That should be fun. And once it’s over, on the morning of Thursday, December 14, there’s the Rule 5 Draft. Few things are so absurd and delightful. As everyone is packing their bags and returning to the regularly-scheduled offseason, teams will quietly pay $100,00 to try to steal another team’s prospect. The catch: Said prospect must stay on the purchasing team’s 25-man roster for the duration of the following MLB season, or he’ll be offered back to their original organization for $50,000.

Unsurprisingly, most Rule 5 selections don’t pan out, and results like Colin Walsh’s .085 batting average in 2016 or Wei-Chung Wang’s 10.90 ERA in 2014 are the norm. But every now and then, there’s an Odubel Herrera or a Joe Biagini or even a Johan Santana sprinkled in among the roster filler to keep things tantalizing.

The Brewers have the 21st selection in this year’s Rule 5 draft. David Stearns and the rest of the Brewers front office will have to dig deep to find an impact talent. Happily, there are plenty of intriguing names available in this year’s draft-eligible class. Here are a few of my favorites.

Travis Ott, LHP, Tampa Bay Rays
Ott, a 6’4” lefty with an exaggerated leg kick who turns 23 in June, is one of a handful of interesting Rays prospects left exposed by a 40-man roster crunch. Formerly property of the Washington Nationals, Ott arrived in Tampa along with Steven Souza Jr. in the three-team trade that netted the Nats Trea Turner and sent Wil Myers to San Diego.

The Rays have been slow to move Ott up the ladder. The lefty spent all of 2015 and 2016 in Class-A ball before reaching Class-A Advanced Charlotte last season. Ott slings a fringy, low-90s fastball across his body from a 3/4 slot, but there’s enough projection left on his frame to hope that the heater kicks up a few ticks. Of his secondaries, a mid-70s curveball flashes more potential than his changeup or slider. Across 118 innings and two levels last year, Ott struck out 132. His career ERA in the minor leagues is 2.72, and he worked to a 67.4 DRA- in Charlotte. It’s not the most electric profile, but there could be a big league arm in there and lefty relief options are always popular come Rule 5 time.

Adam Cimber, RHP, San Diego Padres
At 27 years old, Cimber is no longer a conventional prospect. On the other hand, he just recorded a 21.0 strikeout percentage against a negligible 3.2 walk percentage in AAA. His 55 percent groundball rate was nothing to sneeze at, either. Cimber utilizes an uncommon sidearm delivery, whipping the ball to the plate from the vicinity of his kneecaps. His command profile alone makes him worthy of a look in Spring Training. After all, playing for Milwaukee could be Cimber’s destiny; his first grade teacher was named Mrs. Brewer.

Nick Burdi, RHP, Minnesota Twins
A second-round pick in 2014, Burdi pitched just 17 innings in 2017 before undergoing Tommy John surgery. The year prior, a bone bruise brought about by a high-stress delivery limited the promising hurler to just three appearances.

Still, Burdi’s fragile arm possesses elite upside. In the past, he’s thrown a dominant fastball that can touch triple digits and hard, plus slider that’s been clocked as high as the mid-90s. Though iffy command further clouds his future, he could become a potent bullpen arm if his elbow doesn’t spontaneously combust. In any case, Burdi’s recovery is likely to eat deep into the 2018 season.

Nick Ciuffo, C, Tampa Bay Rays
Ciuffo was a first-round pick for the Rays in 2013. While he hasn’t hit as hoped, it still isn’t difficult to see why the Rays thought so highly of the budding backstop. He’s an advanced defender with viable receiving skills and a plus arm (he’s thrown out 42 percent of would-be base stealers throughout his minor league career).

Dig a little deeper, and the struggles with the stick don’t seem quite so worrisome, either. In 2014, Ciuffo dropped weight while battling a virus. His offensive production lagged, and it’s conceivable that his mechanics got out of whack while his body recovered. He’s always had a good eye, and ran a .266 TAv in AA last year as a 22-year-old catcher. Better still, Ciuffo got stronger as the season wore on. From July 1 through the season’s end, he batted .279/.368/.424 with 15 doubles and 25 walks against 33 strikeouts over 190 plate appearances.

