Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> Career Value

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Career Value

The recent announcement of the nominees for the first class in the College Baseball Hall of Fame got me to thinking -- we don't spend a whole lot of time talking about career value in the college game. The reasons for that are fairly straightforward; college careers are fairly short to start with, they're shortened more because the best players tend to leave after their junior years, and the 18-21 years are so big developmentally that freshmen tend to have limited impact. Nonetheless, if you're talking about something like a Hall of Fame, you don't want to let it become just a list of the best seasons, so it's worth thinking about career value and what it means.

With that in mind, I thought I'd look at the convenient four-year period for which we actually have good college stats -- 2002-2005 -- and see what we might be able to glean. This obviously doesn't directly provide any information for the HoF voters, but it might provide some indirect value by giving some insight into what shape the most valuable careers fall into.

I didn't use a single metric to put these together but rather pulled from a combination of raw stats, one of the versions of the runs created metric, and some of what Bill James used to call black and gray ink -- where the player fell on the national leaderboards. With that in mind, here's one guy's opinion on the top 10 college careers that fell between 2002 and 2005.

10. Ryan Braun, Miami, Florida. Hit for average, walked enough, had decent power -- Braun was one of the five best pure hitters of the last few years. One of the things that works in his favor is a really strong freshman year:

Year   AVG   OBP   SLG   AB  HR

2003  .364  .446  .665  242  17
2004  .335  .439  .606  155  10
2005  .388  .471  .726  219  18

9. Mike Costanzo, Coastal Carolina. Here's a name that surprised me but kept coming up. Costanzo, another three-year player, did not have as strong a freshman year as Braun but had a better sophomore year (Braun was injured for part of 2004), so it may be that two strong years and one above-average year are enough to at least get you on the bottom of this list.

Year   AVG   OBP   SLG   AB  HR

2003  .318  .374  .509  173   8
2004  .359  .479  .740  231  21
2005  .379  .525  .658  240  16

8. Jeff Larish, Arizona State. Here's our only four-year player. Larish suffered through a sub-par junior year and returned for his senior year, hoping to improve his draft status. That's a mixed blessing, but it did provide actual value to the Sun Devils, and I don't think concerns outside the game should be part of this decision.

Year   AVG   OBP   SLG   AB  HR

2002  .328  .447  .477  128   3
2003  .372  .528  .697  234  18
2004  .308  .396  .468  237   7
2005  .324  .457  .680  250  23

7. Jered Weaver, Long Beach State. Surprisingly enough, there are only two full-time pitchers to make the list, even though in a given season the numbers are about even or slightly favor the pitchers. My working theory is that freshman pitchers are much less likely to make an impact, and the ones that do are more likely to lose time to injury along the way.

YEAR   ERA    IP    SO

2002  4.37   92.2   74
2003  1.96  133.1  144
2004  1.62  144.0  213

6. Ryan Patterson, Louisiana State. Another solid hitter who managed to contribute as a freshman. Patterson suffered less of a sophomore slump than Braun or Costanzo, which helps him up here. You'll note that all our hitters so far are from the weak end of the defensive spectrum -- one interesting thing that I've found is that most of the stronger defenders don't start hitting until later in their college careers, so again career value is relatively less than season value.

Year   AVG   OBP   SLG   AB  HR

2003  .350  .387  .616  263  16
2004  .341  .383  .577  293  14
2005  .369  .448  .719  249  20

5. Jed Lowrie, Stanford. Positional adjustments start to kick in here, as we start to find middle infielders who hit like the big boys. Strength of schedule helps Lowrie a lot. It's odd that we end up with two second basemen on the list, since that goes against the usual trend.

Year   AVG   OBP   SLG   AB  HR

2003  .292  .349  .349  212   0
2004  .399  .505  .734  233  17
2005  .317  .416  .594  224  14

4. Rickie Weeks, Southern. Once I gain full four-dimensional control of the universe, one of the neater experiments I'll run is to drop Weeks into an SEC lineup for the 2003 season and see what happens. There's just so much uncertainty in the kind of translations that you have to make when you have what look like Little League stats compiled against really weak competition. The placement here is my best guess, though. Bear in mind that this actually misses Weeks' 2001 freshman season, which points out that it's actually possible for a two-year career to be more valuable than a longer one.

