Projecting High School Statistics

We have already done several articles on college projections here, however, we discovered recently that drafting high schoolers brings a better return (or at least a higher ceiling). Because of this, we have to figure out how to project high school players.

I had to be a little creative with finding high school stats, because many times they are hard to find, especially for past seasons. I used batting average for high school because that was a whole lot easier to find. While batting average is a rather flawed statistic (see my article on Kala Ka'aihue), I have shown previously that it has about the same correlation to scoring runs as OBP (right click on the
image and zoom in to see it).


There seems to be a decent correlation between the ranking of high school batting average and A-ball OBP. The big exception is Matt Weiters who both in college and A-ball had a better OBP than high school BA. This could be two different reasons for this: A) he was a late bloomer type, while good in high school, he wasn't dominant like he was in college or A-ball or B) walks, walks, walks. He could have had a giant OBP in high school.
The biggest "bust" (great BA in high school and extremely low A-ball OBP) in the group is Jon Edwards. But that is just 1 out of 13, which is still a pretty good success rate, all 13 having .400+ BA in high school and being above average in A-ball. Rather than coming up with a metric, it may be more helpful to just note that any player in Major High School baseball with a .400+ BA is probable to have success in A-ball, and give out extra points for power, patience and defense. All 6 players with .500+ BA that have played A-ball have above average OBPs.We saw a similar correlation between high school and college, as all 7 .500+ BA guys were .360+ OBP guys in college. Once, you got into the .400s it got more tricky and was all out of order. I count 5 different players that had higher College OBPs than high school batting averages, while several others saw sharp decline. So strangely, there seems to be a better correlation between high school to A-ball than to college.

In our small sample size, there isn't really any correlation between high school ERA and College ERA. Even the guys that had ERAs under 1 in high school all had varied amount of success at every level. It didn't guarantee success. This is probably because ERA is a much more volatile stat than something like strikeouts. I would guess that a similar list showing K/9IP rather than ERA would provide a better correlation. Strikeout rates are a little harder to find for high school players, but they would be much better than ERA. Along with strikeouts, I would also look at velocity, which is one of the first things scouts look at anyway.

Are the Tigers making the same mistake as the Twins at catcher?

During the ALCS we heard all about the toll a season took on a catcher as we watched Alex Avila limp around and be totally ineffective. We also witnessed the absolute destruction of one of the games most talented, Joe Mauer, in the 2011 season. Outside of a linemen in football, it is hard to find a more strenuous and demanding position that catcher. Many teams start their best one 3 games and their backup 2 games in a row. It isn't hard to see why Mauer fell apart, look at his stats from 2005 (his first full year) on:
2005: 131 G 554 PA 3.4 WAR
06: 140 605 7
07: 109 471 4.6
08: 146 633 8.7
09: 138 606 7.9
10: 137 584 5.9
11: 82 333 1.7

Compare to Alex Avila:
10: 104 353 .2
11: 141 551 5.4

Joe Mauer now suffers from a rare kind of leg weakness and the best days of his career are already sadly behind him. The numbers above clearly show that they just rode him too much. The Tigers of all teams, division rivals of the Twins, should know not to kill their catcher like that. If Mauer is any indication, they can ride him like this for about 2 years, but then its over. Surely the front office will step in and not let this happen.