Ah, I love me some prospect hyperbole. From the New York Post's George King:

“The Yankees have been on [Hechavarria] for a while,” said a scout who saw the 21-year-old shortstop work out recently in the Dominican Republic. “Two weeks ago, about 50 scouts watched him work out and the Yankees were there. They also have seen him in smaller workouts.”

Because the Red Sox gave 19-year old shortstop Jose Iglesias $8 million, industry sources expect the right-handed-hitting Hechavarria to command a $7 to $8 million signing bonus.

“Maybe more because his bat is better than Iglesias’,” a scout said.

Hechavarria, who defected in Mexico last year, played short for the Cuban Junior National team two years ago.

“There has been a lot of interest,” said agent, Bart Hernandez, without mentioning teams. “He is a legitimate player with a chance to be a real good one.”

Though the Yankees view the 6-foot, 170-pounder strictly as a shortstop, others believe he could travel the same path the Rays’ B.J. Upton took: shortstop to impact center fielder.

“He is a very good athlete and runs real well,” the scout said. “I don’t see him as a shortstop, I think he has a chance to be a center fielder in the mold of B.J. Upton. His throwing actions at short are kind of long.”

I wish I had more to tell you about the guy, but I don't know anything that isn't in King's article. However, I'm totally on board with the Yankees signing him. The Yankees seriously lack organizational depth at shortstop—I didn't have any in my top 30 prospect list—so this would be a tremendous boost there.

The price of $7-8 doesn't sound too bad if he has a fraction of B.J. Upton's athleticism and baseball ability. Plus, it's not my money. So go ahead and get this guy signed, Cashman. It would certainly be a nice boost to the ravaged farm system.

Update: Reader Mike R. passes along a blog post with some more information on Hechavarria. Also, head over to the 4:58 mark on this video to see Hechavarria display awesome range going to his left.

Mike Ashmore continues his 2009 Thunder A-Z series and got to Zach McAllister last night. It's a very interesting take on McAllister that you won't find elsewhere. While we here at Pending Pinstripes focus on numbers and scouting reports, it's different seeing what a reporter who covers him on a daily basis has to say about him. His outlook for McAllister is pretty optimistic:

I don’t think anyone foresees him as a top of the rotation starter in the big leagues…but to say he could be a two on some teams, in my opinion, isn’t a stretch.  I think he profiles as a three right now, but that’s only because he doesn’t really have one standout pitch.

Go ahead and read the entire piece for yourself.

Baseball Prospectus has been introducing their new defense-independent pitching stat dubbed SIERA(Skill-Interactive Earned Run Average). They have had five introductory posts explaining everything about the statistic:

Here's an excerpt from part 1, detailing what SIERA intends to do:

1. Allows for the fact that a high ground-ball rate is more useful to pitchers who walk more batters, due to the potential that double plays wipe away runners.

2. Allows for the fact that a low fly-ball rate (and therefore, a low HR rate) is less useful to pitchers who strike out a lot of batters (e.g. Johan Santana's FIP tends to be higher than his ERA because the former treats all HR the same, even though Santana’s skill set portends this bombs allowed will usually be solo shots).

3. Allows for the fact that adding strikeouts is more useful when you don't strike out many guys to begin with, since more runners get stranded.

4. Allows for the fact that adding ground balls is more useful when you already allow a lot of ground balls because there are frequently runners on first.

5. Corrects for the fact that QERA used GB/BIP instead of GB/PA (e.g. Joel Pineiro is all contact, so increasing his ground-ball rate means more ground balls than if Oliver Perez had done it, given he's not a high contact guy).

6. Corrects for the fact that FIP and xFIP use IP as a denominator which means that luck on balls in play changes one's FIP.

For more information on SIERA, there is a good discussion going on about it at The Book Blog.

Here is what the final formula is to calculate the new metric:

SIERA = 6.145 - 16.986*(SO/PA) + 11.434*(BB/PA) - 1.858((GB-FB-PU)/PA) + 7.653*((SO/PA)^2) +/- 6.664*(((GB-FB-PU)/PA)^2) + 10.130*(SO/PA)*((GB-FB-PU)/PA) - 5.195*(BB/PA)*((GB-FB-PU)/PA)

where +/- is as before such that it is a negative sign when (GB-FB-PU)/PA is positive and vice versa.

