I offer OPS only as a crude and imperfect measuring stick of offensive performance. For every minor league success story like Jac Caglianone and Carter Jensen, there’s a guy like Gavin Cross who has failed to live up to his lofty prospect hype. To be fair, prior to this recent influx of talent acquired through the draft this year, there just weren’t many prospect bats hanging around the system. Another issue was, very often, the success that was found in the minor leagues did not translate to the majors. Guys would come up after a successful run in Triple-A and would crater with the Royals. How much of that was just general talent and how much of that was the players not being properly prepared to handle the jump?
To me, it feels that if you’re not renewing the contract of the guy who ran the hitting program for the minor leagues, that’s more than a small “tweak.” That looks like an overhaul of a philosophy. Or a realignment of sorts.