March 2, 2005

Translating Cuban Performance

The Surprising Result

by Clay Davenport

When we were having discussions about how to build our Top 50 Prospects list, the question of imported players came up. Most seasons since the 1994 strike have seen at least one notable player, usually either from Japan (Ichiro Suzuki, Kazuhiro Sasaki, both Matsuis) or Cuba (Jose Contreras, Orlando Hernandez), making his major-league debut. This year, the only player who looked good enough to consider (Tadahito Iguchi hadn't signed when we had this discussion, or he certainly would have been in) was Kendry Morales of the whatever-city-they're-calling-themselves-from-this-week Angels.

What did we have to say about him? Scouting reports said he had power to all fields, and he hit .391 in Cuba one year. Pretty much everything we knew about him was in the Baseball America article announcing his signing.

As much as I love reading BA, though, that was a pretty unsatisfying answer. We're performance analysts, dangit, and we didn't have a performance record to analyze, because Cuban baseball has always been this gaping black hole. Players came out every once in a while, the scouting reports raved over them, and George Steinbrenner or some other sap wrote out the big checks for them, but no one really knew how they would perform. While the Brothers Hernandez did fine, it seemed that the greatest talent of Cuban players was to be little Barnums, making suckers of the U.S. baseball establishment. Fidel may have been upset at losing the players, but the sight of so many capitalists losing so much money to Cubans had to bring him at least a small chuckle.

So we tried to rectify the situation, and see if we couldn't bring a little more light to Senor Morales. Lo and behold, I discovered something that either didn't exist or that I'd missed the last half-dozen times I went looking for it: a Web site for Cuba's Serie Nacional, their highest league. It gave me complete statistics for the last four years, once I was able to translate the categories. (Change the "40" in the website's name to 41, 42, 43, or 44 to get other years).

Now we not only had a complete line for Morales, but we also had some context. Yes, Morales did indeed hit .391 one season, albeit in just 202 at-bats, and had a three-year career average of .350. Impressive. It also told us that the Cuban league, as a whole, had stats that looked like this:

         AVG   OBP   SLG  R/27 outs
2001        .295  .372  .441   5.99
2002        .293  .368  .425   5.63
2003        .297  .379  .439   6.19
2004        .288  .361  .415   5.32

The Cubans, it turns out, play in a rocket-fueled offensive environment. The highest batting average for any North American league over the last four years was the .287 put up by the Pioneer League last year. The Mexican League is a high-offense league, and they peaked at .286. The Pacific Coast League maxes out at .284 over this time frame, while the majors top out at .270. The Cuban league sweeps the batting average category.

The worst OBP from Cuba over that time is .361; the 2004 Pioneer had an OBP of .379, and the 2003 Mexican League reached .362. No other league operating out of the U.S. these past four years can match those numbers, so the Cuban leagues have that category pretty well covered. Besides the high batting averages, the Cubans have insane hit by pitch rates; the 2003 Cuban league is the only recent league in my database to break .02 HBP per plate appearance. The HBP rates for 2002 and 2004 are also higher than any other league I have, then you get a couple of Pioneer League seasons and the 2001 Cuban league; that's the whole top three and four of the top six, if you're ranking them. Painful.

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