2019 Minor Leagues/Prospect Discussion Thread

[gundysmullet]

Fair enough. What about Hernandez?

Hernandez could be, if desired, replaced by just about anyone. As could Galvis, if he was made an outfielder. But Galvis would cost 10x as much next season, and has no real upside.

To give you an idea of why Galvis in the outfield is a bad idea, as a hitter he has been worth -82.9 runs versus an average hitter for his career. That's not good; in fact, out of 779 players with 500+ plate appearances over the past ten years, only six have been worth fewer runs relative to league-average.

Which is a testament to his poor offensive contribution, but it's also a testament to his defense at shortstop: if he played a position other than SS or C, his career would have been over years ago.

You’re doing it again. Please keep things in context, we are only talking about him versus Hernandez or Grichuk.

[Schad]

I'm doing it again because limiting it to Hernandez and Grichuk is pointless. The question is: does making Freddy Galvis a corner outfielder, and keeping him through the trade deadline, make any sense at all? And the answer is no, it doesn't. Whether Galvis is a marginally less bad corner OF in a year where we're one of the worst teams in baseball is not a question that needs answering. From the standpoint of what the team should do, it's whether having Freddy Galvis as a corner OF past this season is desirable, and it most decidedly is not.

[S.W.A.N]

Why is this stuff suddenly rocket science? Keeping Freddy to make him a corner outfielder is dumb. Period.

His value is as a shortstop. Either keep him to back up the young guys and be a mentor or trade him for assets and to make room. Trade is the most logical.

[gundysmullet]

I'm doing it again because limiting it to Hernandez and Grichuk is pointless. The question is: does making Freddy Galvis a corner outfielder, and keeping him through the trade deadline, make any sense at all? And the answer is no, it doesn't. Whether Galvis is a marginally less bad corner OF in a year where we're one of the worst teams in baseball is not a question that needs answering. From the standpoint of what the team should do, it's whether having Freddy Galvis as a corner OF past this season is desirable, and it most decidedly is not.

Holy cow are you a control freak! I’m the one that started the post so it’s my point, you don’t get to decide what the point is. You don’t get to decide what the question is, I’m the one that asked it. I really enjoy your wit and clever prose but you are really a control freak and never admit it ever being wrong about anything and it really detracts from strengths. Anyway I’m done with this post because you want to control the narrative.

[Trilogy]

Lol. You realize he's expanding the scope of the question because it's entirely relevant.

This is like me asking what the best weapon in a fight is. A tissue, cotton ball or a sponge? I mean, a sponge is probably the best, but all those options are terrible so I should be looking for something more effective or I'm going to get my ass beat.

Galvis should get dealt because he has basically no value outside of being a SS, even if he's better than Hernandez/Grichuk as a OF (arguable, btw). If your goal is to win 1 more game this season in one where you lose 90 anyways, then yea sure, keep him and play him over Teoscar. Lmao.

[Schad]

Exactly. "Is Freddy Galvis marginally less bad than our other options" is, as a thought exercise, pretty pointless.

I'll turn this around. Since you want to move Galvis off SS to a corner spot:

- Do you think that Galvis, as a corner outfielder, is worth paying $5.5m next year?
- Are there better options that we could bring in at a reasonable price that would render his presence here totally pointless?
- If Galvis isn't worth that, or he is easily replaceable, is there any real benefit to keeping him for the remainder of the year as a corner outfielder, and then paying him $1m in the offseason to go away?


My feeling is that the answers to those questions are, in order, no, yes, and no. Galvis as a corner OF could -- even if he hits abnormally well again next season, which is to say a bit below league-average -- be replaced by roughly 20 players who'll be available for peanuts in free agency, because "replacement level +/- a touch" is really cheap to find. Turning a solid SS into a bad left fielder, and paying a bunch of money for the privilege when bad left fielders are a dime a dozen, does not strike me as a rational choice.

[Schad]

Also, I can tell you from experience that a tissue is the best weapon. No joke, I still have a scar over my eye from when a friend threw a balled-up tissue at me when I was 10 or thereabouts. Instinctively ducked and smashed my face off the back of a chair. She has not let me live that down.

