That sounds pretty reasonable to me. I meant to mention in my comment above that, though dfa doesn’t state it explicitly, I’m sure he is referring to Donaldson’s accumulated performance through the team controlled years of his career (which should also include his peak years, since the guy is 23 already). Assuming that this is indeed the case, and no one is expecting a .320+ wOBA in his rookie year, then this seems like a strong argument.

I’m still curious about whether there is a difference in how well plate discipline can be projected forward, as opposed to something like power. I mean, if you bumped Chris Carter up to the majors now, he would still be huge (though strength is not the only thing that contributes to a big ISO, obviously). But I imagine that ML pitchers are significantly better at working the strike zone than their minor league counterparts.

If he didn’t have a good arm, why not like 2B or something?

but anyone who is even a remotely plausible catcher has a good enough arm for 3B.

There were rumors he was into field hockey players.

Donaldson hasn’t played 3B regularly since, what, 2006 while in college? You’ve got the A’s knowing they need another option at 3B and have known that since at least 2008 and yet they never bothered to try this former college 3B regularly at the position while in their minor league system. Let’s go on the likelihood that Donaldson doesn’t have the chops to make it as a full time Catcher, and even if his bat could compensate for some defensive issues the A’s already have Kurt Suzuki entrenched behind the plate. The A’s have every reason in the world to try every possible option to find their 3B of the future and yet they’ve hesitated to move Donaldson off Catcher.

You’re position on Donaldson’s defensive abilities center around scouting reports from his 2006 season and an extremely small sample of play this season and yet you’re willing to proclaim he could be a league average defender at one of the harder defensive positions in baseball.

And my argument is problematic?

As for the bat, yes, you can use AA to help project big league performance. I’ve used MLE’s on prospects at various times and I can assure you that I have never, not ever, seen an MLE take a AA player with a .795 OPS in the Texas League and project a .809 OPS for him while playing his home games in Oakland.

How long are you seeing it take for Donaldson to become this 4+ WAR player? Because your post is making it sound near term and that doesn’t look likely.

Suzuki is not a great comp for anyone in the BA department because he’s cut way way down on his K% in the majors from what it was in the minors, which is pretty unusual. Suzuki’s major league batting averages have been much better than would be expected from his minor league numbers.

He was lucky that he didn’t have to hit in the Coli in April and May. 70%ish of his at-bats came in September and October, when the weather is nice and the ball carries better.

I’m still a Barton agnostic at best. I think he’s a second-division first baseman, which is kind of appropriate for our team until Wallace/Carter/Cardenas hit their prime, anyway.

At Baseball Reference, you can sort for whichever players and stats you want (ie, walks and ABs), then use the “share” function to export the relevant columns as a tab- or comma-delimited file. You can then pull that into Excel, write the relevant formula and copy it to every row, and then you can sort on the results of that formula.

It’s still a bit of work, of course, but it’s an improvement over punching each guy’s numbers into your calculator. And the work is all overhead, so you can get 100 guys nearly as easily as 10.

In AA this year, Donaldson had a .370 wOBA (a stat which attempts to effectively quantify hitting into one easy to read number, weighting OBP and SLG at their correct percentages, as well as taking baserunning and other factors into account). People forget that OPS weights slugging percentage much to high compared to OBP. A .370 wOBA is excellent, and last year (granted in a much smaller sample size), Donaldson had a wOBA of .412.

For reference, some major leaguers whose wOBAs were right around .370 this year were:

Justin Morneau
Robinson Cano
Andre Ethier
Michael Cuddyer
Ichiro Suzuki
Billy Butler
Russell Branyan
David Wright

Which is one of the reasons I originally hoped the A’s would try to keep Barton at C when they acquired him.

However, even if Suzuki wasn’t blocking him in Oakland, it just doesn’t look like Donaldson is going to be able to stick at C… not as a starter. You could probably get away with him as the back-up and his extra versatility on the infield corners would be a definite plus.