Questions for Jason "Professor" Parks

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TheoSqua
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Re: Questions for Kevin Goldstein

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What do you feel is the best approach to take when drafting a farm team? The Cardinals under Lunhow tended to draft lots of lower ceiling prospects from college with higher floors that ended up with a glut of lower-end major league talent and not a ton of high end prospects. Other teams tended to take higher risk / higher reward players with bigger signing bonuses and more highschool players.

Do you think one specific approach is more successful over the other? If you were in charge of drafting for a team, what approach would you take?

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Swirls
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Re: Questions for Kevin Goldstein

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The whole point of the "Moneyball" philosophy was to find an extremely undervalued commodity and exploit it. For a long time it was OBP, as teams scrambled drafting college players who would take walks, as well as MLB players who got on base as well. Now that commodity isn't really undervalued anymore - if anything, it's now overvalued. More recently, it appeared that teams were starting to shift to undervaluing defense - sign a veteran cheap who provided GG defense or bring up a prospect who was excellent defensively but couldn't hit his way out of a paper bag (i.e. Brendan Ryan) . It kind of seems that the undervalued commodity right now is finding veterans that had been injured/not performing and signing them to short term deals (i.e. Huff in 2010, Berkman in 2011, Beltran in 2012, etc).

What do you think the next big undervalued commodity will be that teams take advantage of?

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heyzeus
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Re: Questions for Kevin Goldstein

Post by heyzeus »

How did Allen Craig fly under the radar more or less until exploding in the majors?

jim
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Re: Questions for Kevin Goldstein

Post by jim »

How far are we away from a world wide draft? What kind of impact would this have in baseball factories like the D.R.? If the min. draft age was 18 in places like the D.R., would this help with the problems with players falsifying their age?

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Re: Questions for Kevin Goldstein

Post by jim »

JackofDiamonds wrote:The Cards farm system has generally been rated at best middle of the pack, yet it seems year after year we grow key contributers to winning teams. My questions are these:

1. Have the Cardinals outperformed expectations?
2. If they have, what's going on? Just getting short changed from the experts? Something happening with teaching at the lower levels that is unique to this organization? Tony LaRussa/Dave Duncan?

Here is a list of players that have contributed or provided important returns with trades at the MLB level. I put in parens the rating of the team by Baseball America or the individual players ranking within the Cardinal organization. This seems like good production from a farm system, more than what I would have expected given the organizational rankings.

2007 (23)
- Colby Rasmus (1) - Largely the reason we were as high as 23, Rasmus hasn't lived up to his potential yet at the MLB level. St. Louis seemed to recognize something, trading him at the deadline for bullpen help that was instrumental in the 2011 WS.

- Jaimie Garcia (2)
- Chriz Perez (3) - again provided good returns.
- Jon Jay (5)
- Mitchell Boggs (11)
- Shane Robinson (28)
- Skip Schumaker (29)

2008 (13)
- Rasmus (1)
- Perez (2)
- Garcia (5)
- Boggs (9)
- Jay (11)
- Allen Craig (15)
- Kyle McClellan (19)
- Jason Motte (24)
- Mark Hamilton (27)

2009 (8)
- Rasmus (1) and Brett Wallace(2) were big reasons for the higher ranking. We turned Wallace into Matt Holliday.
- Perez (3)
- Motte (8)
- David Freese (9)
- Jay (12)
- Garcia (13)
- Boggs (14)
- Lance Lynn (15)
- Fernando Salas (20)
- Craig (26)
- Robinson (28)

2010 (29)
- Shelby Miller (1) - still waiting but he is the reason we weren't ranked dead last.
- Garcia (2) *
- Lynn (3) *
- Freese (5) *
- Eduardo Sanchez (6) *
- Craig (7) *
- Daniel Descalso (9) *
- Jay (13) *
- Joe Kelly(21)
- Mark Hamilton (26)

Look at that! The 29th ranked farm system had 7 guys that were on the WS roster (denoted by *). That's pretty impressive.

2011 (24)
Miller (1)
Craig (5)
Lynn (6)
Sanchez (7)
Kelly (10)
Matt Carpenter (11)
Descalso (12)
Salas (14)
Adron Chambers (16) * - the 8th guy that was on the WS roster.
Tony Cruz (25)
Excellent question!

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Re: Questions for Kevin Goldstein

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OK, I unleashed all these questions on Kevin and wow, were jim's and phins' long! Hopefully he responds to half of them. Thanks for all the thoughtful questions!

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JackofDiamonds
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Re: Questions for Kevin Goldstein

Post by JackofDiamonds »

planet puma wrote:OK, I unleashed all these questions on Kevin and wow, were jim's and phins' long! Hopefully he responds to half of them. Thanks for all the thoughtful questions!
I'll bet he answers mine.

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Re: Questions for Kevin Goldstein

Post by jim »

planet puma wrote:OK, I unleashed all these questions on Kevin and wow, were jim's and phins' long! Hopefully he responds to half of them. Thanks for all the thoughtful questions!
Both of my questions where short. One just had a lot of stuff in it to show why I was asking it.

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lukethedrifter
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Re: Questions for Kevin Goldstein

Post by lukethedrifter »

Too late but ... what was your path to your current job? when did you see analyzing players and bs'ing with the Jason Parks as a potential career?

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sighyoung
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Re: Questions for Kevin Goldstein

Post by sighyoung »

Rats. I guess it's too late to ask if he'd rather be a puppy dog or bumblebee in his next life.

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