I think BP’s Kevin Goldstein had the scoop last night on the demise of the Hawaiian Winter League. Seems that it makes more financial sense to run a second fall/winter league in Arizona. Hard to argue with that.
The tidbit that caught my eye in Goldstein’s post, however, was this: “Still, the league filled a crucial gap in the winter league landscape, providing the opportunity of extra playing time for talents one notch below the AA/AAA level of the Arizona Fall League and the various Latin American circuits.”
Perhaps those minor-league equivalents are common knowledge, but I’d never heard it so explicitly. One notch below AA/AAA would be High A/AA, right? Reports from Hawaii said the parks favored the pitchers. So let’s make a rough parallel between Hawaii and the Giants’ AA affiliate, Connecticut, an extreme pitchers’ park.
That gives us a slightly better gauge of the performances we saw in Hawaii from Buster Posey and Roger Kieschnick. We can sum up Posey this way: Initially had a lot of trouble on defense. Hit for very little power but high average. Kieschnick showed excellent power but had trouble making contact. Remember we’re going on small sample sizes, 74 and 110 at bats respectively, but at least contemplate these questions:
* If Posey hits .338 / .405 / .392 (his HWL line) in double-A next year, will you be concerned?
* If Kieschnick launches a HR every 18 at-bats but struck out nearly half the time in Connecticut, will you label him the next Rob Deer?
* Based on their HWL numbers, should these guys even start next year at AA?
You can run through the same half-assed thought exercise with the performances in the AA/AAA-equivalent AFL. Or you can say these sample sizes are way too small and it’s not worth the brain cells. The choice, my friends, is yours.
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Link of the day: In his circuitous way, Peter Gammons made an excellent point over the weekend that the economy could turn a lot of teams desperate by mid-summer to shed contracts. The real action might happen in June and July, not December and January.
Desecrated photo courtesy of flickr user Go Card USA.
