I Like Bowker and His Approach to Hitting

A tool that Bill James introduced long ago was Major League Equivalency, or MLEs, but for ordinary fans like us, we had to rely on the experts to provide us with that information. No longer.

Jeff Sackmann, wearer of many hats, innovator extraordinaire within the saber-statistics community, has made public his MLE calculator here. He is the founder and creator of both the minor league splits data-site and now the college baseball splits data-site, which has the splits of most of the top draft picks from college. With this calculator, you can adjust for the league and team in the minors and the league and team in the majors. My hats off to Jeff for making this available!

I was planning on comparing Bowker's overall, home, and road numbers from Connecticut last season. Unfortunately, Bowker's 2007 splits are not available right now via Jeff's site; he's in the process of updating and improving everything but, for now, access to 2007 data is not possible (if you check around, you can still get pre-2007 data)..

However, using the data I had published on his hitting line previously, I backed into an approximate batting line to use to calculate his MLE based on his road numbers. It is basically what I had estimated in my post on Bowker in April, about .830 OPS, which I estimated by finding hitters approximately his age, with about the same batting line, and at the same level (AA), and seeing what their MLE was.

I guess that validates my method for backing into an approximate MLE for minor leaguers, but more importantly shows that Bowker should have been taken more seriously as a prospect by most experts. However, his horrible home at Dodd Stadium while playing for Connecticut masked how good he was and his overall MLE looked horrible. Thus, while his performance was good enough to get him on the radar for a number of prospect publications, he probably should have been higher rated/ranked than he was had he not played at Dodd Stadium.

Adjustments

Ultimately, it is all about adjustments, which I wrote recently about on Bowker. There was also a nice article about Bowker and adjusting recently on sfgiants.com. Here are some good bits.

After hitting three home runs in his first seven Major League games, John Bowker found out what countless batters have already learned: Pitchers make adjustments.

They jam you on the inside if they think you can clobber an outside pitch. They throw changeups if they think you're sitting on heat. The trick to staying in the big leagues is adjusting to those adjustments.

It took Bowker more than a month to figure that out. He had just one dinger in May. He had 16- and 20-game homerless streaks in a seven-week span. But lately, he's been getting back in a groove. Before Tuesday night's game, he was batting .350 with three home runs and a .409 on-base percentage in June. He's got seven home runs this year.

I would actually say that May was his month of adjustment because he was able to maintain a good batting average during May, just with no power. In other words, he was first learning how to hit in May, then used what he learned to learn to hit with power in June. That is exactly the pattern that Schierholtz has shown at almost every level, he would first get the lay of the land, figuring out how to hit pitchers initially, compiling a good batting average but with no power, then he applies those lessons so that he can then pound the ball for power.

That's why I want him up sooner than later, because he was able to hit in the majors last season, and therefore hopefully he just needs experience to seal the deal and then start hitting for power. However, I don't want to trade Winn just to open a spot up for Schierholtz, it is more important to get a good prospect out of another team for Winn than to bring up Schierholtz in the middle of a re-building season.

Here is something more from Bowker that is pretty good, shows a lot of hitting IQ on his part:

"It's constantly a back-and-forth, cat-and-mouse game," Bowker said. "Pitchers
are trying to see what you can handle. You still want to go to your strengths,
but you have to consider what the pitcher is going to be able to throw at you."

Rowand had something good to say too:

When Bowker hit his home run again Detroit's Fernando Rodney on Monday, seasoned hitter Aaron Rowand was in the dugout marveling at how well he adjusted mid-at-bat. Bowker had been fooled on consecutive changeups before regrouping and launching another changeup into the right-field seats.

Rowand said most young hitters learn to adjust to different pitches while they're in the Minors. But Bowker, along with fellow Giants rookies Brian Horwitz, Emmanuel Burriss and Travis Denker, have all been forced to learn on the fly in the Majors.

"The guys all go through a time where they're figuring out that it's up to them to adjust to the pitchers," Rowand said. "It's about maturing mentally as a batter. All these guys have the physical tools, but there's a lot more that goes into success than just that."

Maturity is something I've talked about for prospects. It also harkens back to what I quoted from BP's Gary Huckabaly from his discussion of TINSTAAPP, he noted hitters just need some time and experience to figure things out, to - and I don' t think he used this word but what he says is as much about maturity - mature. Back to Bowker:

Every at-bat is a new lesson. In any given plate appearance, it's important to know what the team needs, Bowker said. It's not about padding stats. No need to aim for the bleachers if a sacrifice fly can bring in the winning run.

If a pitcher has a 95 mph fastball and an 80 mph changeup, the batter has to put himself in a position to hit both -- keep the hands back and don't try to pull everything. It's better to get jammed and foul off a pitch than to whiff at it and strike out.

What a team player! What a gamer! Only the best hitters can adjust to a pitcher within an AB, some hitters never figure that one out. So that speaks well of his future if he can continue to do that. Lastly from Rowand:

"The way the young guys are starting to hit more is a perfect example of all of the hard work that's put into being a big league hitter," Rowand said. "You can't just adjust game to game; it has to be pitch to pitch."

Giants Thoughts

I've been impressed by Bowker because of his stats before and his knowledge of why he had trouble hitting in San Jose and Connecticut, but this article really illuminates how good a student of hitting he is. Because I think a player is more able to have a long and successful career when he is a student of the game of hitting - whether it be Ted Williams or Pete Rose - than if he just relies on natural ability.

