Here is what we said during a Tennessee Smokies status report on Aug 16.

Jen Ho Tseng went from aa to aaa and is pitching well for Iowa right now.  We’ll see if the MLB Cubs try him out in September.

And tonight he starts in Wrigley Field against the Mets.  What does the Ouija Board think of this?

DATE 09_14 8:05_PM NYN CHN
LINEAWAY NYN [ 0.357 ] < 0.312 >
STARTAWAY -0.46(0.475) Seth_Lugo_NYN
LINEHOME CHN [ 0.683 ] < 0.722 >
STARTHOME 0.00(NA) Jen-Ho_Tseng_CHN


Cubs have an expected probability of 0.72.  According to our deltaWAA table  the Cubs should be at 0.65 so there are other factors involved pushing the line more towards the Cubs.  The NA in parenthesis means we have no MLB stats on Jen-Ho Tseng and we can’t use AAA or AA stats which were good.

In the minors we add Win% showing the rate.  Jen-Ho Tseng split the season in AA and AAA and still made top 200 in both leagues.  The rate shows he played even better in Iowa.  The above is data from our August 16 report.

Good luck to Tseng tonight.  The Cubs will need more good pitchers next season.   You can’t have too many pitchers.

Today we’ll look at the state of the Myrtle Beach Pelicans, the Cubs A+ minor league team.  This will be the last of minor league reports until perhaps the off season.  Below are team statuses from today and the last time we did this on July 16.

BAT went down and PITCH is about even and the Pelicans went 18-20 losing two games.  Let’s look at their top players.

This starts to get complicated later in the season when so many players move around.  The players highlighted in tan were traded to the White Sox for Jose Quintana.  Their WAAs for CHN are frozen and they have a new entry for CHA.   Here are their lines with both teams.

The Ranking algorithm currently treats all player entries as separate.  It should add the two WAA values but these minor league scripts have been cobbled together and don’t do that yet.  The WinPct is the important column in this table and you can see Eloy Jimenez and Matt Rose have turned on the juice after moving to the White Sox.    Bryant Flete posted negative value since moving over.

The names in green in the Cubs’ table are those players who were promoted to AA.   All players in that table have decent WinPct numbers showing they are hitting or pitching well above average in A+ right now.  We don’t have access to minor league rosters.   The above are historical data.

Below are the top White Sox players in their Winston-Salem Dash A+ team

Not sure who any of these players are other than Eloy Jimenez.    Now let’s look at the top 25 ranked players in A+.  These top players played long enough in A+ to accumulate value.  It doesn’t necessarily mean they are top prospects.

Eloy Jimenz had a total of around +3.75 so he would have made the top 25 this year.  Next season many of these players (if not all) will be on an AA team somewhere.

That is all for A+ and minor league reports for this season.  Perhaps in the off season when trading starts we’ll run through AAA, AA, and A+ once again.  Cubs start a new series with the Phillies tomorrow and then it’s another Saturday and update on Cubs team status.  Until then….

We haven’t looked at the Tennessee Smokies or AA since the beginning of July.  Here are  their last two snapshots we made and current team status.

Hitting tanked badly, pitching canceled that out and the Smokies went 16-16 since our last snapshot which is expected.  Let’s dive into their top players to see what happened during the last month.

Jason Vosler was ranked #3 in AA on 7/11 and has dropped to #43 which is still top 100.  He went from +4.18 to +2.90 which is a significant loss for a single month.  It means he was hitting way below league average along with many others on this team.  The two pitchers, Pugliese and Torrez maintained their rank which requires increasing their value.  We saw in team status how pitching has improved and you can see it in the above table.

The highlighted names in blue have moved to aaa or moved here from aplus leagues.

League is the last column.  We don’t have minor league rosters so can’t tell if Acevedo is with the Cubs or Arizona but he played in AAA with the Cubs after tearing up the AA league with a 0.923 Win%.  Alzolay moved from aplus to aa and has been pitching well.  Jen Ho Tseng went from aa to aaa and is pitching well for Iowa right now.  We’ll see if the MLB Cubs try him out in September.  It appears David Garner also moved to AAA after pitching well in aa but he doesn’t have enough playing time to compute a Win%.

This data model only takes the dataset and crunches it to make these sorts.  We don’t follow prospects and don’t even know anything about the above players.  Finally, let’s dump the top 25 of AA which will have many more players we  know nothing about other than their name ends up in this list.

Cubs highlighted in blue. This list is compiled using the WAA value as a weighting factor so it means these are the top 25 players who accumulated value in AA this season, not necessarily the top 25 prospects in AA.  Evaluating prospect talent requires much more than this data model can provide.

The White Sox may have players in this list next year.  Most of their prospects are in A+ or A.  We’ll do A+ next and look into some of their acquisitions there.  Until then….

It has been a month since we looked at the Iowa Cubs.  The last time back on July 6 was the day Kyle Schwarber returned to the MLB Cubs after spending a productive week in Iowa.  Let’s look at the current team status line for the Iowa Cubs as well as the previous two snapshots we have.

Both BAT and PITCH up around 5 runs, UR is up 4 runs, and the Iowa Cubs went 16-12 during this period gaining 4 games.  Not bad.  Let’s take a look at their top players.

