Out In Front Part 1: What To Make Of Chris Stratton & Martin Agosta This Season

Welcome to the first Out In Front Series, where I express my opinions about the hot topics regarding Giants prospects in a playful but informative way that's backed by data that I have collected from various sites! 

In this first part of the series, I'll talk about Chris Stratton and Martin Agosta, the first and second round selections of the San Francisco Giants in the 2012 MLB Draft. In full honesty, I almost placed this in Something Extra together with the Top 10+10 to make it just a short and quick read but there's just something that tells me that I need to expand this thoughts of mine and that's the reason why I write my first Out In Front series. I will discuss here how Stratton and Agosta are performing this year and how they make my head and your head turn upside down and spin in circles and a lot, lot more.

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Let's start with Chris Stratton, the first round pick that on Draft day got four above-average pitches. This year in Richmond, his numbers are pretty average and we're not really having high hopes for the guy but the good thing is that his FIP is lower than his ERA (3.85 vs 4.14) then the front office promoted him to Sacramento and he has pitched way better in a tougher hitting environment that's the PCL and especially after pitching one of his worst starts in Sacto, he pitched two consecutive 8-inning, 5-hit performances where he pitched way better and seems to be in the best form of his career. How does he seemingly turned one of his worst starts in AAA into his best pitching stretch that I have ever seen from him? 

First thing that connects me is the concussion that he experienced when he got struck by a ball in the head during batting practice in August 2012 and his stuff has never been the same since. I researched concussions and what it can do to a player and I found this article by Dr. Jeffrey Bazarian of University of Rochester that links concussions to hitters performance (link here) that "After a concussion, brain function can be impaired for weeks or months resulting in symptoms such as slowed thinking or response speed, and poor concentration. Understanding the impact of concussions on batting performance can help to inform decisions about when to return to the lineup, the study said." 

I am not sure about pitchers and concussions but in my opinion, sometimes it takes years to be fully healed of concussions. One of the most famous examples of that is Joe Mauer. Him and his glorious hair is just a thing of beauty when he squares a baseball up, but he's been bitten by concussion in 2013 and was just never the same hitter since, making the Twins to move him from the rigors of catching to playing in first base. You can partly blame catching for that but concussions can derail anybody's career. I will not expand pitchers safety here because it's not the topic in hand. In Stratton's case, I feel that this is the first time that I truly feel that he's concussion-free and ready for the new stage in his career. I can see that he's now mentally strong and focused to shrug off a bad start and enjoy the time in the mound.

David Sanchez commented on the last blog post that Stratton enjoyed an uptick in his velocity late last year and on the only video that I saw of him this year, his slider is still above-average to plus. Velocity differential is one of the biggest things that a pitcher needs to have in order to succeed. A prime example of velocity differential is Fernando Rodney. Throughout his career, his average fastball velocity is 95.2 MPH while his average changeup velocity is just 83.3 MPH. That's 12 MPH velocity separation. If you got that velocity separation, you can really induce weak contact and swings and misses. In Stratton's case, based on Baseball Prospectus Eyewitness Reports of him (link here), his fastball velocity is normally in the 89-91 MPH range and topped at 92. Now when I start to think about the uptick in velocity, I can see that he could be sitting somewhere in the 90-93 MPH range now on his fastball which is pretty big considering if he has a 81-83 MPH slider and from one of two videos of him this year from MiLB.com (link here), his slider is still above-average to a plus pitch. In this other video of him courtesy of Roger Munter, his first pitch is a fastball that got life and based on what I see, I can guess that it is 92 MPH. I can really compare him to Jeremy Guthrie in terms of mechanics and stuff.

Last and might be the most important of them all, the Giants front office never left him behind in his struggles and kept on being aggressive on him regarding on his promotions and they kept on believing in the potential of the guy. I feel that it all comes together just at the right time and we are now seeing the culmination of what he has become. He might never be the Chris Stratton, the future partner of Bumgarner, but Chris Stratton, the reliable starter.

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-Let's now focus on Martin Agosta, the second round selection. A look at Agosta's numbers this year and you're going to see that his K/9 spiked up from 5.77 last year to 10.65 this year and his BB/9 going waaaay down from 7.85 last year to 2.19 this year. So you're gonna say that he's pitching really well this year and that he deserves a promotion this year, right? Wrong. His ERA is 5.55 and his FIP is 4.72. And you're going to say WHAT THE HELL, MAN? What the hell it is. I saw this trend recently where pitchers will post impressive K/BB ratio then they'll allow 5 or more runs like Noah Syndergaard and Andrew Cashner. He's on that same path in his last start where he allowed 7 hits, 5 runs, zero walks, and 9 strikeouts. So, what the hell is wrong with Martin Agosta this season?

First, let's take a look at his stats. The first glaring red flag is the numbers of homers that he allowed so far this season. He allowed 12 home runs, 3 of them with runners on base. That's good for the 3rd most home runs allowed by a pitcher so far in the Cal League. Yikes! That's a lot of home runs! So much that his HR/9 spiked from 1.15 last year to 1.75 this year. Nobody's gonna sustain a really good season even when looking at the peripherals as long as you allow a lot of home runs. And his GO/AO ratio is 0.75 which means that when he induces contact, it's typically in the air and once it's in the air, it got a good chance to be a home run.
Second is his BABIP. According to Wikipedia, a normal BABIP is around .300, though the baseline regression varies depending on number of factors including the quality of the team's defense (e.g., a team with an exceptionally bad defense might yield a BABIP as high as .315) and the pitching tendencies of the pitcher (for instance, whether he is a groundball or flyball pitcher). He actually has a lower BABIP this year than last year (.335 vs .346 last year) but .335 is absurdly high given that he has struck out 73 in 61 2/3 innings pitched. Home runs contribute greatly to his high BABIP. He has also allowed more hits than innings pitched this year and he already allowed 4 wild pitches this season that moves runners and gives hitter better chance to break through. He actually got a higher LOB% this year than last year (55.7% last year to 64.4% this year) that indicates that he can limit the damage that he induces.

I just don't have enough data to back me up but I feel that he got one of the worst hard hit ball percentage in the Minors because it seems like the hitters got a good idea what to expect from him. He doesn't seem to tip his pitches since he induces that many of strikeouts and doesn't allow a lot of walks to suspect that he's tipping his pitches. From the earlier trend on Syndergaard and Cashner, I watched an MLB.com clip about the death of FIP due to their performances and Agosta is really one of them. One of the things to consider is that the hitters in the Minors are mostly free swingers and it is a double-edged sword where Agosta can take advantage of it as well as getting bitten hard in his behind really bad.

What I can conclude of Agosta is that he seems that there's a two-way possibility for him, where he can generate strikeouts by his good sequencing and getting hitters to chase out of the strike zone but once his ball is thrown in the strike zone and the hitters hits it with the fat part of the bat, it generally results in a hard hit ball especially that he's a flyball pitcher, typically a home run. If he can make hitters generate weaker contact (probably pitching down in the zone with the famous pitches that induces groundballs and weak contact, the sinker and the cutter) and he retains his out of this world BB/9 and K/9 that you would expect from a top pitching prospect in baseball, he could be more than just a bullpen arm that I project him to be.

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This ends the first part of the Out In Front series. It might be a pretty short one but I hope that I shed some light on the success and failure of the two of the previous top picks by the Giants three years ago. It's pretty underwhelming that the two did not developed as I hoped and most of the Giants fans had hoped for but I'm still open for the chance that they can be contributors for the big league club whatever their roles will be. I hope you enjoyed reading this one like the other blog posts. Cheers!