Interviews with top prospects Brown and Panik

The Giants/MLB's video section got two nice interviews with Gary Brown and Joe Panik, where they answer some questions about their background, college experience, their 2011 performance, type of hitter they are, what they are working on in the AFL, and future plans. 

Brown

I've been very impressed so far by the interviews that Gary has given before and he was great in this one too.  This is the first time I've seen him not smile like a Cheshire Cat, he has a great smile usually, like he is just so happy to be in the position he is in (I think I've seen him in 3-5 interviews before).  He was very serious in this interview, barely cracked a smile at all that I can recall, though he did look like he did in prior interivews when he commented about liking to take a HBP. 

I like that he took on the Moneyball concept, which to me reflects perfectly what he has done in his career:  the most important thing is to get on base, walking to do that is one aspect of it, so is taking HBP.  If he can't figure out hitting in any particularly league, he'll adjust and get on-base via other methods.  But if he's hitting the ball well, why take the bat out of his hands by walking?

I find that the Moneyball topic is the key thing that separates the Saber-wannabes and those who know their stuff and are serious about it.  Walking is important but not to the extreme extent that many people make it to be.  There is a nuance to it that a lot of people don't get, it is important but not the only important thing.  Not being able to walk is not necessarily a bad trait if he is good at hitting the ball well.  A hit is much more valuable than a walk, you can advance the runners, you put pressure on the defense to make an error as well.  Also, a walk will never become a homer unless you can easily steal 2B, 3B, and home.  :^) 

Still, there is some importance, as there are those players who are not able to hit and thus need to be able to take walks to be able to add value as a hitter.  And ultimately, someone who can avoid swinging at pitches outside of the strike zone and swing only at strikes will be able to force the pitcher to come in with pitches that the hitter can handle and hit for a line drive or a hit somewhere.  But there are plenty of good hitters who do not take walks.  Sure, they are rarer and harder to find, but they do exist and they do provide a lot of good value as a player.

I guess it just bugs me a lot that people would point his lack of walks as a huge negative.  First of all, they based their analysis on one year's worth of data, his junior year when he was a hitting god.  Looking at his three years in college plus Cape Cod, he clearly was all about getting on base, whatever it takes.  Second, there are plenty of hitters who do well in the majors without walking that much.  Yes, it is better if he could take walks no matter what, but the focus was always on the lack of walks, not on the fact that he was hitting great and didn't need to take walks. 

As an analytical lark, I examined what would have happened if he took away 5 PA from his non-walk PA's and somehow magically changed them into five walks (no one really knows what would happen to a hitter if he suddenly tried to change his hitting style to take more walks, he might get more walks but much less hits plus additional outs as well; it would be like predicting the weather, i.e. right sometimes, but you can't really predict the rarer events, nor the complex sequence of results).  Using the valuations of each component of a non-walk PA, I found that his offensive production was REDUCED by converting his non-walk PA's into five walks.  He had so many hits, and so many of his hits were for extra bases, that the value of all the offense that could generate was higher than the offense generated by taking walks, even though a larger percent of those non-walk PAs were outs.  So he was better off hitting than trying to change and take a walk instead.

Panik

This is my first interview that I can recall seeing of Panik.  He was very poised, very humble, much like Brown, two really nice guys working hard to achieve their dreams.  He discussed the issue of switching to 2B in the AFL, really enjoyed the interview.  He has a nice smile too, a more serious face like Brown, maybe the interviewer asked them to do that?  Sounds like the same guy doing the interview.

There are also nice clips of them playing:  hitting and fielding.  Brown's batting stance is not so jittery anymore, so that was good to see.  Get to see Panik in the field too, that was nice.

Really nice, particulary in-depth interviews given how short, really, they are, allow us fans to get to know these two prospects.  Seeing these makes me root for them even more, they seem to be solid hard-working ballplayers who are not full of themselves.

Here are the links:

Gary Brown on playing in the AFL
Joe Panik on moving to second base in AFL

Giants Thoughts

Neither of them have been doing that well so far, but I understand it is just small samples.  As of the latest available stats, Brown is only hitting .220/.278/.300/.578 and Panik is only hitting .211/.302/.212/.513.  They are third and second worse on their team by OPS among the leaders on this list (not sure how many PA to qualify, but based on rough perusing of AB and BB, 30 is the lowest I could find, lowest AB is 27; also, sort by OPS to get most up to date stats, found lower ABs when sorted by BA for some reason).  At least they are doing better than Angel's Wunderkind Mike Trout (.222/.222/.289/.511) and not much worse than Nat's Wunderkind Bryce Harper (.214/.313/.381/.693).

But Panik does not appear to be totally overmatched.  Panik has done well with his batting discipline, he has only 3 strikeouts in 38 AB with 4 walks, both great ratios.  That is a 92% contact rate, which is great, 1.33 BB/K ratio (anything over 1.0 is great), and 10.5% BB/PA, which is good too.  However, his BABIP is only .229, which leads to the bad overall results and batting line. 

The fact that he isn't hitiing anything for extra bases suggest that while he's not being fooled in terms of striking out, he's also not able to do anything with the strikes he is hitting, he is not hitting them with much authority and either getting only singles or weak outs.  So that is bad, but given that his basic type of hitting is going for gap to gap line drives, this suggests that the pitching has an advantage over him at the moment but as he adjusts to and figures them out, he'll start hitting line drives again. 