Ciuffo is a much surer thing to stick behind the plate than fellow catcher Max Pentecost, who will likely be gone by the time the Brewers make their first selection. If Stearns and company trust Manny Piña to handle everyday duties behind the dish, Ciuffo could slide onto the roster in place of Stephen Vogt and soak up Piña’s thirteen-plus years of catching expertise.

Travis Demeritte, IF, Atlanta Braves
The Brewers have a need at second base, and Demeritte, a first-round pick of the Rangers in 2013, offers an interesting blend of risk and reward. On the “reward” side, Demeritte is a slick defender at both second and third base equipped with plus raw power and a keen eye for walks.

Then there’s the risk. A positive test for performance enhancing drugs in 2015 took some of the luster off Demeritte’s rising star. He also has a long swing. 2017 was his first full professional season with a strikeout rate below 30 percent. Additionally, Demeritte hit just .231 for a .267 TAv last year in Class-AA ball. Contact issues aside, the collection of average-or-better tools could at least turn the 23-year-old Demeritte into a valuable utility man with uncommon pop.

Victor Reyes, OF, Arizona Diamondbacks
Rule 5-eligible for the second year in a row, the 23-year-old Reyes is an average runner with a decent glove and a serviceable arm. A switch-hitter, he’s a career .298 batter in the minors thanks to a smooth, line-drive swing that generates lots of contact. He doesn’t walk a ton, but he doesn’t strike out much, either. Last year in AA, he turned in a characteristic .292/.332/.399 batting line.

That all sounds like a typical fourth outfielder, and Reyes might be just that. But if he develops his lagging power, he has a chance to be much more. Good news on that front: Reyes whacked 29 doubles last year, easily a career high. If he continues to make strides in that department, he could blossom into a regular corner outfielder who can play center in a pinch. His swing and approach give him perhaps the best chance of any player on this list to actually hit major league pitching next season.

Jason Martin, OF, Houston Astros
Martin offers a rare Rule 5 opportunity: Five tools that could be average or better. He features a compact left-handed swing that he uses to spray line drives across the field. The power is coming along, as Martin has posted back-to-back years of Isolated Slugging over .200 and his 18 home runs across Class-A Advanced and AA last year were joined by 35 doubles and 5 triples.

On the defensive side of the spectrum, Martin’s routes in the outfield could use refinement and some extra zip to his throwing arm would ease worries about his long-term home. Tighten the routes and he could be an everyday centerfielder. Otherwise, he could be a fringe-regular in left.

Big league pitching may be a problem for Martin at first, as his move to AA last year was accompanied by a spike in strikeouts and a precipitous drop in walks. On the plus side, Martin played most of last season as a 21-year-old. He has plenty of time to adjust.

Grading Trades: Surplus
Translating OFP
Cashing Out OFP
Organizational Logic and Playoff Trades

Over the course of the past year, I have used a WARP-based system to assess transactions. I use a harsh depreciation system to demonstrate the assumption that a player’s value will only decrease in time, which basically attempts to price trades closer to their worst-case scenario rather than their best-case scenario. I have priced prospects by assessing the distribution of 18,848 careers and using that distribution to approximate prospect value. This model employs Baseball Reference Play Index WAR data.

Assessing the careers across the history of baseball produces a clear distribution of talent, and also helps to clarify what a player’s ceiling looks like on the field. For example, by the time a batter reaches 1.1 WAR, they are within the top third of all batters in the game. This is helpful to temper expectations of how prospects should produce, and also to understand whether an MLB player is truly elite. Using this career wide scale to assess transactions ensures that analysts can quickly translate the distribution of talent to assess the likelihood of future player production (and therefore the risk of acquiring a player or prospect).

This scheme works across individual seasons, as well, which can be drawn from Baseball Prospectus CSV functions (for example, I found approximately 29,428 individual pitching seasons with recorded WARP, and thousands more with unrecorded WARP, and 95,790 individual batting seasons with recorded WARP, which can be assembled according to mean and standard deviation). Once the mean WARP for pitchers and batters is identified, one can easily scale nearly every player in baseball history according to their percentile on a season-by-season basis:

