knew he could hit. He just got stuck on teams that had very good corner players already. Eventually, Pittsburgh cleared out some space for him when Stargell and Bill Robinson got old.

Red Sox minor leaguers continue to K at alarming rates.

Yeah. Here are the numbers, AB/K for most of the guys I think are prospect-y.

3.8, Fuentes
5.0, Gibson
5.5, Almanzar
4.0, Middlebrooks
5.2, Tejeda
3.8, Rizzo
5.5, Iglesias
7.3, Kalish
3.8, Anderson
4.5, Nava
4.5, Reddick

Kalish is really the only one with a good strikeout rate - hopefully he should start hitting for a better average than .260 if he's making this much contact. Fuentes is not looking good - a guy with little power who can't make contact is not a major leaguer - and won't be a prospect until he starts making contact. Will Middlebrooks has been awesome, but that's a lot of Ks in the Sally League. And so on.

Kalish is a mystery to me. He doesn't K much and he walks a lot. Why won't his average go up?

Salem K'ed 15 times last night. My hope is that the Red Sox have determined that the whole strikeout thing is a self-fulfilling prophecy that guys like Ryan Howard have disproven. Yeah, that's it.

Will Middlebrooks has been awesome, but that's a lot of Ks in the Sally League.

He's in the Carolina league right now.

PA/K may also be a better way to look at this. E.g., Lars has 4.6 PA/K across AA and AAA this year. There is, IMO, a substantial difference between a player with high BB and K rates and a player with only high K rates, and an AB/K metric takes two players with similar K rates (e.g. Lars and Reddick) and makes the player with the lower BB rate look better, which is misleading.

I'm not sure if it is. The problem of not making contact is what I'm trying to get at - a high walk rate is, in part, also a function of a low contact rate. With players who don't make a lot of contact against minor league pitchers, I worry they'll struggle that much more in the majors - and likewise, drawing walks against minor league pitchers is significantly easier.

I'm not sure - I can certainly run the numbers on PA/K, and certainly a player who both strikes out a lot and walks a lot is better than one with a similar AB/K and many fewer walks. But I think that the risks of a high-K hitter may be obscured a bit by using PA/K.

EDIT: and yeah, dumb mistake on WMB.

A patient approach is going to have a player taking a lot more strikes, leading to both K's and BB's. Swing and miss % would probably useful for high BB/high K guys.

But I think that the risks of a high-K hitter may be obscured a bit by using PA/K.

I think it's generally better to use PA for everything, as teams decide how to allocate PA's rather than AB's. If I had my druthers, we'd all be using H/PA and TB/PA instead of batting average and slugging percentage as well.

fret: Check out this article by Jim Albert, a stat prof at Bowling Green:

http://bayes.bgsu.edu/papers/career_trajectory.pdf

See, especially, Table 3. The median peak for players born in the '60s was 29.8; that's the most recent cohort Jim looked at, but I suspect players born since are aging similarly well.

I believe the "players peak at 27" generalization (and I think many statistically savvy fans subscribe to it) dates from an early Bill James Abstract article. It just turns out that Bill's sample wasn't very "typical," and his methodology not that statistically sophisticated; I believe he and others have acknowledged this. In general, my main critique of a lot of sabermetric work is that it is not very "robust." Sabermetricians ought to go at questions from a variety of angles, using different data bases, and subjected to peer review; we can shout our findings from the rooftops after they've been replicated a few times with diverse methodologies and data sets.

But haven't follow-ups by tango, mgl, and phil birnbaum still shown that despite lots of different modeling differences (thinking especially of their look at JC Bradbury's studies) the peak age is still in the 27/28 range, not closer to 30?

Looking over the minor league numbers, this guy seems like his upside is more like being a less quotable version of Kevin Millar, rather than Easler. Millar went to a junior college, then a 4-year school, then an independent league, then dominated minor leagues he was too old for. He managed to carve out a pretty nice career for himself.

Kalish is a mystery to me. He doesn't K much and he walks a lot. Why won't his average go up?

Too many fly balls, which are not good things to hit in most of the EL ballparks. He's been hitting more ground balls of late, but the flip side of that is that he's hitting for less power and drawing fewer walks. He's still only 22, and playing in some pretty tough ballparks, so there's no particular reason to throw in the towel yet.

-- MWE

Nava's smoking the ball at McCoy Stadium; he's been ordinary (at best) on the road. I think the Millar comparison is probably appropriate, but until I see him play I can't really offer much else.

-- MWE

There is, IMO, a substantial difference between a player with high BB and K rates and a player with only high K rates, and an AB/K metric takes two players with similar K rates (e.g. Lars and Reddick) and makes the player with the lower BB rate look better, which is misleading.