Year   AVG   OBP   SLG   AB  HR

2002  .497  .578 1.000  195  20
2003  .483  .607  .948  172  17

3. Stephen Head, Mississippi. Two-way players are useful enough, in that they free up a scholarship portion you can give to someone else, but when you evaluate them you usually find that two little's don't add up to a lot. In Head's case, though, he had two smallish lot's, and that added up well.

Year   AVG   OBP   SLG   AB  HR

2003  .337  .385  .490  208   6
2004  .346  .419  .583  228  13
2005  .331  .403  .596  272  18

YEAR   ERA    IP    SO

2003  1.40   57.2   43
2004  2.82   70.1   56
2005  2.54   85.0   77

2. Stephen Drew, Florida State. Hit .344 and walk 45 times while playing shortstop, and you, too, can be rich and famous. Drew's 2002 is probably the best freshman year in my memory.

Year   AVG   OBP   SLG   AB  HR

2002  .402  .457  .750  204  16
2003  .327  .435  .582  263  11
2004  .344  .458  .692  227  17

1. Mike Pelfrey, Wichita State. You know, if you had asked me before I started looking at the numbers who would end up on top of the list, I'm pretty sure I would have gone through at least 100 players before I guessed Pelfrey, simply because there was never a year when I thought he was the best pitcher in the country. I'm still fairly sure that's true, which is why it's worth looking at career value instead of just collecting season thoughts. It turns out that top-flight years by pitchers are hard enough to find that putting three of them together (Pelfrey was probably one of the five best in the country for three straight years) is incredibly valuable, and that puts Pelfrey at the top.

YEAR   ERA    IP    SO

2003  2.49  104.2   98
2004  2.18  115.1  125
2005  1.93  139.1  143

So, is there any guidance to be found? Well, modern players who stay for four years seem to be likely to still provide less value than three-year players. Middle infielders are to be treasured. Pitchers are less likely to manage sustained value but can be incredibly valuable when they do.

This means absolutely nothing, ignore it.

This is one generic layman's predictions for who gets in the tournament. I'm not going to bother picking a team from the one-bid conferences, since the conference tournament will just be a crapshoot, but if I only list one team from a conference, they'll get an at large bid if they don't get the automatic bid.

America East   Clemson               Purdue                Alabama
Atlantic 10    Georgia Tech          Cal State Fullerton   Georgia
Atlantic Sun   Florida State         UC Irvine             South Carolina
Horizon        North Carolina        Long Beach State      Arkansas
Ivy            North Carolina State  Rice                  Mississippi State
MAAC           Wake Forest           Houston               Florida
MAC            Miami, Florida        East Carolina         Mississippi
MEAC           Virginia              Southern Mississippi  Louisiana State
Mid-Continent  Nebraska              Tulane                Vanderbilt
Mountain West  Texas                 Old Dominion          College of Charleston
MVC            Oklahoma              Arizona State         Elon
NEC            Baylor                UCLA                  Troy
OVC            Kansas                Southern California   Louisiana Tech
Patriot        Notre Dame            Stanford              Hawaii
Southland      St. John's            Oregon State          San Diego
SWAC           Winthrop              Washington            Pepperdine

Rather than keep returning to the subject of pitch counts and pitcher usage in general too often for my main theme, I'm just going to run a standard feature down here where I point out potential problems; feel free to stop reading above this if the subject doesn't interest you. This will just be a quick listing of questionable starts that have caught my eye -- the general threshold for listing is 120 actual pitches or 130 estimated, although short rest will also get a pitcher listed if I catch it. Don't blame me; I'm just the messenger.

The Olvey outing is an actual count replacing last week's estimate.

(*) Pitch count is estimated. As always, I welcome actual pitch count corrections.

Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> Career Value

About the author, Boyd Nation