These scales can be used to approximate Overall Future Potential (OFP), as well, as the distribution between prospect classes can be compared to the distribution between historical seasons. For example, according to the 2013 Baseball Prospectus Top 10 organizational lists, those 300 prospects (and approximately 150 “just interesting” guys) are distributed as follows: 6.7 percent 70 OFP, 27.8 percent 60 OFP, 32.7 percent 50 OFP, and 33.3 percent 45-50 OFP (“just interesting”). In this scenario, 60 and 70 OFP prospects neatly align with the 1+ and 2+ standard deviation historical WARP seasons, while the 50 OFP prospects wind down to the mean WARP or fall just below replacement level on a single season basis. This should align with what one would expect a prospect to produce once they reach the MLB (for example, it would not be surprising if Mauricio Dubon was a player that accumulated between 0.0 and 0.7 WARP on a seasonal basis, while Josh Hader produced 4+ WARP at his best; we could certainly draw such estimates from their tools and scouting profiles).

By identifying mean and standard deviation for individual WARP seasons, one can assess player value in monetary terms based on the progression of each standard deviation:

I believe this is a useful, if crude, system because it seeks to provide meaning to a statement such as, “if Lewis Brinson is a star prospect, he will be likely to produce at least 28.0 WARP in his career;” alternately, one could reasonably expect Brinson to have a 4.0-to-6.0 WARP ceiling should he reach his optimal OFP. I depreciate this historical value in order to express the risk of Brinson reaching that level. Obviously, GM David Stearns and President Jon Daniels did not price out Brinson as a $196 million player (using one free market assessment of the value of WARP); however, depreciating Brinson’s ceiling to accommodate the risk that (1, at that time) Brinson failed to reach the majors and (2, perhaps more plausibly) Brinson plays closer to his floor than his ceiling in the MLB gets Brinson close to Jonathan Lucroy’s value. Placing Overall Future Potential (OFP), Wins Above Replacement (WAR or WARP), and contracts ($$$) on the same scale produces a solid at-a-glance pricing system that allows fans, analysts, and writers to quickly consider risk and reward. A similar price emerges if one moves from a historical career evaluation model to a model that assesses players based on their likely ceiling of seasonal WARP.

One benefit of assessing more than 18,000 baseball careers and scaling those seasons to prospect expectations is that the different parts of these systems speak to each other easily and clearly. We can literally test our assumption that the Lucroy trade was in fact a pretty good deal for both sides on the day of the trade. Obviously, post hoc analysis is necessary each and every year following a trade to test those assumptions. As in Benefit-Cost Analysis, it’s not simply enough to drop things the day of the trade, and adding analysis on an annual basis can help to fine tune assumptions about value, as well (or solidify trade deadline trends). In the case of the Rangers trade for Jonathan Lucroy and Jeremy Jeffress, depreciation analysis shows the rapid decline in surplus value that follows poor production:

Using WARP, OFP, and $$$ to assess trades is inherently problematic insofar as it (a) incorporates biases involving the Replacement Player Model, (b) only assesses players according to marginal value, and (c) assumes that player value can be expressed in one particular figure (be it cash, future potential, or current production). Yet, pushing back on (c), I don’t think it’s entirely problematic to say that an analyst can express player value at one point in time while also understanding how that value can change very quickly, on a seasonal basis, or over the course of a career. Jimmy Nelson is a fine example of this type of issue; the Brewers’ righty struggled with command and mechanical adjustments throughout his first couple of seasons, but working through adjustments has helped him produce notably above average runs prevention in 2017. It’s not wrong to assess Nelson in such a manner now (notably better than average), nor was it wrong to previously assess Nelson (struggling rotation depth). The narrative can connect to the statistics, and one can use a transactional model to assess risk and value in order to judge trades and perhaps understand how value is allocated within a given organization; one could even use such a system to analyze how an organization acquires risk (whether they are risk averse, or neutral, or aggressive).

It should also be clear that players can produce well beyond their OFP. Nolan Arenado is an example of such a player, a 50 OFP top prospect in 2013 who nevertheless entered 2017 with 21.9 WARP over four MLB seasons under his belt. But fans and analysts should be wary of the lesson of Arenado; for one Arenado, the 2013 Top 10 organizational prospects included 35 players with 0.0 or lower career WARP within the class of 50 OFP prospects (the same class as Arenado), and this is prior to considering the forty-five 50 OFP prospects from that class that had yet to reach the MLB (like Tyrone Taylor, for example). Arenado is a valuable lesson about how players can exceed their OFP, but one should understand that developing a single Arenado cost 80 players who have yet to reach the majors or are producing replacement level careers. Incidentally, the 2013 Top 10 prospects rated 50 OFP entered the 2017 season with 190.8 WARP over 287 seasons, which corresponds quite well to the mean seasonal 0.46 WARP produced above.

