Friday, January 11, 2013

Dominican Summer League Position Player Data

The Dominican Summer League is somewhat shrouded in mystery. While we get better numbers now from the league than we once did, there isn't a way to follow the games live and none of the games are streamed online. So I gathered some of the data we do have from the positional players there from the 2012 season and put it in a nifty little spreadsheet.
While there are players there that are 22 and sometimes even 23, I wanted to look at just prospects (and I didn't account for players recently released), so I only looked at the ones that are currently under 20 and haven't played in an American level (some were promoted in season to GCL or AZL).

I wanted to include signing bonuses along with the numbers as a control group (i.e. how teams viewed the players), but I didn't realize how many players don't have reported (or easily ones to find) signing bonuses.

To create a ranking, I did a similar thing that I did with the NPB hitting prospects. However, I did a better job with the positional adjustments, using Tom Tango's rankings used in this Fangraphs/Statcorner article. Instead of using the run values, I just used the overall rankings, so catcher at 1, DH at 9, etc (I switched left-field and right-field, as I think right-field is harder than left-field and they had the same run values and the chart had left-field ranked higher). To fix the problem I had in the NPB article linked to above when it came to OPS +, I broke everything into 9 sections. So, to use wRC + in this article as an example, each section had 16 players. The highest 16 get a 1 and the bottom 16 get a 9 for example. Since only 29 players had listed bonuses, I broke the first 28 into groups of 4, put the lowest bonus by itself, and put the non-listed bonus guys in their own group. We basically have to assume that the no bonus guys have smaller bonuses than the listed bonus guys, which isn't ideal. Obviously, I could only compare defense (RF/G) by position, but I tried to break the positions into groups of 9 if I could (thus not additionally penalizing the most frequent positions). For catchers I put SB% instead of Range Factor. For age, there were only 3 different ages (17-19), so those rankings only went 1-3 (I debated going 1,4,7, but decided not to). Obviously, the lower the overall ranking, the better. To download the spreadsheet, click on this link or copy and past the below address:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_DUd_c_mKWrNnpvektIendaWnM/edit

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