Not entirely. A player with both a high walk rate and a high strikeout rate sometimes gets there because he has a relatively narrow hitting zone, and chooses to pass up pitches early in the count when they aren't perfect. If that same player starts swinging at those less-than-perfect pitches earlier in the count, his walk rate will typically plummet while the strikeout rate remains on the high side. The first player is (usually) more productive in the minors, but in the majors, once the pitchers figure out that he'll take pitches early in the count, he tends to see a lot more first-pitch strikes than he does in the minors. As I have said before, this is more or less what has happened to Jeremy Hermida.

I haven't seen enough of either Anderson or Reddick to comment specifically on what they do.

-- MWE

Mike--

Thanks for chiming in here--very illuminating stuff, particularly on Kalish. Love to hear your take on Nava if you get a chance to see him.

I meant to add something else interesting about Nava. He's not your typical AAAA masher in that this isn't his 3rd go-round at the level as would be the case with most such guys at 27. So, unlike a typical AAAA guy, there's no question of whether he's figured out how to exploit inferior pitching after having several hundred or thousands of PAs to do so. This is Nava's first look at the level and he's doing quite well.

Nava appears to be on his way up, with Reddick being optioned back to Pawtucket.

http://news.soxprospects.com/2010/06/sox-to-call-up-daniel-nava.html

Dan, you scooped me! I am so psyched for Nava--this is great news for any underdog!

What a crazy idea, bringing up the guy who can actually hit in AAA and sending down the guy who can't break .200 in AAA or the majors. Crazy!

So, Nava just hit a Grand Slam into the bullpen at Fenway on the first pitch he saw in the majors.

It's all downhill from here.

Seriously, that was great.

I also missed this story until now. Apparently Nava leaves tickets at every home game for Erin Andrews.

Maybe he's got a shot with her after that grand slam?

First freaking pitch! Mother of gosh! Holy chamoly! WTF and OH YEAH! And if he swung at the 1st pitch of his 2nd AB, he'd have 2 grand slams on 2 pitches. It was a meatball on the inner half.

Nava also stroked a very nice double the opposite way. All of this while he was wearing a uni top that David Wells had left behind. This was such a great, great thing!

Just an awesome story.

Also, I was awaiting the day that someone born in 1983 would unironically be called "old". After a long time, here it is!

I was hoping to see this thread come back. A week or so ago my dad was telling me he thought Kalish might get called up soon, and one of the reasons I cited for disagreeing with him was Daniel Nava. I got an email from him this afternoon with the subject line "(sigh) You're right again."

Nava also came up with the bags loaded in his second AB - and whiffed. Not quite a Tatis special chance, but pretty close.

A double in his 3rd AB though.

The possibly inaccurate Fox storyline seemed to have the parents in Indy watching this kid, skedded back to CA, but then news of the callup, so the younger son's HS graduation is left to other family and friends plus watch Naya in case he does anything - so score!

I thought they said it was the younger son's college graduation they blew off to fly to Boston.

The parents also told Rosenthal on Fox that they arrived at Logan late, and then there was a long delay for their bags, so they went straight to the ballpark without collecting them.

Three things about an amazing story:

1) Nava was the interview on the pre-game show yesterday on WEEI in Boston, with longtime radio voice Joe Castiglione. Nava was exceptionally articulate and thoughtful in the interview, describing his path to Boston, how much he appreciates the opportunity, etc. Very well-spoken and composed, instant cult hero.

2) Speaking of Erin Andrews, Castiglione brought it up in the interview, and Nava was very, "oh, yeah, whatever" about it. He said it started as a one-time joke with his teammates, and then a second day, and so on. It was supposed to be a one-time thing, and grew from there. Castiglione said that Andrews might be in town this weekend (is it the ESPN game? Does Andrews work on the Sunday Night broadcast?) If so, does this officially get really weird? Doesn't ESPN have to get an interview by Andrews of Nava? I would pay money to see that interview.

3) I just read the link from #29. It's OK until the last line...then it gets pretty salty. Don't let the kids read it, put it to you that way...

I'm happy for Nava, sure. And I'm happy the Red Sox won with our emergency starter. But most of all, I'm happy for Darren. As he lays out, and as you can see for yourselves in the archives, yesterday was the realization of a dream long deferred.

Thanks, MC! I woke up with a smile on my face today. Nava's story is even better than the other guys--Gadzyuki, Bubba, Petagine in a bottle, etc--none of those had the story that Nava has. What fun.

Just for everyone's amusement, I was on the treadmill at the gym, watching my own personal TV when Nava hit the grand slam. I had to cover my shout by coughing several times afterward (didn't fool anyone). This was only slightly less embarrassing than the time I tripped and fell. But this one was far less painful.

Speaking of old non-prospects: what the #### gives with letting McDonald bat against Lidge in the 9th? I can't possibly imagine a worse match up for him than Lidge with that slider. Someone really needs to sit Francona down and tell him he needs to pinch hit for platoon players, because the non-moves are pretty ####### stupid.

Castiglione said that Andrews might be in town this weekend (is it the ESPN game? Does Andrews work on the Sunday Night broadcast?)

Celtics.