Both WARP and OFP have their respective imperfections as measurement systems, but their benefits also allow them to serve as solid transactional assessment tools despite their shortcomings. In the case of the Brewers, one can literally price out the value of the club’s extra cash, surplus of prospects, and the depreciated (or maximum) surplus of any intended trade target in order to understand whether a trade is worth the risk. Absent databases full of proprietary scouting, mechanical, and health information, this type of at-a-glance measurement system can approximate transaction prices and help one understand whether teams made an advantageous trade, or simply a good baseball deal.

Minor league stats are effectively meaningless, and especially meaningless without significant context for several reasons:

• First, the league environments themselves are not as readily or openly tracked as MLB, meaning that fans are not likely to have as much as an easy grasp on which parks play like Coors or which parks play like PetCo.

• A related factor impacting environment is that these professional baseball players are honing their skills, and often at different developmental stages. It’s easy to think this is more extreme in Class-A or Advanced A environments, where 19-to-20 year old Dominican Academy graduates might be playing with polished 22-to-23 year old college bats, and a set of recent draftees who might be anywhere from 19-to-21 years old, but this is easily just as extreme at Class-AA and AAA. In the advanced minors reside phenoms like Lewis Brinson, who has played each minor league level with little repetition, organizational depth like Victor Roache or Clint Coulter, 40-man Roster depth like Brent Suter and Michael Reed, and replacement players looking to either make their way back to the MLB or earn a living in the upper reaches of the minors.

• These different developmental stages obscure competitive environments prior to considering the fact that many of these minor league players may be working on specific assignments from the Front Office, meaning that the objective in the minor leagues is not as clear as in the MLB (ex., these players are not specifically in the minors to win, they are in the minors to develop).

• A player’s tools package, mechanics, and approach are most important, and it is unclear that minor league surface statistics easily translate those elements. A player who struggles through a minor league season while making a mechanical or approach adjustment may end up being a more desirable future asset than a player who shreds statistically but does not have the supporting tools, mechanics, and approach.

With this in mind, how do we read context into the minors? Baseball Prospectus offers several helpful statistics to this effect. One can use Opposing OPS to assess whether a phenom prospect is indeed phenomenal, or whether they are feasting on easy competition. Rickie Weeks was arguably a victim of this misunderstanding during his 2005 campaign, during which the 22-year old shredded the Pacific Coast League to the tune of .320 / .431 / .655. This looks all well and good until one determines that the .809 Opponent OPS Weeks faced was among the very weakest for Pacific Coast League regulars, and significantly easier than the .790 Opponent OPS faced by the median PCL player with 200 plate appearances. Brewers fans appear ready to commit a similar error of judgment with Lewis Brinson, who like Weeks is shredding the PCL (Brinson in his age-23 season) while facing some of the easiest competition in the league (.803 Opposing OPS versus .743 median for early season PCL regulars). Unlike 2005 Weeks, 2017 Brinson is also working in the easiest batting environment, which we can compare thanks to BPF, an index of park environment that Baseball Prospectus keeps for minor leagues.

Let me be clear: these statistics are not meant to diminish a player’s accomplishment. Lewis Brinson is hitting quite well, even with park factors and competition in mind; it’s just that these contextual statistics should help keep fans from expecting Brinson to immediately tear up the MLB when he reaches The Show.

With this background, here are the current batting environments faced by Brewers affiliates:

And now the pitching environments:

These tables should hopefully help to place individual performances in context. By using these tables, one can assess whether:

• A player is young or old, or of median age, for their respective league.
• A player is working in an environment that favors pitchers or batters.
• A player is facing easy competition, tough competition, or median competition.

Teammates to Watch:

• Brandon Woodruff versus Josh Hader. Thus far it’s easy to cite Brandon Woodruff’s 17/6/1 K/BB/HR line and 1.61 ERA as indicators of smashing success thus far, but the righty has faced opponents with a .702 OPS thus far. Granted, a .657 OPS-allowed still looks solid, and Woodruff is young in terms of age and developmental status in Class-AAA, so it’s not necessarily reason to be alarmed. Hader, on the other hand, appears to be struggling with command (15 K / 14 BB / 4 HR), but is facing opponents with a .169 Isolated Slugging Percentage. It will be worth looking for the scouting reports to emerge this spring, in order to assess any delivery or stuff issues, but Hader is receiving no benefits with his opponents faced.

