So yeah...Kyle Parker

I've been too busy with work to write much lately. But I've been following baseball and yeah, Kyle Parker currently sports a slash line of .391/.519/.751. 169 at bats is still a small sample size for projecting future performance in baseball, but that's still a mighty impressive line for a third-year player in the ACC. His batting average on balls in play (BABIP) is .412 which seems a bit high and could imply that some regression is coming. For reference sake, average BABIP in the big leagues is around .290. On the other hand, the average ACC BABIP is undoubtedly higher and this stat can mislead at the college level if players consistently square up on pitchers from weak out-of-conference competition.

It's not just the numbers, most of the scouting sites I've read are now pretty much sold on his power and approach at the plate. No one is willing to go out on a limb and say he'll hit for good average in the pros, but now everyone seems to acknowledge it as a distinct possibility. He is still rated as raw on the defensive skills side. The stupid errors are down this season, but that's something that's not really that important and can be improved through repetition. What scouts are looking for is range, jump as the ball comes off the bat, and route-running (in roughly that order). Arm strength then comes in as a pretty distant fourth, although Parker has plenty of arm. To me he still seems to get poor jumps and take pretty lousy routes, but his range might have improved a bit from years past. The routes can be fixed with experience, but jump is more instinctive. Good range will make up for below-average jump, though.

I have always felt that Parker's defense would keep him from getting drafted high enough to tempt him away from another season of football. My reasoning: there isn't a lot of demand right now for all bat, no glove players--even at a corner outfield position. If your ceiling includes the DH position, that automatically cuts the number of interested teams in half and recently even the DH slot has been used by American League teams for purposes other than stashing away a slugger. Ultimately, however, I think Parker's overall athleticism (bolstered in part by a strong showing on the football field last season?) is causing concerns about his defense to fade, at least somewhat. Coupled with an improved plate approach, his stock has really been rising. There was always the danger that a team with a lot of money to burn on the draft (Yankees, Mets, Red Sox, Tigers, etc.) would select him trying to snag higher-level talent later in the draft. At this point, he seems likely to get a good offer from whatever team drafts him.

I'm curious what others think about his defensive play this season. My eye doesn't have the best training in the world, but if we can get a few opinions we'll have a better idea--a wisdom of crowds kind of thing. At any rate, it's going to be a tenser summer for Clemson football fans than I previously anticipated.

Final Thoughts, Pre-Super-Regional

Well, I completely got the date wrong for the start of the Clemson-ASU super-regional in my last post. I woke up yesterday morning expecting to watch the game in the evening; didn't realize it started Saturday until I checked espn.com a few hours later. I hate it when I do this, I was all geared up to watch the game last night and then suddenly the rug gets pulled out from underneath me. Oh well, I managed to catch some of the other super-regional games last night so it wasn't a total loss.

A few final thoughts:

• The extra day probably helps ASU more than us given the lack of depth in their pitching staff, although there's been enough rest to probably not give either team any real advantage.


• The MLB draft starts June 9th (I double-checked the date this time), so this is the last weekend to play in front of the scouts. At this point, anything that happens this weekend probably doesn't make a difference, teams pretty much know the strengths/weaknesses of individual players. But as a player, the days leading up to the draft must be nerve-wracking, and I wonder if they don't end up pressing in an attempt to make a last-second good impression, or alternatively if they don't hold back something to avoid a stupid injury. The only first round lock playing in Tempe this weekend is Mike Leake, but I wonder if fringe second and third-round guys like Chris Dywer, Ben Paulsen, and Jason Kipnis wouldn't be affected by this kind of mindset.


• Arizona State starting pitchers landed five times in Boyd Nation's Pitch Count Watch, which requires a start of ~130 or more pitches. I think its safe to say that ASU has ridden their starting pitchers if things are going well, with little regard for climbing pitch counts.


• By contrast, Clemson makes only one appearance on the list, last week's Dwyer start against OSU. I think this might suggest Leggett is a little more "new-school" in favoring pitch count limits. In the post-season, though, I doubt there's a college coach alive that cares about pitch count other than as a proxy for arm fatigue.


• Related to the above, I came across this ridiculous article at MLB.com today. It sounds like some MLB mouthpiece concern-trolling college baseball for not having rigid pitch counts in their post-season play that align with the current interests of MLB. Look, I get that MLB sees college players as future assets, but don't tell me these college kids don't want to win as much as their managers. I'm all for keeping pitch counts down in general, but in the post-season its just a different story.


• A general rant on pitch-counts: I definitely fall in the camp that thinks MLB takes things to a pretty ridiculous extreme. Its no wonder that major league teams find half of their staff injured two-thirds of the way through the season, these guys are being selected for pure stuff and no endurance. The other extreme is equally stupid, though--say in Japanese baseball, where you get high school kids throwing hundreds of pitches on consecutive days in the Koshien Tournament. That system ends up selecting for pitchers that have rubber arms and little else. There's a happy medium where pitchers are extended enough to identify guys that are high injury risks, but still retain guys with excellent stuff.


• Speaking of Japan, if you have a weak stomach you might want to look the other way:
  
  You read that right--Lemon Vinegar KitKat. Yeah, not the first flavor one would naturally associate with chocolate. I hear there's Apple Vinegar, as well.

LET'S GO TIGERS!!!