What exactly *is* a Short-Season Single-A affiliate?
Baseball is an incredibly difficult sport to master and that has resulted in an extremely advanced system of player development.
Consider that even first-round draft picks’ odds of ever making a major league roster are just 66%. Second rounders get 49% odds. The numbers drop off from there with each successive round. Once you’re in rounds 21-plus, less than 7% make it.
It’s not a stunning idea to think of a high school kid coming straight into the NBA and being dominant. We’ve seen that happen fairly often. Sure, baseball has its Kobe and Lebron equivalents in guys like Mike Trout and Bryce Harper who flew through the minor leagues, but these are extreme exceptions. A couple years of college ball seems to be enough to get quality NFL and NBA draftees to a sufficient point of maturity to be competent in the league.
In contrast to football and basketball, baseball requires years of investment in professional talent development.
In Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s research on the concept of “flow”, he talks about the importance of finding the sweet spot between being not being challenged too much or too little, but just enough. In order to create levels of competition that isn’t going to make a player feel like either a child or a god, there are a range of talent-level minor leagues, with AAA being the highest level, AA the next highest, and A below that.
The Dust Devils are classified as a Short Season Single A affiliate of the San Diego Padres.
Years ago, I thought the whole “short season” business was unnecessary and called them a “Single A” team. It turns out that’s actually wrong because the minor league baseball system is crazypants kinds of complex:
The current minor league classification system divides leagues into one of six classes, those being Triple-A (AAA), Double-A (AA), Class A-Advanced (High A or A+), Class A (Low A), Class A Short Season, and Rookie. Furthermore, Rookie is further informally subdivided into Rookie Advanced, complex-based Rookie and international summer baseball. Under the rules governing the affiliated minor leagues, Class A-Advanced, Class A, and Class A Short Season are separate classifications despite the similarity in name. (Wikipedia)
Got all that straight?
There’s even more nuance: “Not all short-season and rookie leagues are the same,” says Jeff Moore in his nice writeup on the difference between minor league levels.
Some short season leagues take place on teams’ spring training complexes without crowds, intended to ease players into the world of professional sports without having to deal with travel or performing in front of crowds. But others, like the Dust Devils’ Northwest league, provide the full experience of being a professional ballplayer.
As such, Northwest league teams are the landing place for a specific mix of players:
Players in short season leagues are a mixture of newly signed draftees who are considered more advanced than other draftees, and second-year pros who were not ready or for whom there was not space at a higher level to move up. (Wikipedia)
“More advanced” doesn’t mean “highest ceiling”, but maturity and composure and comfort with being a professional player. College players are going to be a lot closer to having that kind of development than prep kids.
So you won’t see recent high school grad draftees showing up on the Dust Devils roster — they’ll end up on one of the Padres’ Rookie teams. It’s mostly college players we can expect to be the ones coming straight from the draft to the Devils. Of course, if a player seems advanced enough, it’s possible they may well skip short season A entirely and get challenged against tougher competition. And if the goal is get playing time against appropriate competition, you’ve got to have playing time to give. Load up on too many similar-level 2Bs and they can’t all end up on the same team.
The Dust Devils’ 2016 opening roster appeared to be integrated with the recent draft class than the 2017 opening roster and we can see something in the difference between those teams’ ages. Despite the 2016 opening roster featuring more from that year’s draft class, the 2017 opening roster was actually younger because the 2016 draftees were among the oldest members of the 2016 opening roster.
A player’s age and the shape of their baseball playing experience thus far plays a significant role into where a newly acquired player will land in a minor league system. You aren’t going to see very many 18 year old draftees. The same isn’t the case for international free agents though. The 2017 Dust Devils roster featured international players as young as then 17 year-old Justin Lopez. International players seem to have a different development path, largely driven by the intense scouting and professionalization of players at much younger ages in some Latin American countries than occurs in the US and Canada.
So as we look forward to seeing how the Padres fill out their 2018 Dust Devils roster, I’d expect we’ll see some mix of international players, 2017 draftees, and a handful of 2018 college player draftees, with the rest filling in from prior drafts.