[SharoneWright]

Also, I can tell you from experience that a tissue is the best weapon. No joke, I still have a scar over my eye from when a friend threw a balled-up tissue at me when I was 10 or thereabouts. Instinctively ducked and smashed my face off the back of a chair. She has not let me live that down.

So just imagine what a sponge could do!

[BigLeagueChew]

BA's updated prospect rankings mid July.

No.# Player Position
1 Bo Bichette SS
2 Nate Pearson RHP
3 Jordan Groshans SS
4 Eric Pardinho RHP
5 Alek Manoah RHP
6 Alejandro Kirk C
7 Gabriel Moreno C
8 Sean Reid-Foley RHP
9 Miguel Hiraldo SS
10 Orelvis Martinez 3B
11 Adam Kloffenstein RHP
12 Griffin Conine OF
13 Kendall Williams RHP
14 Patrick Murphy RHP
15 Anthony Alford OF
16 Cal Stevenson OF
17 Leonardo Jimenez SS
18 Dasan Brown OF
19 Kevin Smith SS
20 Will Robertson OF
21 Hector Perez RHP
22 Yennsy Diaz RHP
23 T.J. Zeuch RHP
24 Reese McGuire C
25 Alberto Rodriguez OF
26 Jhon Solarte OF
27 Javier D'Orazio C
28 Joey Murray RHP
29 Ryan Noda OF/1B
30 Riley Adams C

Rising – Pearson, Kirk, Moreno
Falling – Smith, Logan Warmoth
Graduating – Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Danny Jansen, Cavan Biggio, Trent Thornton, Rowdy Tellez, Billy McKinney

Some pitching in our top 20 now that players have graduated.

[Schad]

Al Kirk's ranking would seem to suggest that they aren't as down on him defensively as has been suggested by some.

Cal Stevenson's intriguing, but that strikes me as being a very aggressive ranking for a guy who probably doesn't profile as more than a 4th OF unless he suddenly develops power.

The Zeuch positioning might surprise some, but I'm really not sure about him...gets grounders but doesn't get enough strikeouts, nor is he a control freak. Means he's harder to project as a reliever if he doesn't make it as a starter, whereas Perez/Diaz both aren't hard to see in a late-inning role.

While I'm pretty down on Smith, that still seems like too big of a drop. There are a lot of scary elements to his game, most notably the K and infield fly rates, but there's enough bad batted ball luck in his numbers that he's been bad rather than utterly hopeless, and he's still a good defensive SS with positional versatility and serious power; heaping piles of risk and may never escape the minors, but there's still upside as at least a defense-and-pop bench player if he can tidy up his swing.

[wamco]

Galvis would be a weak hitting, weak fielding corner of with no upside.

[wamco]

Kirk or Moreno trade bait?

[Tanner]

A better question is why the hell are we holding on to Galvis for so long if he's the one blocking Bichette from everyday playing time? This is a player no one else wanted to give a starting SS spot to in the off season, which is why he signed here. He's had a good half season, but nothing has changed. It's not like playoff teams will be lining up to give up value and start him now when they could have had him for just money in the winter. Trading him now or trading him in two weeks isn't going to drastically change the return. If he's blocking an elite prospect, then take the C level prospect and trade him. What's the hold up?

[Schad]

Simple answer is that Bo isn't really being blocked. Further time in the minors is hardly going to hurt him, given that he had a solid-but-not-spectacular 2018 at the plate, and missed a large stretch of time injured this season. Having 40 post-injury games under his belt rather than 30 isn't exactly the end of the world. Until the past three weeks or thereabouts, it was entirely possible that he wouldn't be called up this season at all.

[BigLeagueChew]

The Brewers are last in fwar from shortstop, The Reds apparently want to add still, they're 27th in fwar but the Jays themselves we' are only ranked 20th at shortstop value ...hence on most playoff teams Galvis is bottom of the order bat.

