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April 20, 2004

Looking Ahead

Translating College Performance

by Boyd Nation

You know that insurance commercial where the guy sleepily mumbles that he's going to skip class before his roommate reminds him that college is over, and he's going to be late for work? Now, imagine that, instead of facing some mild-mannered office manager, your boss is a graduate of the Larry Bowa School of Ballpark Dialectics who's never actually held an indoor job. I'm not sure that you can classify minor league baseball as The Real World, but it's at least a paying job of sorts, and it's hard to imagine a tougher college-to-job transition than going from college athlete to minor league bus jockey without, say, taking a Wellesley grad and plunking her into the Peace Corps.

In college, while nominally an adult, you have a coaching staff that knows that a behavioral meltdown by a player will negatively affect their job status. In the low minors, on the other hand, the coaching staff is charged with weeding out the players, especially those near the talent margins, who won't be able to handle the travel and celebrity scene if they advance. You go from living in a nice, structured dorm, usually with a bed check, to the standard short-season living arrangement--except for a few of the instant millionaires in the first dozen draft picks, that's eight guys, one house, one car, one XBox, and a lot of pizza. You go from four games a week, mostly on the weekends, to six games a week with extensive late-night bus travel between.

On top of those indignities, they take away your friend, the tool you've carried around since you were three--your aluminum bat--and replace it with this heavy wooden thing that stings your fingers every time the pitcher--who got to keep his ball--comes inside, and that shatters if you check your swing wrong. Given all of this, it's a miracle that anyone ever manages to eke out even a foul ball in short-season play, much less put up meaningful numbers. Nonetheless, they do. The question I want to look at, though, is whether those numbers bear any resemblance to the college numbers that got them drafted in the first place.

Out of all the ways that Bill James changed our world (and that's a fun topic all on its own, although there's a danger in eulogizing a guy who's not done yet), the most significant may have been the realization that minor league stats are just as predictive of future performance, properly interpreted, as major league stats. This point gets clouded somewhat by the fact that neither is a particularly reliable indicator, but they're better than nothing, and one of the dividing points even now between the smart organizations and the ones riding to the park on the short bus is the degree to which they consider minor league stats as valid diagnostic tools.

There's been a huge explosion of interest in college stats in the last couple of years--the post-Moneyball era, I suppose--but no one's shown the work to justify that interest. In particular, the question of what "properly interpreted" means in this context has not been settled. I'd like to walk through a series of numbers to show my work, so to speak, and give a reasonable set of steps of use when considering college numbers. I'll use OPS as a good crude tool while going through the steps and then give a full list of correlations once I get a full set of translation steps.

• Correlation of raw OPS between college and minors: .26 (Rookie) / .31 (Short-season A)