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August 14, 2003

Can Of Corn

Minor League Power, Part III

by Dayn Perry

In 1992, Jon Bon Jovi crooned:

"With an ironclad fist, I wake up and French kiss the morning."

Put this lyric alongside Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo" or Goya's "Black Paintings" as one of the most haunting creations in the history of the Western artistic canon. What does this have to do with the third part of our series on projecting power at the major league level? Enough to include it.

You'll recall that for the last two weeks we've looked at the divergent paths, in terms of power, of two distinct groups of minor-league hitters. The first, deftly named Group A, comprised the top 25 active leaders in slugging percentage who had at least 3,000 major league ABs as of the end of the 2002 season. Group B consisted of hitters who, despite putting up strong minor league power numbers, failed to bust out the lumber at the highest level. To populate Group B, I included anyone with a career minor league SLG of at least 0.490, at least a 10% decline in their SLG in the majors and at least 1,750 ABs in the majors.

And once again, here's a brief glossary of the statistics used in this the first two parts of the study:

MLB SLG - The hitter's slugging percentage at the major league level.