• Biloxi Bats versus Carolina Arms. Oh, the prospects! So these guys are not necessarily teammates, but each of these units is facing difficult competition. Given that the Carolina pitching staff features several prospects excelling despite the difficulties (Corbin Burnes, Cody Ponce, and Freddy Peralta for example), midseason call-ups from the Carolina pitching staff could create an All-Team-Tough in Biloxi.

• Jake Gatewood versus Lucas Erceg. Lucas Erceg stormed the prospect scene after the 2016 draft, but few fans or analysts mentioned that the infielder faced relatively easy competition as a relatively polished college player in Class-A ball. Graduating to Carolina, the prospect is now facing a tough .644 Opposing OPS and is still knocking the ball around the ballpark (approximately 10 percent Extra Base Hits thus far). Jake Gatewood is coming into his own in Carolina, but along with some mechanical adjustments the youngster is also facing a .733 Opposing OPS. Granted, this is a case where notable mechanical adjustments are most important, as is the approach adjustment (21 K to 10 BB in 67 PA thus far). It is also worth noting that even though it seems like we’ve been following Gatewood forever, the corner prospect is still young for Advanced A ball.

• Wisconsin Pitching vs. Wisconsin Bats. Forget Colorado Springs, Appleton is also playing tough for pitchers in 2017, which is giving young arms like Trey Supak and Thomas Jankins a trial by fire. Both pitchers have acquitted themselves well thus far, despite the tough environment, which means that those K / BB / HR lines for both pitchers might be even more impressive than they seem at first glance. Meanwhile, it’s worth applying a large grain of salt to several of those blazing hot Wisconsin bats, as these prospects have faced a relatively easy path thus far. Yet, in the case of players like Demi Orimoloye and Mario Feliciano, it is worth noting that both are significantly younger than the Midwest League median age, so it is nice to see these professionals forge their paths at such young ages.

In framing expectations, it is worth investigating the strengths and weaknesses of MLB players as summarized in their overall replacement value. For this exercise, I will use Baseball Reference Wins Above Replacement (WAR) instead of BaseballProspectus WARP, since I used the Play Index to construct sets of 18,848 total MLB careers evident in batting and positional searches of the Play Index (this is remarkably close to the 18,918 players that have worked in MLB since 1871). The benefit of taking this longview is to assess what it actually means to accumulate wins above replacement players — that is, what it means to be a better MLB player than the readily available person that a club could simply land off of the waiver wires or recall from the minor leagues. Using “replacement theory” to judge MLB players has many flaws that can be criticized at length, but in this case one of the strengths of WAR will be seen in the ability to categorize extremely large numbers of players that have played across nearly 150 seasons.

My goal in presenting these charts is to problematize OFP. Earlier this week, I discussed the difficulties in assessing prospect value in order to judge transactions, since there are so many vantage points from which to assess prospect value. Yet, one will notice that in that assessment, there is quite a close range of value for prospects from Grades 40-45 to Grades 55-60. By clustering MLB players according to WAR, I hypothesize that one can translate OFP onto a wider landscape of value, which will allow one to truly capture the distance between different groups of prospects. This exercise is purely abstract insofar as I will link potential OFP ranks to WAR figures, rather than judging whether (or how) players from specific OFP classes surpassed, met, or failed to met their respective ceilings.

Starting with position players (I excluded pitchers from batting WAR conversations), expectations for assessing a 50 OFP, or potential league average player, are deflated: nearly 58 percent of MLB position players earned between -1.0 and 1.0 WAR in their respective careers, and a player that has assessed 2.0 WAR is easily better than 66 percent of all MLB position players in history. But is this what we mean when we describe a 50 OFP prospect, someone who will play for any given amount of time and assess two wins above replacement? I suspect not, and have tried this experiment:

