Fire Gardy

The common wisdom has always been that you build your team through pitching. Especially small- and mid-market teams must draft and develop their own pitching and build a team around that. That’s certainly the approach the Twins have taken over the years, and it’s finally coming to a head this year as the rotation consists solely of homegrown, young, cheap talent. But is the common wisdom right? Is it better to focus your organization’s developmental powers on pitching rather than hitting?

Victor Wang over at The Hardball Times takes a look, and comes to the conclusion that no, it is not better to focus on developing pitching. The crux of the issue is that top hitting prospects are much more likely to succeed than top pitching prospects (everyone acknowledges that prospects are, for the most part, a crapshoot — and that pitching prospects are even more of a crapshoot*), and therefore the overall value of a hitting prospect is considerably higher.

Wang looks at Matt Wieters and David Price. Right now these guys are #1 and #2 in all of baseball — and his methods value Wieters twice as highly as Price. In fact, the top 10 hitting prospects as a whole are twice as valuable as the top 10 pitching prospects.

* For example, in 2001, would you have guessed that Johan Santana would have ended up this much better than Kyle Lohse? At the time, these guys were the #1 and #2 of our Rotation Of The Future … and all the indications were that Lohse would be more successful than Santana. He had a better arm, better stuff, etc. But you can’t predict what’s going to happen with pitching. At all. If you could, we never would have gotten Johan from the Rule 5 draft in the first place.

Of course, the Twins buy into the old conventional wisdom that you simply must build your team by developing young pitchers. After all, it’s really expensive and risky to sign top pitching free agents, who can get injured at any time and leave you holding the bag (and writing them checks). But, as always happens, the times have changed. Top hitters are extremely hard to acquire and are very expensive*, and they bring along less risk of injury and decline than any pitcher.

* This offseason seems to reverse that trend, but I beg to differ. What this offseason shows is a) an overall unwillingness of teams to spend money during a huge influx of free agents (ie, decreasing demand and increasing supply, which will drive down prices), and b) an overall increase in the value teams are placing on defense, which decreases the money offered to good-bat no-glove corner outfielders in their thirties. I contend that good hitters who can also field their position remain extremely valuable.

It’s really no surprise that the Twins have been left behind by the shifting sands of time. And it’s no surprise that they’ve failed to adjust at all.

Last year we had four first round picks (ours, plus the compensation picks from losing Hunter and Silva to free agency). We used three of them on pitchers, and just one on a position player — who also happens to be a pitcher! We continue to focus most of our draft on pitching talent, and yet our top prospects are invariably the few hitters we decide to go for (Hicks, Revere, Ramos, Morales).

Perhaps it’s time to reverse our philosophy for the top end of the draft: focus on hitters and get as many as you can, take a shot on a few high upside pitchers, and fill out the ranks of our pitchers later in the draft (since once you go lower down the list the value of pitchers vs hitters balances out — it’s merely the top hitters vs the top pitchers where there’s a huge imbalance in value).

Do I think the Twins should do this? Absolutely. Do I think they actually will? Oh my, no.