In regard to the Wil Myers trade, a local sports columnist wrote these words:

In time, Wil Myers might develop into one of the top power hitters in the game. At 21, he hit .314 with 37 home runs and 109 RBIs in 134 games of a season split between Double A (35) and Triple A (99). His pitch recognition might develop to the point he can strike out at a less disturbing rate than 140 times in 522 at bats. He’s an excellent prospect, all right.

The word "might" and "prospect" need not enter discussions about James Shields, the main player acquired by the Royals in the deal with the Tampa Bay Rays.

                Oh, I can give you a long list of mights that enter into the James Shields evalaution, but let’s fast forward.    In time, Wil Myers might be something; he isn’t anything yet, but later on, down the road, he might become something.   Not trying to parody the sportswriters words or to state them unfairly; I think that’s an accurate summation of his point; Wil Myers isn’t anything yet, but later on he might be something. 

          Most of us guys, I suspect, see the situation a little differently:   that Wil Myers is a very good baseball player, right now.   He was a very good baseball player in 2012; there is every reason to believe that he will be the same player in 2013, although his statistics will not be the same because the players he will be playing against are better.    Later on, he may develop to an even higher level, true, but he is the same thing now that he will be in a year, and therefore the distinction between "prospect" and "player" is, on some level, a silly distinction.   It relies on doubt that exists only because of ignorance, and thus exists only for the ignorant.

          We cannot make absolutely accurate projections as to what any player will hit next season, whether he is a rookie or whether he has been in the league for ten years.  But we can project what Wil Myers will hit in 2012 as accurately as we could project the same if he had been in the league for ten years, and this is a fairly high level of accuracy.   The sportswriter thinks of Wil Myers as he does because he fails to understand this.    He believes that there is an element of doubt in the equation that is not really there, or does not need to be there.   Thus, he is basing his analysis of the trade on a categorization of the players, and basing the categorization of the players on his own ignorance, his own lack of sophistication.    It’s an analysis that is based, at the deepest level, on the ignorance of the writer.

          But wait a minute; I’m not here to castigate the sportswriter in question; rather, I wanted to point out that I do the same thing.   Within the last two months, a trade was offered to the Red Sox that would have involved our trading a major league pitcher—let’s call him Camilo Pascual--for three excellent pitching prospects.   A group of us were discussing the trade, and in that context I said "Most pitching prospects are going to fail, 60% of them are.  If we trade Camilo Pascual for three pitching prospects, two of them will fail, we’ll wind up trading Camilo Pascual for somebody who will be Camilo Pascual in three years.   I don’t see the point in it."  In other words, I was analyzing that trade exactly the same way the local guy was analyzing the Myers trade:   A pitcher is one thing; a prospect is something else, a different animal.  

                Now, it may be that I am just wrong, and it may be that I am operating out of my own ignorance.    What people often don’t understand, when I "accuse" them of ignorance, is that in my view, we’re all ignorant.  None of us really understand the world or the game of baseball.   We’re all just projecting outward from small islands of understanding into a limitless ocean of ignorance, like a tiny island nation claiming the sea as its lawful territory.   The question I am trying to get to is, why is there this distinction?   Why is it that minor league hitters can be projected into the major leagues accurately and reliably, but minor league pitchers cannot?    I am trying to a) think that question through, and b) outline some research that could help us understand it better.

                We could, as a starting point, determine whether it is actually true that 60% of pitching prospects fail.   I believe this to be true; it has been my experience that this is true.   If you go back to, let us say, 2008, you can see that the baseball world was very excited about Joba Chamberlain, and Phil Coke, and Zack Kroenke, and Michael Bowden, and Hunter Jones, and Craig Hanson, and Francisco Liriano, and Kevin Slowey, and David Purcey, and David Huff, and Aaron Laffey, and Zach Jackson, and 40 or 50 other guys who didn’t turn out to be anything special, either.  . .and no, I’m not exaggerating when I say "40 or 50"; there actually are 40 or 50 other guys who were top-of-the-line pitching prospects four years ago who are middle relievers and ex-major league players now; don’t make me name them, because I will.

                But it could be that this is a fault of my perception, in that—in my ignorance—I failed to distinguish between those who were legitimate top-of-the-line pitching prospects, and those who merely seemed to be that to those of us who don’t know any better.   It would be a worthwhile project, as a starting point, to pull out an old John Sickels Prospect book or Baseball America prospect book, used that as a fixed frame of reference to determine who was a legitimate project and who was a pretender, and then figure out what percentage of pitching prospects from five years ago have since failed.   But not having done that, I’m saying it is 60%, or higher—if by "failed" you include those who are still in the majors but in a very limited role, like Aaron Laffey, and those who pitched brilliantly in the major leagues for three months and then disintegrated, like Dallas Braden, Matt Palmer, Brett Cecil and Jeremy Sowers.    And also, some guys who were not prized prospect then are good pitchers now, but that’s not relevant to this discussion, because what we’re talking about here is failure rates among prized prospects.