I ascribed 50 OFP to the 1.1 to 13.9 WAR group because this group may most effectively encompass the ideal of serving as an above average player for a short period of time (say, Scooter Gennett, my recent favorite example) or a long period of time (if a player averages 2.0 WARP for five or six seasons, that’s quite a good career, but probably someone who is generally average in any given season). I also favor using this method because it captures the fact that the 300 ranked organizational prospects, or even the 300 ranked plus 150 “just interesting” prospects, comprise between four and six percent of all minor league players to begin with; in 2016 BaseballProspectus lists, for example, the 300 top organizational prospects included approximately 100 55+ OFP prospects and only 51 60+ OFP prospects. It stands to reason that although 60+ OFP prospects are severely rare in the minor leagues (0.7 percent of all minor leaguers), those ranks would occupy more MLB rosters over an extended period of time because those players would stick as solid-to-great players while MLB teams shuffled through 40-55 OFP prospects to find roster value. So, I don’t think it’s ridiculous to suggest that “only” 12 percent of MLB players in history should be assessed as 55+ OFP in terms of translating WAR, and I certainly believe that 70+ OFP players should only occupy the top percentile of MLB position players.

Judging pitchers, the results are rather similar. You will undoubtedly notice, by the way, that pitchers and position players add to more MLB careers than total MLB players from 1871-present. This is undoubtedly due to position players that have pitched. However, attempting to remove these players is quite difficult from this survey, since more than seven percent (!!!) of all MLB pitchers have worked fewer than two games in their respective careers. Even double-checking this type of list would be a monumental task for this type of survey. So, the position players that pitched stay, for now…

While I was constructing the pitching list, I realized that a category discrepancy emerged between 42.0 and 65.9 WAR for position players, and 42.0 and 55.9 WAR for pitchers. This affected 47 position players in that survey, and probably muddied up the 65 OFP and 70 OFP grades to some extent. But, by that point it’s splitting hairs among the top three percent of position players in history, so I left my mistake unharmed (if you protest about the range between Johnny Damon and Willie Randolph, I understand).

Coupled together, pitching and positional WAR provide a much wider range between 40 OFP and 80 OFP. While the total monetized value of these WAR ranges appear problematic for judging prospects, one can simply correct for the fact that approximately 20 percent of prospects make the MLB (or so). Using this type of harsh depreciation, one can construct a relatively strong transactional value marker for MLB prospects:

Does it work? Let’s use an eyeball test with Ryan Braun’s expected trade value, using both depreciated and non-depreciated versions of Braun’s value (reflecting the range of values teams may apply to Braun):

This model appears to be fairly intuitive in this case. If a team uses a depreciated version of Braun’s performance and applies it to his contractual situation, Braun’s trade value would be worth approximately two 50 OFP prospects, maybe a 50 OFP and 55 OFP package if a team really wants Braun or has some value discrepancy with one of their prospects, or one 60 OFP prospect. If teams take Braun’s production value and contractual situation at face value, the veteran is worth approximately two 60 OFP prospects, or a 55 OFP and 60 OFP prospect at the very least. This works remarkably well compared to the theoretical models discussed earlier this week. Let’s run another test, using the Carlos Gomez-Mike Fiers trade (with value assessed on the day of the trade, rather than in hindsight):

This model gets relatively close to capturing equilibrium. The trouble is assessing Fiers’s contract, of course, since four arbitration years of control means that Houston can cut Fiers without paying a dime (which vastly inflates Fiers’s value). Taking Fiers’s performance value of $19.6M and Gomez’s total surplus, their value of $87.2M was countered with a prospect value that returns a historical depreciation value of $89.3M, which is much closer to equilibrium. Obviously, in the actual circumstances of a trade, it is arguable that teams are not trying to return equilibrium value, or rather, that teams are trying to return “equilibrium value” that suits their organizational needs to the greatest extent possible. Even with this caveat, it appears that stratifying the history of MLB according to WAR performance levels, and then grading each percentile with an “OFP” actually crates quite a useful “at a glance” model for analyzing trades in Cost-Benefit Analysis style.

When it comes to rebuilding teams, such as the Brewers, we often talk about the next stars. Who will be the next player to bring us joy? Who will break us from this pit of misery? These discussions often happen around top prospects. The one’s you’ve been reading and hearing about for months on end.

When doing so, however, we ignore an entire set of players. And yes, sometimes we’ll give time to discuss the short and scrappy player, and even times we’ll overrate that player. But, we rarely talk about the players who struggle all their lives to make it to the big leagues.

