Tom Brennan - Low Minors Success Doesn’t Mean Major League Cream-of-the-Crop Success

Binghamton Head Shot of Then-MLB-Hopeful Belfast-born PJ Conlon in 2017

An article for us when hope-springs-eternal spring training is just arriving.

Any aficionado of the minor leagues gets excited when he or she sees a young prospect doing exceedingly well in the lower minors. Speculation immediately begins as far as whether or not that success will translate at higher levels. The trouble is higher levels bring with them higher difficulty difficulty.   Mack has often cautioned, "let's see how they do in far tougher AA and AAA."

Take, for instance, PJ Conlon, drafted in the 13th around in 2015. 

One would normally not expect a great deal out of a 13th around Prospect, but PJ excelled in 2016, as he went 12-2, with an ERA of 1.65 in A Ball, after allowing just 2 runs in 17 innings pitched in his 2015 debut draft season. Exciting.

That 2016 season earned him Mets minor league pitcher of the year.  

That’s big. But…

Then “Higher Competition” began.

In AA in 2017, he was 8-9, 3.38, solid results for sure, but considerably lesser in pizzazz than his 2016 in A ball, results-wise.

In 2018 on went PJ to the dreaded PCL AAA level with Las Vegas. Just 4-9, 6.55 ERA.  Las Vegas separates the laddies from the daddies.  

Pitchers dread Las Vegas. An unfriendly place for pitchers.  

In 2017 and 2018, just a substandard 190 Ks in 250 minor league innings, leaving one to wonder how much that modest K rate would slide further in the majors, where far more muscular hitters reside than when I first got really interested in Mets baseball in the 1960s.

For example, the beloved Ed Kranepool.  In this old picture, Casey is pointing out to Eddie where the muscle-growing dumbbells were. Eddie, I speculate, never did find those metallic dumbbells. as his lackluster career .377 slugging percentage would attest:

Bud Harrelson was another Mets hitter of yore that today's pitchers would never have to worry about grooving a pitch, only to find it sailing into McCovey Cove. The only way featherweight Buddy was getting into the Cove was on a boating excursion:

To Bud's credit, he did hit the weights one off season, but his bulk evaporated faster than ice on a 100 degree sunny day, and his weight usually drifted down into the 130s as hot summer days set in. He had 7 career homers, or 1 every 800 times up, and those 7 HRs produced 9 RBIs.

Compare just those two players, Kranepool and Harrelson, with their 125 career HRs in 11,500 combined plate appearances, to today's muscular hitters at the same positions, Pete Alonso and Francisco Lindor, who in just 2021 and 2022 as Mets mainstays hit 123 home runs. 

Pitchers simply face drastically more dangerous power hitters as a rule today, so the ability to miss bats is life-and-death to a pitcher's career.

In 2018, Conlon also got into 3 games for the NY Mets, totaling 7.2 innings, allowing just 2 walks (yay!), but also 15 hits and 7 runs.  That was it. MLB career record of 0-0. Undefeated, though, which he can brag to his grandkids about.  

In 2019, injuries, a brief stint in the minors, and the Leprechaun was released that summer.

So that 12-2, 1.65 from 2016 was nice at the time but was an entirely  false indicator if one was using that to project potential future MLB success.

Because “higher competition” can mean “much tougher competition”.

So, gentlemen, and any ladies out there who may be clandestinely perusing these articles, please leave the rose-colored glasses in your desk drawer when evaluating the prospects of Mets’ prospects. Flaws are flaws, whether it is a high K rate for hitters, or a low K rate for pitchers.

(His pitching career resembles that of Tyler Pill, whom I just wrote about the other day, just as an aside.  Baseball is a hard game for softer tossers to excel in at the highest levels, unless you can "R A Dickey" the baseball).

Here therefore are well-wishes for PJ Conlon in his current and future endeavors.

Wait, I am not done.  It's Saturday, you've got all day, right?

Another guy who found the lower minors a breeze but above that not so breezy was - yes, Mack - the favorite of every writer whose initials are TB, one Danny Muno.

  

In Muno’s 59 game Brooklyn debut  in 2011, he produced a scintillating .355 average and .466 OBP.  

That was followed by a very solid 2012, one level up (.280/.387/.412 in 81 games with 19 of 22 in steals). 

But the Moon Man was more or less just OK from 2013 on, with a small, brief cup of coffee with the Mets, like Conlon himself had. 

No one said this game was easy. Cream rises to the top.  But Cream is hard to find.  (And saying that, of course, I must pay homage to two Cream greats: Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce, who were superstar talents of a different kind.  They may not have been able to hit a high fastball, but they could both hit a high note.)  I know, I know, Ginger Baker was Cream's drum solo machine, so a tip of the cap there too.

When I first heard their music, I was thrilled and thought to myself, "I'm so glad, I'm so glad, I'm glad, I'm glad, I'm glad."  How about you?