                OK, since we haven’t done that, let’s assume for the sake of argument that it is true that most pitching prospects are going to fail, whereas virtually 100% of position prospects who are of the stature of Wil Myers are going to succeed.    The question is, then, why?   What are the differences between pitching prospects and positional prospects which make it so much more difficult to identify the pitchers who will succeed?

                Theorizing:

                a)  Pitchers get hurt more, particularly at those moments when they are first exposed to heavier workloads than they have experienced in the past.

                I think this is true, and I think it is a very important part of why pitchers are so hard to figure.   I would also point out that there is a non-obvious "workload" problem here, which is that making 20 starts and pitching 140 innings in the major leagues is vastly more difficult than making 20 starts and pitching 140 innings in the minors.   If you pitch 140 innings in the minors—let us say that you face 600 batters—you might face really tough hitters, guys like Wil Myers, in 20 of those confrontations.    In the majors, you’re going to face high-quality hitters in 150 or 200 of those plate appearances, guys like Ryan Howard and Mark Teixeira and Jason Heyward.     The major league pitcher is under vastly more pressure to make good pitches, thus is working much harder, even if his innings pitched are the same.

                But while I do think the injury risk is an important part of this dichotomy, I don’t by any means think this is the whole enchilada.   There is something else going on here.

                b)  Despite the gains we have made in better understanding pitchers’ records, it is still true to some extent that pitchers’ records reflect and embody the performance of the team, thus are not true indicators of a pitcher’s ability.

                In 2010 Mike Pelfrey went 15-9 with a 3.66 ERA for the Mets.   If he had done that in 1975, it would have been universally assumed and accepted that Pelfrey had turned the corner.   In the modern world, most of us kind of understood right away that that was more mirrors than smoke, and we weren’t really that surprised when his career went south in 2011, because his strikeout/walk ratio wasn’t all that impressive to begin with.

                But while we have made progress in this area, it is still somewhat difficult to distinguish between what is done by a pitcher and what has been done by his teammates and stored in the pitcher’s record.    If a pitcher goes 11-3 with a 2.06 ERA in Double-A, we tend to assume that he pitched really well.   Sometimes he didn’t actually pitch all that well; he was just pitching for a good team in a pitcher’s park.    We are still misled by pitching records to a certain extent.

                c)  A pitcher faces batters in clusters.   A batter faces pitchers in discrete events, separated from one another in time and place.   This also causes the pitcher’s record to be misleading.

                Because the pitcher faces batters in clusters, small advantages can multiply, and give the impression that they are much greater than they are.    If a pitcher has a 5% advantage over the level of the competition, let us say, that becomes 5% times 5% times 5% in each inning, because the events are interacting with one another—and there can be nine innings a start (more likely seven.)  A small advantage compounds rapidly.   If you’re 5% better than the league, you might have a .700 winning percentage and a tremendous ERA, particularly in a run of 12 or 15 starts.  A pitcher who is in fact 5% better than the league can easily appear to be dominating the competition—whereas a batter who is 5% better than the league, because his at bats do not interact with one another, merely appears to be 5% better than the league.   

                What I am really talking about here is precise calibration of a player’s skills.   Wil Myers, you can argue about whether he is 30% better than the league or 40%, but it’s not 5%.    But with pitchers, the "clustering" effect makes pitchers who are 5% better-than-league look very much the same as pitchers who are 20% or 25% better than the league.    It’s difficult to say exactly how good a pitcher has been, if he is good enough to win 70% of his decisions.  This makes pitchers more difficult to evaluate.

                d)   There is a second and perhaps more important effect from this clusters/isolated events distinction.    The pitcher, in coming to the major leagues, has to make adjustments many times more rapidly than a hitter. 

                A hitter might get 25 at bats a week.   He has time, between games and on days that he isn’t playing, to work on his adjustments.   Wil Myers, I will let you know, has a lot of trouble with a pitch away from him, particularly a slider going away from him or a hard fastball low and outside.    That’s why he struck out 140 times; it’s that pitch.

                In the majors, that’s going to cause him more trouble than it has in the minors, because in the majors everybody will know that, and the ability of the pitchers to hit that spot will be significantly greater.   But Myers will adjust.   He’ll figure it out.   He’ll watch video before every game—and I absolutely guarantee you that he will, whether he likes to watch video or not.   A veteran hitter can say, "I don’t need to watch video; I know how this guy pitches me."  A veteran hitter can make that call.   A rookie, no way; he’s watching video before every game.

                For a pitcher, those adjustments have to take place within the game, within the inning.   Wil Myers’ 25^th at bat will be a week into the season.    Tyler Skaggs’ 25^th batter will be in the sixth inning—if he’s lucky.  

                Further, again because of the clustering of his plate appearances, the short-term tolerance for failure in a pitcher is much less.   The Red Sox have this shortstop prospect, Jose Iglesias.   We don’t know whether he is going to be our shortstop in 2013 or not.   But we all understand that, if he is our shortstop, he’s probably not going to hit .280—and we’re fine with that, even if he’s 30 or 40 or 50% less-than-league as a hitter.