[Tanner]

By calling him up this year they are going to forgo a year of service time. Just call him up now and let him develop in the bigs. Even if he sucks in 2019, the team has already established they don't care if they are terrible. The longer you wait, the less time you will have with him, even if it's one less month that's still something. You can't say "who cares about good vets the team is tanking", and then say "well we can't call him up because Sogard and Galvis are doing well and he's not destroying AAA". I'm sure the injury delayed things, but he should have been up the moment the super 2 deadline passed.

Either call him up yesterday or wait until April of next year. The team is essentially going to give up 2026 control for two **** months in 2019. At least Biggio and Vlad will have a big enough big league sample in 2019 to justify the call up.

[Schad]

The fallacy involved is the belief that development at the major league level is vastly superior to development at the AAA level. There are advantages to both; someone like Vlad doesn't have much to learn in the minors, but for most players it presents a lower-pressure environment for tweaking approaches before the crucible of MLB. In Bo's case, he has an unusual approach that -- while arguably a breath of fresh air in a league of pull-happy bombers -- isn't allowing his power to be on full display. Depending on how the team feels about that, AAA is a better place to work through changes.

You stated that he should have been called up immediately after the Super 2 cutoff passed, but that's a bad way of thinking about it. If you are calling players up before they are prepared in order to maximize their service time, you aren't actually maximizing their service time. What you want is as much positive production as possible over the course of their time in your uniform, and that doesn't always correspond directly to getting the most games.

[Schad]

Kirk or Moreno trade bait?

At some point they might be. Also possible that Jansen will be supplanted. Probably at least a year away from having a firm idea of any of the trio; neither Kirk or Moreno are exactly trade headliners at this moment in time, but the further they get up the ladder while producing, the greater the return.

[Tanner]

Since coming off the IL he has hit .331/.385/.573 in 135 PA. If you include the four rehab games in Dunedin, he has a 1.002 OPS since he came back. At what point does he reach Vlad levels where you say he doesn't have much to prove? If he has to make adjustments to lift the ball more or whatever it doesn't really make a difference if he does it in the minors or Majors because he's already destroying AAA being the dude he is now. Give him big league coaching against big league pitching. He might suck early on, but that's what adjustments are for.

I just don't see how anyone can justify keeping him down when pretty much the only thing holding him back is Freddy f'n Galvis. If they traded Galvis a week ago, who do you think they would have called up? Urena? No it would have been Bichette. They might be keeping Galvis intentionally to keep Bo down longer, but that's equally as silly.

If Bo was struggling in AAA then maybe your point would be valid, but he's not. It's the opposite. He's young for the league and too good for it already.

[Schad]

Slash lines do not tell a complete story, especially in smallish samples. A few things:

- The International League is incredibly hitter-friendly thanks to the new balls. League-average OPS is almost .793; it was .709 last season. Bo's numbers are very good, but not as crazy relative to average as those numbers would have been in seasions past. We all will kinda need to do a mental adjustment of baseline for both pitchers and hitters going forward, as we did when the AAA affiliate was in Las Vegas (PCL numbers are even more demented this season).

- Bo is hitting the ball on the ground. A lot. In the minors, those balls will get through. In the majors, not so much. The abnormally high BABIP he is carrying is a contributor to his gaudy numbers.

- 'Readiness' is not a box ticked when a hot streak takes you to a certain stastical threshold, particularly in what amounts to a third of a season. Or less: his post-injury games amount to 20% of a season. No one's readiness or unreadiness has ever been determined by a shade over a month of baseball.

- Bo is not by any stretch of the imagination "too good" for the IL. Nor, given his current deficiencies, would being too good for the IL be a problem. It would, if one wished, make it an ideal proving ground for him to tweak his swing plane to drive the ball in the air more consistently.

Bo is a really good prospect, and I expect that he will be a really good major leaguer. But holy hell people...stop freaking out that we don't call everyone up the very second they might be ready, stop panicking if they don't hit the moment they are promoted, just flipping relax in general. Bo will be here soon. There will then be peaks and valleys. None of this will require the rending of garments. At some point, people decided that takes on the internet must come in only two intensities: Dostoevsky character existential crisis, and Chernobyl. There are other options!