Now, here's how the 2009 Yankees look:

The top four guys were the Yankees best relievers in 2009, so I'm not surprised to see them so high. David Robertson's number is extremely impressive and I'm curious to see how he ranks among all relief pitchers. He should be an asset in the bullpen over the next few seasons.

Phil Hughes and Alfredo Aceves have numbers right in line with their 2009 ERAs, which is nice to see. Using a one year sample for relievers isn't particularly effective, but it does suggest that their strong seasons were not flukes.

The biggest surprise to me was how well Sergio Mitre fared. xFIP really likes Mitre too, and I believe that SIERA and xFIP are the most predictive pitching metrics out there. Yankee fans hated Mitre last season, but these numbers suggest he was extremely unlucky and could rebound in 2010. Seeing this makes me think holding onto Mitre was the right decision.

Joba Chamberlain comes in with a solid 4.41 SIERA. There is no doubt he was frustrating to watch in 2009, but he wasn't as bad in the rotation as he has been made out to be. He was only a bit below average with FIP and ERA while SIERA suggests that he was possibly above average.

I like the methodology behind this new metric, so you can expect to see me using it here throughout the season. It is similar to tERA in that it uses batted ball data, but it seems to have higher correlation scores. You can definitely expect to see me using it alongside FIP numbers as we go through the 2010 season.

Edit: I forgot to include Vazquez in the above chart, but his 2009 SIERA came out to 2.68, wow.

Via The Book Blog, Bill James recently did a study on whether a "young" player's development has anything to do with their walk rate. Sadly, I am not a subscriber to Bill James Online, so I am unable to read the whole study and fully comment on it. What I do have are the two excerpts posted by Tango:

Anyway, I was wondering:  does a low walk rate predict a failure to develop as a hitter?  Because I can see it either way.  I can see that a low walk rate for a young player could be an impediment to development, but I can also see how a low walk rate might be predictive of development, in this way:  that the hitter who walks more, as a young player, can be seen as a more finished product, and therefore as a player who has less room to develop.  There’s an extra door open for the undeveloped hitter.

This makes perfect sense to me. It's not necessarily how I personally evaluate young players or prospects, but it works. A young player who has a high OBP but doesn't have any power is pretty much finished in terms of his development. A low-OBP guy with a ton of power can always theoretically learn to take a walk on more occasions. Again, I don't have the meat of James' study so I'm not sure what he did, but he reached the following conclusion:

Essentially, there is no reason to believe that the walk rate plays any predictable role in the future development of a young player.

Now, since I didn't read the piece, I can't really comment much on it. I don't even know what James's definition of "future development" or "young player" is. I don't know if he's talking about young minor leaguers or young major leaguers.

However, I find that last part very interesting and it just didn't sound right to me. The first part makes sense, and I'd love to see the data James peruses to get to that conclusion, but I just can't pay for that right now.

Anyway, I'm not trying to debunk James's conclusion here, but it just got me thinking. The following little study I put together is far from scientific and has serious sample size issues. I took the 149 major leaguers who qualified for the batting title and sorted them by their 2009 wOBA. I wanted to see how the group's wOBA correlated with their minor league walk rate.

Now, I know this isn't very scientific at all; comparing people who are all in different stages of their career to their minor league numbers doesn't make perfect sense. Also, using just 149 players isn't nearly enough. If I were to thoroughly study this, I'd have to use many more players and many more years of data. I would like to, but I currently don't have the resources or time to embark on that right now.

A few other things to note about the sample I used. Since it was only players who qualified for the batting title, there is not a normal distribution. The league average wOBA in 2009 was .329 and this group had an average .353 wOBA. Only 38 of these players posted a wOBA below the league average.

Here's what the data on these 149 players told me:

The correlation coefficient came out to .313, which suggests a weak positive correlation. I wonder what the data would look like if I had used a bigger sample with a more normal distribution, but this is what I got.

Now, this is such a small sample that it can't confirm my biases that walks do matter for young players, but I still figured it would be interesting to take a look at. Also, out of all of the players in the top 50 wOBA, only five of them posted minor league walk rates under eight percent.

I find this to be a very interesting topic, as I find it hard to believe that a young player's walk rate doesn't suggest too much about a player's future performance. Maybe if I read James's entire study and saw his data, I'd buy into it. Until then, though, my bias that walk rate is important for young players remains.

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