beckdawg
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Something interesting is happening. I don't think many people realize it because after Happ left the minors most people tuned out the minors. I've edited this a bit to keep it as short as I can as I tend to be long winded but the short version is this. Since 2015 I think the cubs have changed their approach on player acquisition in terms of hitters. Prior to 2015 is when you saw them mostly draft/acquiring power bats. As we see with most of the home grown talent the team doesn't really have much speed. Baez is the only guy with more than 5 steals and he wasn't brought in by the current front office.
Simply put there's 2 ways of reading this IMO. One is they have all the power they need by getting Schwarber, Rizzo and bryant. While that may be sort of true I think there's more to it than that. K rate has skyrocketed in the majors. Over the last 10 years it's up almost 5%. That's pretty nuts when you think about it because historically those rate are fairly steady. Maddon has talked a bit about this and has suggested the new approach to launch angle is the culprit. Regardless, this is interesting to me because it certainly seems like the cubs are zigging when everyone else is zagging.
The reason that is interesting to me is that I'm old enough to remember the 80's baseball player. Back then someone like Aaron Judge wasn't really the prototypical "star" player. That is to say guys with low contact(high bb/k rates) and power. Your prototypical 1980's star was usually a 20/20 guy unless they played somewhere like 1B/3B where power was more pressing. Even in RF which is now typically viewed as a power spot you had guys like Tony Gwynn. None of that is to say that Judge is a bad player or "doing it wrong." What I am saying however is that a 20/20 player today is pretty much nothing because no one really cares about 20 SB and 20 HR's isn't really any kind of "feat." Altuve is 5'6 and hit 24 HRs.
So imagine my surprise to see how many guys in the cubs low level minors are running like the damn 1980's cardinals. I follow the box scores of every team in the cubs minors. It started to come to my attention last year with Fernando Kelli in the DSL. I like to try and keep track of interesting super low level guys as they progress and his average caught my eye as he hit .320/.437/.443 in the DSL as a CF. As I watched day after day I started to notice how many steals he was raking up and he ended last year with 58 in 67 games. This year the cubs have 3 of the top 6(1, 3, 6) base stealers in the DSL. Keep in mind this is a league with 44 teams and roughly 750-800 hitters. Then we had the most recent draft and for anyone paying attention to that the scouting report on basically all the hitters the cubs drafted was pretty similar. That is to say a high contact guy with good speed who can probably play CF. There were certainly a few exceptions but largely that's been the type of guy they went after since 2015.
The only real way you win in a game of market inefficiency is by doing things other teams aren't. So when you see so many teams buying into this launch angle revolution it's interesting in seeing the cubs drafting/signing more like a 1980's team. The added factor making this even more clever in my opinion is we're now seeing guys like Altuve who have 0 business hitting 20 HRs doing that. As a 17 year old in the DSL he had an ISO of .098. Last year his ISO was .202 and it's not like a 5'6 guy has a lot of frame to add on power.
I think what we're seeing is the cubs basically ceding power to the other 29 teams and instead targeting speed and contact.The idea there being it appears that you can teach/develop power but finding guys who don't strike out like crazy is much harder these days. Even the guys with interesting power potential they've drafted like Brennan Davis and Nelson Velaqeuz have come with big time speed. We're still probably 3-4 years at the earliest from seeing any of these guys approaching the majors but it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if the cubs start to lead the majors in stolen bases in 5-7 years. And this current itteration of the cubs is second only to the red sox in batting average by 1 point. You remove the pitchers the cubs .277 batting average is #1 by a lot with #2 being atlanta 9 points lower. And in terms of OBP the current cubs excluding pitching are 10 points up on the reds with a .358 team OBP which is pretty absurd. Crazy part is I think the hitters in the lower level minors may be better average hitters than a number of the cubs. I think we're looking at a future with more hitters like Almora/Zobrist rather than Schwarber/Happ.
Simply put there's 2 ways of reading this IMO. One is they have all the power they need by getting Schwarber, Rizzo and bryant. While that may be sort of true I think there's more to it than that. K rate has skyrocketed in the majors. Over the last 10 years it's up almost 5%. That's pretty nuts when you think about it because historically those rate are fairly steady. Maddon has talked a bit about this and has suggested the new approach to launch angle is the culprit. Regardless, this is interesting to me because it certainly seems like the cubs are zigging when everyone else is zagging.
The reason that is interesting to me is that I'm old enough to remember the 80's baseball player. Back then someone like Aaron Judge wasn't really the prototypical "star" player. That is to say guys with low contact(high bb/k rates) and power. Your prototypical 1980's star was usually a 20/20 guy unless they played somewhere like 1B/3B where power was more pressing. Even in RF which is now typically viewed as a power spot you had guys like Tony Gwynn. None of that is to say that Judge is a bad player or "doing it wrong." What I am saying however is that a 20/20 player today is pretty much nothing because no one really cares about 20 SB and 20 HR's isn't really any kind of "feat." Altuve is 5'6 and hit 24 HRs.
So imagine my surprise to see how many guys in the cubs low level minors are running like the damn 1980's cardinals. I follow the box scores of every team in the cubs minors. It started to come to my attention last year with Fernando Kelli in the DSL. I like to try and keep track of interesting super low level guys as they progress and his average caught my eye as he hit .320/.437/.443 in the DSL as a CF. As I watched day after day I started to notice how many steals he was raking up and he ended last year with 58 in 67 games. This year the cubs have 3 of the top 6(1, 3, 6) base stealers in the DSL. Keep in mind this is a league with 44 teams and roughly 750-800 hitters. Then we had the most recent draft and for anyone paying attention to that the scouting report on basically all the hitters the cubs drafted was pretty similar. That is to say a high contact guy with good speed who can probably play CF. There were certainly a few exceptions but largely that's been the type of guy they went after since 2015.
The only real way you win in a game of market inefficiency is by doing things other teams aren't. So when you see so many teams buying into this launch angle revolution it's interesting in seeing the cubs drafting/signing more like a 1980's team. The added factor making this even more clever in my opinion is we're now seeing guys like Altuve who have 0 business hitting 20 HRs doing that. As a 17 year old in the DSL he had an ISO of .098. Last year his ISO was .202 and it's not like a 5'6 guy has a lot of frame to add on power.
I think what we're seeing is the cubs basically ceding power to the other 29 teams and instead targeting speed and contact.The idea there being it appears that you can teach/develop power but finding guys who don't strike out like crazy is much harder these days. Even the guys with interesting power potential they've drafted like Brennan Davis and Nelson Velaqeuz have come with big time speed. We're still probably 3-4 years at the earliest from seeing any of these guys approaching the majors but it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if the cubs start to lead the majors in stolen bases in 5-7 years. And this current itteration of the cubs is second only to the red sox in batting average by 1 point. You remove the pitchers the cubs .277 batting average is #1 by a lot with #2 being atlanta 9 points lower. And in terms of OBP the current cubs excluding pitching are 10 points up on the reds with a .358 team OBP which is pretty absurd. Crazy part is I think the hitters in the lower level minors may be better average hitters than a number of the cubs. I think we're looking at a future with more hitters like Almora/Zobrist rather than Schwarber/Happ.
