If players have an exploitable weakness issue, wouldn't it show up in really tilted pitch-fx data? If McPherson really can't hit high velocity pitching wouldn't you see a horrific knee bend in success rate vs. fastball velocity? (Or success rate vs. a pitcher's typical velocity.)

Do you think Bryan LaHair could emulate a 2008 or 2009 Carlos Pena season? Are their scouting reports similar enough to be able to project that?

This gets me very curious about advanced scouting- it occurs to me that teams the 'overperform' may do so due to really good advance scouting reports and effective application of said reports(as opposed to, say, a really good coaching). KG, to your knowledge, how much variability is there in quality of advance scouting among different teams? And what goes into it? Do scouts look at how future opponents perform just in the few weeks preceding a series or further back in time? Might be a good podcast topic!

For some reason, this made me wonder whether there is such a thing as "QUAD-A" pitching. Certainly there are pitchers who stall out at AAA (but are there that many, compared to hitters?).

Wha5 are the symptoms? I'm thinking about these:
--lack of an out pitch, too few Ks, too many HRs (for soft-tossers)
--problems with control, walk rate, command (for hard-throwers)
Some of the adjustment/talent issues also could come into play for these pitchers.

Watch Brad Eldred play 1b sometime and you will realize that he gives up 2-3 hits a game. Johnny Pesky once said that he tried hitting Sam Horn 1000's of groundballs and he couldn't learn to field them. I don't know why some teams won't just put a young guy at DH and let him concentrate on hitting. Can LaHair become an MLB 1st baseman or will he give up 3 hits a game?

Cool stuff as always, KG.

I have to say, I do think you're *slightly* misrepresenting the type of players that sabermetrically-inclined people champion as miscategorized Quad-A players; I think most of us recognized that Brad Eldred (for example) would never make enough contact to maintain a palatable batting line.

There are definitely players - Roberto Petagine being maybe the most prominent example - that a lot of us to this day swear would have hit if he'd only been given enough of a chance. Dallas McPherson ... not so much. I guess what I'm saying is that statheads have enough sophistication to look into the *details* of a player's minor league batting line before championing their cause, rather than assuming that anyone slugging .550 in the PCL can hit in the big leagues.

Off the top of my head it seems like you could look at all the players with AAA and MLB expereince and filter them using some set of criteria and then seeing if the resulting list contained players reputed to be AAAA-players.

Since hitting ability appears to be the key component, a criteria might be to look for players who in AAA had much larger than normal discrepancies in batting average when batting against the best 20% of AAA pitchers versus all other AAA pitchers. Another criteria might be to look at larer than normal batting average discrepancies when the player batted against pitchers with above average velocity versus when batting against normal or below average velocity pitchers.

In other words, we are looking for players who numbers are excessively influenced by playing sufficiently well against average and below average AAA players so as to mask their poor performance against the best AAA playes who are presumably MLB quality players.

I'm still hopeful that Ryan Raburn could have a break out year at 2B for the Tigers if they give him the chance. He has not seized the opportunity in the past....he probably doesn't have many more chances left. He has hit well in the second half a couple of times but just as often he has stumbled through April/May very badly.

Chris Davis gets labeled as a AAAA player and he is a good fielder. Is he still possible for a breakout in Baltimore?

I was glad to see bat speed mentioned in the article. When thinking about Quad-A players, my mind immediately went to recent example Kila Ka'aihue. I remember when looking at his gaudy slash lines and juicy walk rates in the upper minors I became more interested in what scouts thought of him. Even prior to reaching the majors, one constant stood out as a seeming industry consensus, he had "slider bat speed," and was able to take advantage of the lack of premium velocity in Double-A and Triple-A.

With a guy like that, I've sometimes wondered if there are adjustments coaches can make to speed up a players bat. It would seem the likely answer is no, that some players have it, and others don't. Those that don't cheat, and get exploited in the majors, and you have what we've seen to date from Ka'aihue. What's your take Kevin? Enjoyable article, keep up the great work.

Poor Kila Ka'aihue, buried already.

I wonder if there are players who are, to put it bluntly, too dumb to succeed above AAA. Once upon a time I read that the athletes who reach the top echelons of their sports tend to be people of somewhat (slightly, not drastically) above average intelligence. According to the article, which I really wish I could find again, the highly intelligent athlete is difficult to coach, because he/she challenges the coaching. The below-average athletic intellect, by contrast, just never gets it to begin with.

I am thinking of one particular highly-touted prospect, whom I won't name, who was hailed as a can't-miss hitter on the way up, but is doing a pretty creditable job of missing so far, and in the process, has said and done some things that make me suspect he's not the brightest light bulb in the scoreboard. Consensus seems to be that this guy will eventually figure it out, but I really wonder. There must be others like him.

So how smart DO you have to be to succeed at baseball?

Alan Knicely.

Kevin, the advance scout thing is interesting. Do any organizations put advance scouts on their own minor league players? If my advance scout is finding these weaknesses to exploit on other teams' players, wouldn't I want to know the same about my own minor leaguers so I can correct some of these problems in advance?

Chris Davis is a very good defensive 1B--Average at best at 3B. I have seen nearly all of his Texas games. I am not sure where he got the rap of being a bad defensive player. I have seen it several times.