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Introduction
As I began my series of correlating prospect walk and strike ratios to future hitting success, a question arose from Carson Cistulli. How do minor and major league walk and strikeout rates compare to each other? I did a little of this analysis in my original series at The Platoon Advantage, but never pursued it in any depth. Consider this a supplement to the already running series.
Previous Levels: Rookie and Short-A | Single-A
Method
Success rates for Advanced-A League prospects based on walk and strikeout rates
Using historical prospect lists, which current prospects have helped their chances at Major League success based on their walks, strikeouts, and age?
I took the same data but instead split minor league seasons into various BB% or K% bins, basically the equivalent of Very Low, Low, Average, High, and Very High. Then I compared those rates with the player’s eventual MLB rate. If a player had fewer than 500 MLB PAs, I did not count his rate, since that is too small of a sample.
Hopefully the following tables are simple to understand, but just in case I didn’t design them well enough, I will explain. The first column contains the labels for BB% or K% at the minor league level. The third through eighth columns are the percentage of prospects that had that column heading’s major league BB% or K%. This means that rows add up to 100%, but columns do not.
Walk Percentage
As is the normal trend, players that make the majors for at least 500 PAs tend to fall outside of the extremes. Their major league walk rate falls close to their minor league walk rate.
Strikeout Percentage
The most success from high strikeout prospects come from those who are 19 years old. Only 18% have fewer than 500 PAs in MLB. But, most of those prospects who make it to the majors still have a 20% or higher strikeout rate.
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Statistics courtesy of Fangraphs and Baseball Prospectus.
Chris St. John is a writer at Beyond The Box Score. You can follow him on Twitter at @stealofhome.