In the minors we list the WinPct rate to provide perspective because players move around a lot.  Many players above have played and still play for the MLB Cubs.  Happ keeps dropping in rank because his WAA is frozen.  The WinPct shows why the MLB Cubs pulled him out of Iowa and he has been hitting well so far.  Butler is back in Iowa and he has been moving sideways and dropped from #53 to #75.  He still has a high WinPct.  Avila was acquired from Detroit for Jeimer Candelario above so they could let Caratini grow some more.  He’s the top Cub and ranked #40.  On July 6 he was ranked #20 but he spent some time with the MLB Cubs.  I think Zac Rosscup is with COL now.

Let’s see how the White Sox AAA team, the Charlotte Knights are doing.

They went 10-22 or -12 during the last month.  This is a team that is cratering at all levels.  Most of their prospects traded are in A or AA so we’ll see how they’re doing later.  Here are their top players.

There won’t be many top players on a team that is -24.  Apparently Goldberg might have been called up to the MLB White Sox.

Let’s look at the top players in AAA, both International and Pacific Coast Leagues.

Ranking is alway done using the weighting value, WAA, not WinPct.  Because players can move up from AA and start anew in AAA the above list does not reflect that.  Many of the above are playing for an MLB team and not necessarily the MLB team listed with their name.

That’s all for now.  We’ll do Tennessee Smokies and AA as well as the Myrtle Beach Pelicans, the Cubs A+ team some time this month.

Since the Cubs’ recent acquisition, Jose Quintana, just pitched a gem today I decided to compile the 30 MLB affiliates in the A+ minor league and look at the players the White Sox got in return.  The A+ league is one level below AA, two below AAA, and 3 below MLB.  There is one level below A+ but not sure if that’s worth compiling.

The Cubs’ A+ team is the Myrtle Beach Pelicans.  Back in 2013 they were in Daytona and they might have won it all that year.  These affiliates move around a lot in the lower leagues.  Here is the Pelicans’ team status.

This is a good team even though their fielding (UR) is sub average, worse than the MLB Cubs.  Here are their top players in Myrtle Beach.

Cubs have a lot of guys in the top 200 out of 30 MLB A+ affiliates.  The three guys in bold tan are who the Cubs gave up for Quintana.  The forth prospect Dylan Cease played for the Cubs in South Bend on their A team.   We’ll wait until the end of the season to look at him if the White Sox decide to elevate him to A+.

A WinPct column has been added just for minor leagues.  Since WAA represents wins, the delta between W-L, it can be converted to WinPct using the following formula.

WinPct = 0.5 + 0.5*WAA/Games

Where Games = PA/38.4 for batters, IP/9 for pitchers.  This is explained more here.  You can’t do this with WAR.

The weighted WAA is the only value that can be used to rank.  Unlike In MLB, minor league players move from league to league in a season.  A value stat accumulates with playing time so just looking at WAA in these leagues can be deceptive.  A WinPct is considered a rate at which a player is accumulating value much like a batting average which is also a rate.

Many sites and TV commentators like to tout rates to compare players and that is improper.  Rates can only provide context.  A player who hit 0.300 with 700 ABs  made 210 hits whereas a player who hit 0.300 with only 500 AB made 150 hits.  The TV commentators and most Sabermetric stat sites don’t make this distinction and consider the rate sacrosanct.

In the minors we need to provide context.  We don’t in MLB.  In MLB all that matters is a player’s contribution.  We don’t care what could be if that player had more ABs because nobody knows.  Rates change and past results do not affect future results.  When a GM needs to pick a player to elevate they want to do that mid season or several times a season and they don’t want to wait.  That’s where these WinPct rates can be beneficial, they put the WAA value stat into context.  All three Cubs’ prospects who were traded are around 0.600 which is a very good rate.

There’s also scouting intuition like Clint Eastwood in “Trouble with the Curve” that comes into play that can have its own completely separate model used to evaluate the knowledge base of scouts.   There are coaches developing players who might not care about stats as they’re trying out different things.  The above numbers can’t discern this.  These numbers simply provide one perspective.

The Cubs don’t have any A+ players in the top 25 but, like their MLB team, they are all playing around the same level.  A team can win championships without many superstars as long as everyone contributes a little bit.  It all adds up.

I was going to do the White Sox’ Winston Salem team but they’re just as bad as their AA and AAA teams described here.  The White Sox farm system is in complete disarray.  Not sure what Reinsdorf has been doing all these years.

Since we’re here let’s list the top 25 players of all MLB affiliates in the A+ league.  Although many of these teams have cool names we only tag players with their franchise ID.

The WinPct rate is not needed and would only confuse on a top level sort like this.  Notice ranks 2-7 are from the Colorado Rocky affiliate.  Normally when something like this happens I”m thinking bug in the code but this isn’t a bug.  Here’s their team status.

LOL! This is about as lopsided a team can possibly get.  They’re pitching is absolutely horrible and it’s balanced out by a team of minor league Babe Ruths.   The Lucky Runs (LR) is described more here.   They’re basically runs that score where no one gets an RBI.  Unlike Unearned Runs which a team can improve upon,  there’s nothing a team can do to improve lucky runs.  That’s why we call them lucky.  We include them in team status reports for completeness.  I have never seen LR this high.

Anyway, that’s all today.  New series with Atlanta tomorrow.  Until then….