                A pitcher who is 30% worse-than-league. ..there is no way in hell.   Because the at-bats form clusters, you can’t live with a pitcher who is 10% worse than the league, much less 30% worse.   If he’s 5% better-than-league, a pitcher might go 10-2 in a stretch of 15 starts—which means that if he is 5% worse-than-league, he might go 2-10.   A small disadvantage catches up with the pitcher much more rapidly.

                And, for that reason (primarily) the pitcher must make adjustments at a dramatically higher rate of speed.   A batter who has five straight bad games. ..that’s nothing.   Ted Williams had five straight bad games at least a few times.   A rookie pitcher who has five straight bad games is out of the league.    The team simply can’t live with a pitcher who gets beat up while he is trying to figure it out.

                Players fail in the major leagues essentially for two reasons:

                1)  They fail to make adjustments, and

                2)  They make bad adjustments.

                I would argue that it is 90% the latter.   The real risk isn’t that Wil Myers will fail to adjust to pitchers pounding the outside corner; the real risk is that he’ll over-react and over-adjust, and fall into a frustration cycle in which he is lunging at outside pitches and getting beat inside, or vice versa.    Other people don’t necessarily agree with me here.   Other people, and people whose opinions I respect, will say that players fail because they fail to make adjustments. 

                But either way, whether players fail because they don’t adjust or because they make bad adjustments, the adjustment cycle is much more difficult for a pitcher than it is for a position player—and this causes pitchers to fail when they try to make the minors-to-majors transition.

                e)  The constant demand for pitching in the major leagues, combined with the somewhat indiscriminate nature of the pitching position, tends to cause pitchers to vault to the major leagues as soon as they are perceived as ready to play—whereas position players normally have to wait their turn.

                I did a study in the 1970s, again in the 1980s, again in the 1990s, comparing the average number of minor league games and at bats for position players over time. ..that is, if you look at the players of the 1930s, look at the position players of the 1940s, etc., you will find that the number of games they have played in the minor leagues has not changed essentially at all over time.    Those studies are a little out of date, and I should re-run them, but I would bet that that is still true.   Position players, on average, play about 450, 470 games in the minor leagues before they come to the majors.    This number dropped slightly after each expansion, but then quickly returned to its historic norm—and the shocking thing is that the historic norm hasn’t moved at all, over many decades.  

                For position players.   But for pitchers, I would bet that it has moved, and I would bet that it has moved dramatically, particularly in terms of innings pitched.   I am not suggesting that you should take my word for it; I am suggesting this as an area of study.  There are a lot of guys who come to the majors now who haven’t pitched 250 innings in the minor leagues.   I don’t think that was true, in 1955, or even so much in 1975.

                Minor league systems are a lot more fluid now than they were years ago.    In 1955 if you were assigned to Danville, you were going to play for Danville.   If you hit 51 homers and drove in 166 runs for Danville, you were still going to finish the season at Danville.

                Now, if a player hits 20 homers the first two months, he moves up a level.   The systems are more fluid.

                However, the fluidity doesn’t substantially impact the length of the training period for a position player, because the player still has to wait his turn.    Will Middlebrooks is an exciting young player, but he put in his 416 games in the minor leagues anyway, because that was how long it took until a) his position opened up, and b) he was the top dog in the organization at that position.   When Kevin Youkilis got hurt, Middlebrooks got his shot—but not before then.   If Youkilis didn’t get hurt, Middlebrooks would have put in a full season at Pawtucket.  

                But with pitchers. ..well, everybody always needs pitching.   Some pitcher will get hurt, sometime during the season.   If you’re the top dog in the organization, your time is going to come very quickly.

                Some of you who are older will remember that in the 1980s, when you went to the airport, there would be four ticket counters with four separate lines.   If you got into line behind some guy who was going to Kuala Lumpur, you would stand in line for 20 minutes waiting for a ticket agent.    At some point it occurred to everybody that this would work better if you had one line feeding all four agents; that way the line would keep moving.    In the space of a year, everybody switched to the system in which all the lines fed one agent.

                There is the same distinction between pitchers and hitters.   Hitters very often find themselves in a line that isn’t moving—whereas the line for pitchers almost always moves.  This distinction has greased the rails for pitchers—plus, many pitchers now are relievers in the minor leagues.   They might face 180 batters a season.    In 1952 Larry Jackson was 28-4 at Fresno.   He probably faced 1,300 batters that season.   A whole lot of pitchers come to the majors now having faced less than a thousand batters in the minor leagues.    Craig Kimbrel faced 627.    Aaron Crow faced 791.   Aaron Loup de Loup faced 864.

                Pitchers have to make adjustments many times faster when they get to the majors—and, as a group, they have much less experience to fall back on in making those adjustments.

                Plus, to be honest, we’re all afraid of leaving a guy’s best years in the minor leagues.    Larry Jackson went 28-4 at Fresno in 1952—yet he pitched 14 years in the majors, pitched 244 innings at the age of 37 and retired.   In the modern world we don’t have the stones to let that happen.   A guy goes 7-1 at Fresno, we don’t want him leaving his career year in Fresno.   We rush pitchers to the majors before they get hurt—and sometimes before they are ready—because we’re afraid they will get hurt before we get major league value from them. 

                This is my thinking about this issue; not absolutely claiming that any of this is correct, but this is what I think.