PP Top 50

given hafner’s injury history i think weglarz will get an opportunity sooner rather then later

Gordon is no doubt the product of the hype machine, but I still have him firmly in my top 100. I have Withrow just outside my top 25.

If my tone was too aggressive for you, I apologize, and I certainly wasn’t trying to dismantle your work, which I’m a huge fan of overall, but you are out of your depth on this issue.

You realize just as well as I do that watching videos isn’t going to give you the kind of sample size that could make conclusions relevant for years…years and years (you guys know more about sample size than anybody), yet you single out Hellickson today, a mistake, imo. You also admit you’re not taking anatomical differences into account a bit. As Graham on LL has posted numerous times over the years, you can’t control for anatomy, and it varies wildly. Hell, there are theories out there that the only reason baseball pitchers can throw as hard as they can is because of anatomical defects. Go look at Eric Cressey’s site. He’s a powerlifter/personal therapist who works with major and minor league pitchers and is a specialist on shoulder anatomy. He has numerous posts dealing with injuries, and he’s never talking about silly things like inverted Ws. The motion doesn’t tell you nearly enough, at least with what little data there is now, and maybe never.

It’s an uphill battle that you don’t have the resources to tackle (right now), and presenting conclusions today, before you’ve even done what little you’re going to is a mistake.

It’s just that when you take the high road and claim a scientific approach that you’re not actually employing, I’ve got a problem with that.

If you’re going to go out on limbs, you should be more willing to defend your positions imo.

How much respect does a critic need to offer? I already said this in my initial post:

“I like a lot of what you’re trying to do and respect the contrarian nature of the positions you sometimes take”

If you need more than that from people that question what you write, than I’m not sure what I can do about that.

I have no problem offering praise and respect for the things that you do well while being quick to point out the things you do poorly.

If I was in your position, that’s exactly the kind of readers that I’d want.

Hi there! Glad to see such a spirited discussion.

Rather than getting into a semantic argument about a certain phrase, I thought I’d try and give y’all a little bit of background on what we try to do when grading pitching prospects.

We, at ProjectProspect, take our hobby seriously and are always looking for ways to improve our methods, expand our databases, and refine our theories. We believe that scouting and prospect ranking can be improved and are willing to take unpopular stances. Our position player rankings are very quantitatively based, but we add in a good deal of scouting analysis as well. In general pitching stats have a lower correlation to future success. Pitching rankings HAVE to be more subjective than their hitting counterparts.

Mechanics play a large role in our evaluations, and I play a large role in this particular scouting effort. I have certain theories about pitching mechanics, which are based strongly on the work of Dr. Mike Marshall, Chris O’Leary, Dr. James Andrews and Dr. Glenn Fleisig among others. I am still learning and do not consider myself to be an ‘expert’. I consider myself to be a dedicated, knowledgeable fan. I spend a good deal of time reviewing any pitcher I analyze and take great pride in my, and our, work.

I have not had the opportunity to run extensive, long-term controlled experiments in effort to prove my theories.

The key point that, I believe, Adam was trying to make regarding our analysis and rankings is that they are not random.

I think you might be discounting the amount of useful information that can be attained by observation. Even without a goniometer handy, maximum external rotation can be closely estimated visually. While I haven’t strapped force gauges on any live pitchers; hip rotation, leg drive, backfoot-spin, dragline creation can all be observed and give us a good idea of the amount of force generated (resulting in velocity). The pitching motion is a kinetic chain. You can see that Aaron Crow (for example) inefficiently applies the force he generates to the ball, due to the ball placement at the beginning of the acceleration phase of his delivery.

While his technology is better and his knowledge greater, the overall process I try to undertake is very similar to (and based on) the work that Dr. Fleisig and crew do at ASMI. The majority of what they do is based on high-speed motion capture technology. The work they do is largely observation. They’ve fully tested something like 2000 pitchers, but are more than willing to identify ‘red flags’ threw simple observation. Check out 3Psports – it’s an ASMI based company that breaks down pitchers mechanics and offers coaching advise based on user submitted video.

What I do and how I do it is no different than how the majority of MLB teams scout pitchers and determine the effectiveness of their mechanics – again, they have more experience and information at their disposal, the process is not very different.

I try to go into detail and explain the reasons why I like or don’t like any specific player. I haven’t been doing this for a real long time, but I’ve killed a few virtual trees with the cyber-space I spent on individual mechanic breakdowns.

The DPG will be a streamlined collection of our theories and assumptions.

As for our ranking of Hellickson specifically. His numbers are great but his stuff is slightly better than average (at best) and he has a history of arm problems. His ceiling maybe a No. 3/2 starter, but his floor is a No. 4 starter with health problems. That doesn’t make him an elite prospect in my mind.