Very interesting. It's great to hear of professional ballplayers moving beyond the cliches.

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Our pitching instructor preaches that if you want to advance to the next level (the only thing that minor league players really care about) you need to have a below league-average ERA, a WHIP below 1.3 and a strikeout-to-walk ratio of at least 3 to 1.
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This seems brutal to me. Caring about a minor leaguer's ERA, are you kidding me? All I care about Red Sox prospects doing well in are K%, K/BB, and GB%.

Shawn,

Thanks for the great guest post. I hope you've enjoyed your time at Kane County this year. It's a tremendous host for Class A ball. (As a disclaimer, I developed my love of baseball from attending many of their games when I was young.) The note Ryan pointed out also surprised me, as I find it hard to believe that the A's, of all teams, would rely on a traditional metric like ERA to judge you and your fellow minor league pitchers. That just seems like contradictory thinking to their famed use of OBP for hitters.

"I’ve been reading The Baseball Analysts for a while and really enjoy the work that they do so hopefully I can keep up the high standard that has been set."

If you want to do that you need to go back to your HS English teacher and stop using words like "hopefully".
Keep up writing, it shouldn't detract from your ability to do your day job. Brad Ziegler used to post at A's Nation when he was in the minors and it didn't hurt him.

Why is it that some people (Gilbert) find slamming others necessary?

Great post. Really interesting. Thanks for taking the time to write it. I think back in the 60s, the White Sox manager, Eddie Stanky, promised his pitchers he would buy them a new suit any time they got 20 groundball outs in a game.

Great insight into pitcher development at MILB level. Please continue to be so candid.

Did you also cross-reference your LOB% (Left On Base %) with your BABIP? They are often linked.

Also, you can find reliable formulas online to self-calculate without the help of sites like Fangraphs.

PS -- Ignore Gilbert's comments. They're not constructive.

Best--

Drew

Ryan- those stats are to "guarantee" advancement, a very high standard but in the minors you have to force the hand of the organization to promote you especially as a 33rd round pick.

Matt- Kane County has been awesome, the stadium is always packed and the fans are awesome. It is possible that the higher ups (billy beane, dave forst etc) in the organization focus on different types of stats, I just haven't run into it yet.

Cyril- I'm going to ask my pitching coach to look into this kind of incentive program, maybe lowering the standard to 15 ground balls because we rarely get to go more than 6 innings.

Drew- LOB% is a stat I don't know much about. I have heard it is supposed to be around 70%, I am not sure what my percentage would be. I'll have to look into it.

Thanks for all the comments, this has been a good learning experience for me and hopefully I can do it again.

Shawn

15 sounds more reasonable, especially since it would be in fewer innings. If no one believes you about it, just google "eddie stanky" along with suit and/or ground. I found a few sites that mentioned this. But I think the pitcher needed to pitch a complete game. More common in those days. One site said that Stanky had to change the policy one year because he was buying too many suits. I recalled it from being a White Sox fan back in the 1960s. Anyway, as an economics professor, I believe in incentives.

Cyril

Really enjoyed hearing from a pitcher who thinks beyond just the scoreboard stats. I'm glad there are becoming more and more pitchers who are willing to speak about sabermetrics.

Oh, and forget the grammar police.

Add me to those above: Thank you for sharing your information.

I'm surprised that the A's are not more sabermetrically advanced in what they are asking from their minor leaguers. One would think the Moneyball team would be doing more.

I would suggest concentrating on K/BB along with GB%. And, of course, K/9. As you note, minorleaguesplits.com is great for those stats.

Since you are new to saber, may I suggest you check out Ron Shandler's Baseball Forecaster? If you check them out on-line, you can get their old annuals for less than half price (at least you could before they were bought out; not sure now, haven't checked lately). The fantasy stuff you don't need (though that is good stuff if you are into it), but they have great stuff teaching you about analyzing players sabermetrically that I found helped me understand everything much more clearly. I love their Toolkit. I had bought Baseball Prospectus for years before, but never understood everything until I read this book.

I would also suggest checking out "Curve Ball" by Jim Albert and Jay Bennett. Lots of interesting stuff there. Jim Albert also wrote, "Teaching Statistics Using Baseball" if you want a more text book oriented tome to read.

Lastly, I recall that someone from SABR is a professor at Harvard. Victor Wang? He sometimes writes an article for SABR's monthly publication, just search for it on the web, usually easy to find. Maybe you can make a connection through school and he can help you out.

Good luck!

Oh, and I suggest you and your buddies try to get starts in San Jose. Jonathan Mayo of MiLB.com studied minor league parks and found that Municipal Stadium has the highest strikeout rate in the minors. A hitter noted that the background enables that, making it hard for hitters to see pitches. And BP notes that the Park Factor for San Jose makes it an extreme pitchers park in the hitter's league that is the Cal League.

And, if any of your buddies ever can, Norwich is a great place to pitch at, extreme pitcher's park, limits homers greatly. I would include you but Norwich soon will not be in the Eastern League, at least not with the Giants, and I'm not sure where it will or has ended up.

Great post....unique and informative. I'll be reading everything you write from here on out!

"Pitching for ground balls also eliminates the effect of the ballpark you play in"

Not so!

For 2006-2009, the groundball hit factor for California League parks ranged form 1.12 at Lancaster to 0.75 At San Jose. For all of pro baseball, 1.52 at Parque Foro Sol in Mexico City and 1.45 at The Diamond in Richmond, down to 0.59 at Hammind Field in Fort Myers (compared to the other parks in their league). This is the percentage of all non-bunt groundballs that go to the outfield for hits, comparing home to road in a matched pairs analysis.

                  GBH  IFH
Lancaster        1.23 1.11
San Bernardino   1.17 0.94
Lake Elsinore    1.06 1.22
Adelanto         1.03 1.03
Visalia          1.00 0.81
Stockton         0.98 1.10
Rancho Cucamonga 0.98 0.85
Modesto          0.91 0.96
Bakersfield      0.89 0.96
San Jose         0.75 1.02

My best guess for reasons why is the hardness of the dirt and the length of the grass. I was watching the PGH/MIL game the other day, and the announcers quoted players about the hard infield in Milwaukee - I checked to see that Miller Park has a GBH factor 1.08.