LSB Community Prospect Project: #6

to add to your two points I’d add that there is a lot more willingness to examine the statistical evidence these days for the economic benefit. Most team now completely understand that you’re often just as well off (or better off) going with the young player instead of the barely above replacement level veteran, or the overpriced but still productive veteran.

You’re obsessed! :)

You have sort of a miles-y love for speedy outfielders.

the powers that be presumably didn’t want to mess with what was working

I really doubt that they did that. You don’t take a guy to FIL and let him play an entire year without doing a single thing to work on the prime weakness in his game. That just seems silly to me.

I think you also have to factor in the adjustment to wood bats, as there was some question as to how he would adjust.

For what it’s worth, he’s played with wooden bats before. I think that his adjustment to the level of play was greater than the wood bat thing, and of course that has nothing to do with offensive approach. If there’s one thing you can do while you adjust to wood (if you need to) is work on your approach.

I don’t doubt at all that they placed a major emphasis on it prior to AFL, but to suggest that they didn’t place any kind of focus on it during this yera makes zero sense to me. I mean if he were a shortstop who was air mailing every throw, would they just say, let’s get through this year and then we’ll worry about that. Or if he were popping everything up, let’s get through five months of games, then we’ll start working on it.

This is a guy with prototypical leadoff ability, who, if he can overcome one weakness could be exactly what they need, and who they and everyone else knew before they even drafted him what his big area of work needed to be. To just waste a year of development without addressing it at all would be pretty unforgivable and just isn’t how coaches and instructors work. They worked on it, but his approach is so ingrained that it’s taking more drastic measures. But again, that course of events doesn’t suggest that “he can do whatever he’s asked to do”. It suggests that (and this may be what he was trying to say), with enough work, he might be able to make this adjustment, but the fact that it took a full year to even start to make improvement doesn’t make for a guy who just hears something once and puts it directly into play, at least in this one area.

I’m not misreading it. You’re missing a very key word there in your first paragraph, “can”. He didn’t say that he does whatever he’s asked to do. He said he can do whatever he’s asked to do. That implies a very special skill to incorporate teaching very easily, which is something that very few guys can do. It’s what he’s saying there, and if Borbon can do that, he didn’t pick very compelling evidence at all.

I obviously am not in meetings or sessions where they coach Borbon. But come on. The guy can hit. To say that the first step in teaching him how to fix his big problem, which is his approach to his at-bats, is to completely avoid it…you’re just having to come up with a far fetched scenario to support the initial statement, rather than accept the obvious, which is that he just wasn’t able to incorporate it into his game through the normal course of the season, and they had to send him to summer school to force feed it.

I know that debate over something like this that isn’t concrete will go on forever with no progress, though, so I’ll stop here for my part. I think that it’s pretty obvious that you’d defend pretty much whatever he says to build up a player regardless of how silly it is, just like you’d defend pretty much anybody in the world they’d keep on their 40 man roster.