Develop Power or Contact First? (MiLB Breakdown)
The old saying goes that that you first develop contact then you grow into power. After reading this a in an article over the past week I thought that it was worth the analysis of this old adage. For this experiment I want to look at two variables one being Contact, and the second being Power. I want to define each variable in terms of a statistic as it will help us focus on what we want to learn from this analysis. I have set the cutoff point for a “prospect” 27. This could be debated but I think for higher levels of baseball development this is an appropriate number.
For Contact we are going to be using K% for each batter. I think this is going to be the fairest indicator for players ability to put the ball in play. Essentially by putting the ball in play you are avoiding striking out.
We are going to define Power by using SLG% as this is going to give us a players ability to generate extra base hits. This will also filter out factors such as OBP which would potentially skew our results. If the statement from above Contact comes first then players grow into power then we should see player have good strikeout rates early in their careers and have those numbers either sustain, or get worse as they grew into their power.
Inversely we should see players have low SLG% and have see large jumps as they move through the minors and increase their age.
Over the course of a players time in the minors we do see a pretty good jump in the average players SLG% as they age in minor league baseball. 40 points in SLG% is pretty significant. But maybe we are getting false results due to players moving through leagues at different rates?
We can take away a few things from these graphs as they are presented. We see a few downward trends for players who spend more time in AAA, AA, and A+. Which could indicate that players who spend more “time” in those leagues may be those who have preformed worse. We could also look at players who advance to higher levels earlier may be more prolific hitters by making it to more advanced stages of baseball earlier in their development. While those who make it “older” ages may be less polished hitters.
While looking at K% we see players tend to cut down SLIGHTLY on their strikeout rates as they move through the minors. The slope here is a little misleading as players change their K% only 1 percent roughly over the life of their MiLB careers. Again there is probably some survivor-ship bias going on in this sample of players.
If we break down K% by Age and League we also see players at higher levels of development AAA, AA, A+ tend to all go up slightly in their Strike Out %. While players in A and Low A tend to have slightly higher K% and then lower it as they age.
Obviously this is a lot more complex than just looking at a few plots and trying to see what might work. But I think this is a start when examining what could/should be developed first over a players time with a team. The information presented from the plots would tend to agree with the old adage that power will develop as a player develops. One piece of caution maybe that it seems that as players move up into different levels of competition that they tend to slug less. Which could point to the idea of “Power developing later” to be faulty.
Lastly I wanted to present the idea that maybe we shouldn’t be focused on the hit tool but rather focus on the decision making process that a player is making in his time developing. The plot below points to the fact that as a player ages in the minors that he tends to walk less (slightly).
When we break it down by league and age we get a different story though.
We see that universally in almost every league that players tend to walk more as they move through different leagues. With the only league seeing a negative trend being A ball. It would seem that as players move through the minors they start to make better swing decisions which would lead to a higher walk %. We are playing with factions of percentages here so I’m not trying to over dramatize the changes that are happening here to the average player.
Hypothetically though if a player is able to have a higher starting BB% then as they age through the minors and see more pitching hopefully players will begin to continue to improve their own swing decisions.
I think that this is a start for looking at what we should look to develop in players first. I think that focusing on what you want, and starting to develop a plan around that should help develop better players.
