Reese Kaplan -- Draft Picks are an Inexact Science

There’s an old saying that it’s easy to play armchair quarterback.  The same thought really applies to baseball as well.  For those fans sitting at home who watch another team’s player blossom upon arriving in the big leagues it’s very easy to grumble out loud about how the front office has failed in its mission to find the best talents, and “If I’d been the one in charge you can guarantee every guy I’d select would become a star!”  

Ummm, no, that’s not exactly true.  Hitting a baseball remains one of the toughest acts in sports.  Forget the velocities, the arm angles, the control and the preparedness of the batter.  Recognize that a Major League Baseball player in 2019 in the National League averaged just .251 when swinging the bat.  That means nearly 75% of the time when he went to the plate he failed at his mission.  Now there are small ball advances like hitting behind the runner that can be productive to advance a guy from one bag to the next, but hitting a baseball against a professional pitcher is an incredibly difficult skill to master.

Towards that end, you might grimace (as I often do) when a team goes after guys with high batting average and low strikeout percentages in their high school, college and independent careers.  The logic makes some sense.  After all, if a guy is making strong contact, then it’s entirely possible as the grade of pitching he faces improves he’ll still be able to get the bat on the ball.  

Of course, to hear many fans talk about it, the only way to go in drafting is power bats and power arms.  There’s some merit there, too.  Look at the one man show put on by Pete Alonso in 2019.  Every time he came to the plate it was a “stop what you’re doing” moment to see if he was going to crush another one.  A lot of folks focus only on the home runs (including winning the All Star Game’s Home Run Derby) without recognizing the equally ignominious feat of driving home 120 runs with only a .260 average.  

When I was growing up there were two absolute studs at making contact, one in the AL and one in the NL.  For the Minnesota Twins and California Angels you had Rod Carew handling the bat with rare skill, hitting .328 for his entire career, earning a berth on the All Star Team every single year of his career with the exception of his final season at age 39 when he “only” hit .280, an average many players would kill to get.

On the NL side of the ledger was the incomparable Tony Gwynn of the San Diego Padres. For his career he hit ten points higher than Carew, finishing with a .338 average.  Carew managed to hit double digits in HRs twice.  Gwynn did it five times (including his age 39 season when he hit -- you guessed it -- .338).  He once even tallied 119 RBIs in a season for a guy with just 17 HRs, though the .327 AVG had to help a lot.  He ranked only 6th in the MVP voting that year because Coors Field aided Larry Walker hit 49 HRs, drove in 130 and hit .366.  (By the way, some schlub on the Dodgers named Pizza PIe or something like that was 2nd in the voting!)

As Tom Glavine once said famously in a Nike commercial on TV that “chicks dig the long ball,” apparently now so too do General Managers.  You see a great emphasis on home run hitters just as you see the priority in finding rocket throwers who can blow the ball past them.  The idea of small ball has pretty much fallen by the wayside.  

As a Mets fan you have seen a great many of those high contact hitters come and go without much success.  Recently that would include folks like Phillip Evans, T.J. Rivera, Wilmer Flores and others.  The best of the lot, of course, has turned out to be late bloomer Jeff McNeil who waited until age 26 to make his big league initiation, but he’s proven to be even better here than he was in the minors.  The issue is that those types of guys are few and far between.  

To hear the fan base talk about it, they want to see more hit like Pete Alonso and fewer hit like Pete Schourek.  Even the middle of the pack stars like Michael Conforto are embraced more than singles hitters like Edgardo Alfonzo whose popularity only soared after he started putting the ball over the fence.  It would seem to me that contact hitters vs. power hitters is not a one or the other choice.  Your odds of winning either way are pretty slim.  And people will complain no matter who you draft.