6-4-2 — an Angels/Dodgers double play blog: BPro Angels Stuff

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Thursday, February 23, 2006

BPro Angels Stuff

A couple items from Baseball Prospectus on the Angels: first off, the team health report is out, and it's loaded with risks. Both Jeff Mathis and Jose Molina profile as red lights (mainly because of the increase in innings), as does starter Ervin Santana, for essentially the same reason. K-Rod also profiles as a red light injury risk because of his complicated delivery, and Erstad and Anderson are risky because of their injury history. Yellow lights include Casey Kotchman, Adam Kennedy, Vlad Guerrero, Kelvim Escobar, and Bartolo Colon.

The second piece is BPro's PECOTA projection for prospects. Brandon Wood turns up third in the list of shortstop prospects after Dodgers prospects Joel Guzman and Erick Aybar, and why?

I suspect that it’s hard for people, myself included, to make the full mental adjustment for the California League. Cal League teams averaged 5.73 runs per game last season, a figure about 20% higher than the Carolina League, and 25% higher than the Florida State League, the other two leagues at the High-A classification. It’s as though Wood were playing half his games in Coors Field.
However, the most basic reason for Wood’s modest rating isn’t quite as sexy as that. Namely, 2005 isn’t the only season on Brandon Wood’s track record, and his numbers prior to 2005 were not especially impressive. I went back and re-ran Wood’s PECOTA, using his 2005 numbers only. When we do that, his combined rating shoots up to 498.1, which would rank him as the second best prospect in baseball, and #1 in the Upside department.
...
He’s a tremendous prospect [....] Nevertheless, it’s very unlikely that he was really as good as his numbers last year, even after we get done adjusting for his league and level.

Unsurprisingly, Howie Kendrick places first in their second basemen projection, Delwyn Young seventh, Alberto Callaspo eleventh, and Estanislao Abreu 29th. (Dude, get some consonants!)

// posted by Rob @ 9:03 PM link // 3 comments