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January 13, 2006

Prospectus Matchups

The Best of the Newest

by Jim Baker

When I saw that Hal Morris had gotten five votes for the Hall of Fame I began to wonder if there wasn’t an idea for a movie in that. Hollywood has always produced comedies in which some unlikely guy ends up as president or something because of a quirk in the system. What if you push the envelope on the concept and have a movie about a player of Morris’s caliber who, by some quirk, gets enough votes to be in the Hall of Fame? Maybe the voters were mad about something and did it as a protest. I don’t know. Maybe the player blackmailed them all. That can be worked out later. The important thing is that audiences are made to laugh and that I am given money for the idea. Oh--and figuring out who in their right mind thinks Hal Morris had a Cooperstown-caliber career and why it is that those people are allowed the honor of voting.

Moving on, I thought we’d go position-by-position today and see which players sans major league experience have the best PECOTA projections for 2006 at each position. These are not necessarily the best prospects in baseball (although some of them are), just those whose translations suggest they could survive right now in the majors.

Starting Pitcher

Philip Hughes, New York Yankees (24.3 projected VORP)
What ho? A 20-year old pitcher on the Yankees? Not bloody likely. Hughes’ projected VORP of 24.3 is better than all Yankee starters except for Randy Johnson and Mike Mussina, but the last time anybody that young started a game for New York was in 1984 when 19-year old Jose Rijo got five starts in 24 appearances. The youngest Yankee to get a start under the Joe Torre regime has been Jake Westbrook on June 17, 2000. He was 22 years, eight months and change. He beats Ryan Bradley’s 22 years, 10 months which came on August 26, 1998. Dave Eiland (1988) and Al Leiter (1987)--who were both 21--were the only other pitchers 22 or younger to get a start for New York in the last two decades. Ten years ago, 24-year olds Andy Pettitte and Sterling Hitchcock started 34 and 11 games respectively. That is the last time any Yankee pitcher under the age of 25 has been given anything like a serious starting workload.

Since then, under-25s have combined to start a total of 22 games for New York. That’s over a period of nine seasons. Bradley, Ed Yarnall, Westbrook, Randy Keisler, Ben Ford, Brett Jodie, Jorge DePaula, Brandon Claussen, Brad Halsey and Sean Henn have all gotten a start or two in that time with Halsey (7) and Henn (3) getting more opportunities than the rest. For the sake of comparison, the Braves have given 173 starts to U-25s in the same period, with 21 and 22 year-olds getting 68 turns.

Of course, given the eventual careers of most of those Yankee pitchers, limiting their exposure was not necessarily a bad thing. The Yankees haven’t exactly been a font of young pitching talent in recent times and now that they have a legitimate prospect it simply means that he’s on the top of the Players-Most-Likely-to-be-Traded list.