At some point (or perhaps you didn't start with much in the first place) you will no longer have that natural ability, and you will have to learn how to hit. Better to learn that upfront than to either learn it over a long career as experience takes over for abilities or be forced to learn it all when your physical gifts are fading or gone. Bowker is looking better and better to me all the time.

How he is doing contrasts, in my mind, with how Brian Buscher has done. When the Twins took Brian Buscher via the Rule 5 Draft, I wasn't bothered much. But when Buscher started hitting well for the Twins in the minors, I was bothered, and then he was promoted to the majors last season, and I was wondering what went wrong, why did the Giants give him up so easily. But then he faded and for this season, the books I buy said that Buscher won't amount for much for the Twins in 2008 or the future, most probably.

Then again, the books didn't think much of Bowker either.

Giants and Hitting Prospects

Perhaps the Giants management knows more about hitting prospects than some - including the experts - suspect because, if you went solely by stats, there was no reason to bring up Bowker this season. He wasn't doing anything at AAA, though small samples, and yet they felt good enough to bring him up instead of, say, Scott McMain, who, to me, inexplicably was brought up last season for some September call-up ABs and got some love from the upper brass in public comments, while Bowker wasn't brought up, and, more to the point, McClain plays 1B regularly whereas Bowker had not played much if any 1B in the minors. Yet Bowker was brought up and, for the most part, has been good and getting better.

In addition, the experts weren't impressed that much. BP noted for 2008, "He's an inferior version of Schierholtz, and unlikely to build on his progress," and didn't include him with the regular player section where the best prospects are. BA was impressed enough to boost him up to 9th in the Giants farm system. But still, and obviously, they noted that with the glut of outfielders, he would have to "continue putting up strong numbers to earn a permanent role in San Francisco." Which technically he didn't in AAA but got promoted anyway.

But it is still too early to say whether Bowker is a success or not, the season is long and the nice Lance Niekro's starts devolve into Rick Lancellotti's or JR Phillips's or Damon Minor's career just like that sometime. Still, given his initial success, that speaks to the team's knowledge of their own hitters to bring him up when he didn't have the numbers in AAA to support that and for him to succeed over a two month period now, after a poor start in April.

Giants Focused on Pitching Over Hitting

Perhaps the lack of hitting talent is also more a matter of what I've been writing about the draft, that it is very hard to find MLB players period, using the draft, particularly when you are drafting in the back of the first round when you are winning. The Giants, by focusing on pitching, increased the odds of finding a good pitcher, but that likewise decreased the odds of finding a good hitter, as it is a zero-sum game. So the lack of hitting prospects is more a function of the Giants devoting most of their picks, particularly their higher percentage draft picks, on pitching - Grilli, Ainsworth, Bonser, Hennessey, Lowry, Cain, Aardsma, Lincecum, Bumgarner, Alderson - than on hitters - Torcato, McDowell, Fairley, and now Posey.

Because once you get outside the first round and the supplementary, the second round success is around 4% in finding a good player, about 13% in finding even a useful player. Once you get to the 100th pick, there is about a 1.5% chance of finding a good player, about 4-5% chance in finding a useful player. And who knows how much these figures are boosted by the fact that some players fall in the draft due to signability concerns.

Still, at those success rates (and really, I just realized, it is not success rate but rather population rates), and assuming you are the average team, it would take about 25 years of drafts for a team to find a good player from the second round, 60 years of drafts for a team with the 100th pick overall, which varies somewhere around the 3rd round, depending on the number of supplemental picks are awarded. To find a useful player, Michael Tucker being a good example of one, it would take 8 years of drafts to find one with your second round pick, 20-25 years of drafts to find one with the 100th pick.

So are the Giants bad at drafting hitters or have they been bad because they have focused on pitching? Before, I would have to say that it didn't look like the Giants knew what they were doing because there were no successes to compare to. However, now with Lewis doing well over two seasons, and Bowker showing initial success and successful adjustments after a horrible start, and Horwitz and Denker really small samples success, heck, I guess one could throw Holm and Burriss in there too, plus Frandsen from last year, it at least introduces the notion that perhaps they weren't bad, as much as they were focused on pitching as a drafting philosophy, previously, as a reason for why there haven't been much position player success.

Maybe Sabean Not So Bad Afterall

And that makes sense because, after all, Sabean was the scouting director in charge of the draft when the Yankees drafted Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, and Carl Everett. He also got Shane Spenser for them as well, plus picked up nice pitchers like Andy Pettitte and Mariano Riviera on his watch. And that was over just a three year period when he was director of player development and of scouting for the Yankees. He was also the GM who turned the Giants around his first year here as GM, after two horribly bad seasons, three straight losing seasons, and losing seasons in five of the previous six seasons.

And irregardless of how well or poorly one may think he has done in the past, as for present day, I think he is doing it for us. He has already re-built the pitching staff, to one that other teams are very envious of - and remember, of the vast majority of pitching to come out of our system, he has kept the vast majority of the best and useful ones. In addition, the future starting lineup is starting to look pretty good in a few years, and perhaps might be good enough as early as next year to return to consistent .500 play. Maybe Sabean isn't as bad as so many Giants fans think he is.