A couple days ago I was in the airport perusing the MLB and CBS Sports websites when I came across two separate articles about possible prospect call-ups for teams later this season. One name in particular caught my eye — CJ Abrams. He plays shortstop for the San Antonio Missions and two weeks ago I had the opportunity to see him play in person. Boy, he did not disappoint. Anyway, it reminded me of some OPS analysis I did on the Missions weeks ago. I wanted to see who the best hitters on the team were and how they stacked up compared to the rest of the time.
Sure enough, CJ Abrams is up there in terms of OPS. Granted, the data is a few weeks old and I’m sure it’s different by now, but if he’s being mentioned by CBS Sports and MLB as a prospect to keep an eye on, I’m sure he’s still raking.
The first thing I want to look at is the distribution of OPS for each Missions batter.
Above is a really basic scatterplot of the Missions’ OPS distribution. You can see that there are some pretty poor hitters on the roster, the majority of players are in between 0.500 and 0.750, and there’s three hitters that seem to be raking the ball pretty well. I can make a better plot, however, that shows OBP on the x-axis and SLG on the y-axis. The plots on this graph will correspond to the batters’ OPS as well as label the top 3 hitters on the Missions roster so far this season.
Sure enough, there’s CJ Abrams, right up there with Jack Suwinski and Robbie Podorsky (who actually was recently called up to the AAA El Paso Chihuahuas).
Here’s the same graph, but with the OPS lines included. You can see Abrams right there above 0.800 on the OPS line. The kid is good and hopefully I can see him play a few more times in San Antonio before he gets the call-up.
Anyway, it was cool to read two separate articles that mentioned a player I had previously done some analysis on. Hope you enjoy! Below are links to the articles I mentioned above.
