At times I feel like I might be the only member of this group. The clamour to promote Jacob Gonzalez and others, such as the elite pitching prospects, is clearly the majority view right now on White Sox Twitter, or at least the most vocal minority view. (We will come back to the “there is no such thing as a pitching prospect” bullshit that some big nosed idiot peddle later).
The leaders of this group, like our #108Tourney champion Matt Crawford, have previously made their position known on the Au Jus, which can be found at the following link:
This blog is the counter argument.
I’m obviously not saying never promote anyone, that’s clearly ridiculous. I also don’t support service time manipulation. What I am talking about is, having a plan, trusting that plan and appropriate risk management.
Case studies
Caleb Bonemer
For me, this guy is the player that could push us over the top and makes The Sox a contender. That could be because he turns out to be an all-star (my hope) or because he gets flipped for a position of need.
This is one of those places where a plan and risk management collide. Bonemer’s current strike out right is high (34% strike out rate), he has spoken about how he is being pitched differently this year, yet he is making harder contact than ever. The arrow overall is clearly upwards. Age is also very much on our side with Bonemer.
The plan element could be that he has a specific development goal they are working on, with a specific coach at Winston Salen Dash (hitting off speed pitching). There is no logical need to mess with that. Risk wise, if the strike out rate stays this high, at some point it will impact either his ceiling (MLB pitchers will exploit this) or affect what you can flip him for. Now is not the time to promote Bonemer, given both his age and the park factors in Birmingham. Lets see if he can lower the risk slightly.
Jacob Gonzalez
The case for not promoting Gonzalez is even clearer. This topic has been high up on the agenda of all the smart podcasts this week (and some non-smart ones too ?).
Gonzalez is on a roll, let’s not fuck with it. By that I mean, it clearly benefits everyone for this run of hitting to continue. Should he come up to The Bigs, struggle for playing time or not hit, both his value to the Sox on the field and his value in trades will tank and never recover.
We can mentally move him from non-prospect only a few months ago, to I am intrigued. If this run of hitting continues, it shows it might be real… in which case nothing was lost or it might make him a trade chip. The risk to reward benefit clearly lands on leave Gonzalez where he is, until an injury opens real playing time for him.
Hagen Smith and co
Nothing makes my eyes roll into the back of my head faster than the sentence “there is no such thing as a pitching prospect”. The logic of this ridiculous argument is that pitchers only have a certain number of bullets, so use them in the bigs if they can get out major league hitters. This fallacy made sense until the last decade, but two things have changed.
- Pitch design – we hear all the time about pitching labs, pitch design and everything else that makes pitching ahead of hitting right now league wide. With Hagen in particular, let him spend some time working on designing a pitch that helps him get out opposites sided hitters (Has slight reverse splits currently, but these are not his norms.)
- Injury risk – pitchers come back from long term injuries better now than a few decades ago. If you have a pitcher who you think is ticketed for TJ at some point, let them have it before they start accruing service time. This might he treating pitchers as a commodity and as a risk proposition too heavily… but it’s not like we have evidence that we will sign an ace via free agency to cover for losing a future ace for a year. Ultimately pitchers can now recover from injury better and make huge jumps in results by designing a new pitch. Why not let some of these pitchers do that work in the minors and then see them in Chicago. This is as close as I get to being pro service time manipulation. The key here is you have these players for seven years. You need to get the best version of them you can in this time. These arguments alone are enough for me, before you talk about marginal gains that can be made on command and control via reps.
Every rule has exceptions
The exception to the rule is college relievers who were drafted as such and stay that way (Think Pierce George or Phil Fox). If they can find the zone and can get MLB hitters out, let’s rush that group. Grant Taylor almost fit in this category when he was a prospect, but his case is different simply because he is a unicorn stuff wise. Whether he remains a reliever or becomes a starter is an interesting conversation, which for me should be lead by need and risk, but that’s a conversation not for this blog.
Final thoughts
What more do you need to see out of our player development team to start trusting them? We have seen them recover Colson Montgomery, help Davis Martin with pitch design and bring down the strike out rates of players like Mogollon and Wolkow. The clamour for promotions comes from seeing horrible swings from Acuna and co. I get it, I really do, I watch more Sox Baseball than any sane person would or should. I just don’t let that cloud my overall view of development timelines and risk management.