Many players spend their entire careers in the minor leagues never making it to the show. Others who spend years in the minors, and finally one day get a chance. Today, the latter is what I’ll be looking at, even though the former can still derive an interesting discussion.

In order to find out which player spent the most time in the minors, for the Brewers, before reaching the big leagues, I looked at the number of plate appearances players had before getting to the big leagues.

Zelous Wheeler was drafted in the 19th round, 581st overall, by the Brewers in 2007. He signed and was then sent to play for the Helena Brewers – the Rookie-level Pioneer League.

In Helena, Wheeler mostly played third base, but it was clear, early on that the Brewers thought of Wheeler as a utility infielder. In 2008, Wheeler played in A-Ball for the West Virginia Power. This was his first full season with a professional organization, and they had him playing all over the infield. That season, Wheeler played 34 games at second base, 91 games at third (his primary position), 14 games at shortstop, and three games in left field.

We don’t often think of teams grooming players to be utility infielders or outfielders, but it’s something teams often do especially with late round draft picks.

What’s interesting about Wheeler, however, is that he doesn’t look like the stereotypical infielder. He’s 5’10 and built like a linebacker. “Everyone always says I don’t look like a middle infielder…but I’m pretty quick on my feet,” Wheeler said with a smile in an interview done by the Journal Sentinel.

Wheeler’s body type may not fit the stereotypical infielder profile, but he was nonetheless an average to above average infielder. In fact, in only one of his seasons did Wheeler have a negative FRAA value in the minors and commonly had FRAA values around three.

Defensively, what carried Wheeler through the minors was his strong arm, which in 2010 was named the best infield arm in the Brewers organization by Baseball America. On the hitting side, his plate discipline is what carried him. Wheeler had a .366 OBP throughout his minor league career, which helped him post OPS numbers that always hovered around .800.

In 2012, Wheeler was claimed off waivers by the Baltimore Orioles. The next season he re-signed with the team to a one-year minor league contract. In 2013, he split time between Double-A and Triple-A and produced OPS’ in the high .700s.

In 2014, Wheeler signed a one-year minor-league contract with the New York Yankees. He started the season in Triple-A Scranton and tore the cover off the ball, with a .834 OPS.

Then, on July 2nd, 2014, the New York Yankees promoted Wheeler to the big leagues.

Since the time Wheeler was drafted to the time Wheeler was promoted to the majors, seven years had passed. He played for three different organizations and eight different teams. He played all over the infield, some outfield when his team needed him too, pitched in one game, and tried his luck at catcher. Most notable of all, Wheeler had 3,389 at-bats in the minor leagues before he made his big league debut. That’s the most at-bats a player has had before reaching the majors when drafted by the Brewers (1984-2015). That’s 603 more at bats than Bryce Harper has had in his entire career, major and minor leagues combined. Or, think about it this way, that’s 2,649 more minor-league at-bats than Kris Bryant had.

And, in his first major league game here’s what Zelous Wheeler did:

After spending seven years in the minors, Wheeler hit a long home run in his second major league at-bat. He finished the game 2-4 with a home run and a single.

Unfortunately for Wheeler, that was the height of his major league career. He then struggled mightily at the plate and had inconsistent playing time. Wheeler was optioned to Triple-A when the Yankees acquired Stephen Drew and Martin Prado. On August 21st, the Yankees recalled Wheeler after Beltran went down with an injury.

In his second big league call up, Wheeler didn’t perform much better. Then, after the 2014 season, Wheeler was sold to the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles of Japan for $35, 000.

Wheeler is still playing baseball in Japan. His story isn’t one that will finish in the traditional happy ending. It’s unlikely that he’ll ever get another chance at a big league roster.

Wheeler’s story is one of many professional athletes. Not everyone is as talented as Bryce Harper and Mike Trout. Most players struggle through the minors hoping that some day they’ll get their chance at the show. Many try and fewer make it.

If there’s one solace in this tale, it’s that Wheeler got to enjoy one hell of a moment. We all dream of hitting a home run in the big leagues. Each one of us who picked up a bat when we were little. We practiced in our back yards and with our friends knowing full well that that moment was never going to happen. For Wheeler, however, it did. He got his shot and for one day he made the most of it. He got his pitch and he crushed it.