Brown, however, appears to be overmatched to an extent but he's also suffering from some bad luck.  In 50 ABs, he only has 1 walk and 10 strikeouts.  That is a 80% contact rate, which is OK (good is 85%) but he needs to bring up his walk rate, that is just too low to sustain if he is to be our leadoff hitter.  Still, he is going with his bread and butter of HBP to boost up his OBP, it appears from the numbers that he already has 3 HBP in the 11 games he has played in so far.   His BABIP is .275, but he has 3 XBH in 11 hits so far, so he is making some hard contact when he is hitting the ball, so his poor hitting so far could be related to a simple case of bad luck with the BABIP gods.  Boosting him up to .325 BABIP would put him at 13 hits, for a batting line of roughly .260/.315/..340/.655 (and .360/.675 if he got an extra double among the extra hits).  At his .369 BABIP for San Jose, he would be at .295/.347/..400/.747 overall, roughly, assuming a slight uptick in XBH.  With some HR power that he normally tries for, that would push him closer to .800 OPS.

The cool thing with him is that while he realizes that as a lead-off hitter, he needs to figure out how to get on-base a lot, he also knows the value of hitting for extra-base power, including homeruns.  There are many speedsters who limit themselves to trying to get on base, ending up with a low OPS overall because their SLB is so low, like Burriss.  With just an uptick in power, the way Carney Lansford was trying to teach him to do, Burriss could be our starting 2B right now, instead of Franchez, because he'll be hitting more linedrives that will fall in for more hits as well as more extra-base hits.  Instead, he's probably going become, at best, a bench utility player, worse, a AAAA player bouncing up and down, as needs dictate.

Brown's philosophy at the plate, which he has espoused in the interviews I've seen him in before, encapsulates both getting on base (the OBP) as well as the driving in runs (SLG) components of the Runs Created formula.  He will always get HBP, it appears.  He will walk when he can't get on base via hitting (typically he did this in college, freshman and sophomore years), but if he's the leading hitter in the league (which he was in junior year, he was among top in BA, OBP, SLG, and thus OPS), he didn't focus so much on the walks as the power he was generating with his bat.  He wants to hit gap to gap and use his speed, but he also wants to get the regular HR as well.  He focuses on being an all-around hitter, which to me is kind of like a Rickey Henderson-lite:  not as much walks, hits, or homers, but that's Rickey's HOF standards, as what Brown has done is still pretty good overall.  He just needs to do it all at the major league level.

Brandon Crawford, meanwhile, has been doing well.  Playing SS while Panik plays 2B, he is hitting .353/.389/.588/.977 in 34 AB.  He has 7 K's for a 79% contact rate (OK, but not good) but only 2 walks, so he could stand to take a few more walks, so that it is closer to his K's, plus he could stand to not strikeout so much.  But neither is a big deal with so few games played so far and few ABs.  He's not going to hit that well forever, though, his BABIP is high at .423, there is no way he can sustain that at any level. 

But his 235 ISO is potentially repeatable, so if he can hit mid .200 BA and walk enough to reach .300 OBP, with that ISO, he will roughly be in the high 700 OPS range, which is more than enough for the Giants to play him at SS with his defense, heck, in that range, he would be a good offensive SS.  And even if he hits in the low .200 BA range, with that ISO, he would still be around 700 OPS (or slightly under), which is doable with his defense for him to be our starter in 2012.  Heck, if he is batting 8th for us, he probably can hit in the .650 OPS range and still be a productive SS for us, given his plus defense and OK (at that range) offense.  Anything above that would probably be gravy.  Still, he has under 50 PA, so it is very much a small sample size issue right now.

And that is a large part of looking at their stats right now, realizing that there are not that many ABs so far.  Still, there are some things that can be pointed out about each hitter that they can work on, whether they are doing well or doing poorly, overall.  There are some good things to point out as well, on a thus far basis, that if they continue, would be good signs.  Obviously, it would be nicer if they were all hitting like BCraw is hitting (though with a .423 BABIP, he's not going to continue that going for very much longer), but there is nothing to panic over yet, and there are some good signs for each, as well as things to work on.

The bad news of their performance so far is that most probably the highest Brown and Panik will probably be promoted to is AA, and thus 2013 is the more likely the earliest season they ascend to the majors permanently, particularly Panik.  Brown definitely will get promoted to AA Richmond, but Panik could end up at San Jose instead, like Brown did in his first full season as a pro, this season.  Brown could push the envelope with a good performance and make the majors by the end of 2012, but right now I don't see that happening with Panik given his difficulties in the AFL.  Still, I think Panik's decision to sign early has paid off, he has made his mark and got the AFL gig, a opportunity which he probably would not have gotten had he waited until the last minute to sign. 

I know the Giants said that they will not rush prospects, but as I noted, Panik is not exactly being dominated by pitchers in the AFL, which experts have said that the talent would be like between AA and AAA.  Personally, while I agree that the talent overall is like that, I think it is tougher than either because you are facing that top level of player every day, whereas when playing in those leagues, you get to play against a lot of organizational players.  Thus the Giants might push him up to AA, partly because his batting discipline is good, with the thought that he will figure it out  but also to pair up Brown and Panik atop the lineup and learn to play together, much like how they had Bumgarner and Posey together in order to give them some time together to work together.  Overall, though, the caution in Sabean's talk suggests that unless Panik heats up soon, he's most probably ending up in San Jose for the 2012 season.

And while Crawford most likely will cool off at some point, if he can keep his batting line in a good range, probably at least .800 OPS, he most probably will be given the chance to win the SS spot and the Giants will not consider signing any SS to a big money, long-term deal (meaning no Rollins).  Instead, they would do as they have been in recent years when keeping a spot open for a top prospect, sign a vet on the cheap who looks capable enough to keep the seat warm until the top prospect is ready, presumably sometime mid-season.  If they do sign Rollins to a long-term deal, then clearly they don't think much of Crawford's future.  But I don't think that is the scenario we will be facing by the end of the AFL season, I think Crawford is making his case, both in the AFL as well as his last month in the majors, that he's ready enough to start at SS for the Giants in 2012.