NOTE ON STATS

There were two major developments in minor league stats during the 2006 season.  One was the advent of the marvellous, and self-explanatory, site, www.minorleaguesplits.com.  The other was at www.minorleaguebaseball.com, which has added limited minor league splits.  Each source has advantages and disadvantages.  MiLB.com provides splits only for a player's most recent team.  It also does not provide opponents' OBP and slugging average for pitchers.  The minorleaguesplits site has all of these stats.  In 2006 it had other additional features such as games played (and started!) by position, but it does not have them for 2007.  Its stats, however, are not official and there are quite a few inaccuracies.  The opp. OBP and slugging I've shown in the pitchers' stats starting in 2005 are from minorleaguesplits and are indicated by italics.  The 2007 opponents' OBP and SLG are definitely inaccurate because minorleaguesplits.com was never updated to include stats from the last week or so of the minor league season.  The OBP and SLG numbers are likely to be way off for pitchers who got late-season promotions.

Still another development came in late 2007 with the advent of the minor league version of baseball.reference.com, found at http://minors.baseball-reference.com/ .  It has stats, including fielding and average ages by team and league, going back to 1992 for the North American minor leagues.  Starting in 2007, it also has the Dominican and Venezuelan Summer Leagues.

All of the sources linked above provide a lot of information that's worth checking out.  I've mentioned stats like L/R splits and GB/FB ratios in the individual writeups where I thought they were noteworthy.  Because these splits are generally only available beginning in 2006, they have to be taken with a grain of salt where there are only small sample sizes available.  In my opinion, you need several years of these stats for a player before you can feel very confident about what they indicate.

Career minor league stats are available from several sources.  Waymoresports has career major and minor league stats for all major leaguers and many top prospects.  The Baseball Cube theoretically has career stats for all minor leaguers, as well as for many college players.  The Cube has a lot of errors, but not as many as it used to have.  It's a huge undertaking that seems to be improving over time.  Finally, Baseball America annually publishes its Super Register, which has career stats for all players active in pro ball during the preceding season.

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