Eric Thames and skills ownership

This is my ESPN Insider column for the week.

Twenty years ago, I coined a simple aphorism: “Once a player displays a skill, he owns it.” It came about from experiencing the 1996 breakout performance of Henry Rodriguez. After four nondescript seasons in the majors, Rodriguez exploded in 1997 by hitting 36 home runs, driving in 103 and batting .276 for the Montreal Expos.

Analysts were dumbfounded as to where that came from. But a scan back into history revealed that he was the 1990 Texas League MVP behind a 28-109-.291 performance. The skills were always there, it just took him a few years to tap back into them.

Coming into this season, everyone was wondering what to expect from Milwaukee Brewers first-basemen Eric Thames. Would he carry over the immense productivity he displayed in his three years in Korea? Or would he revert to the middling numbers he posted in parts of two seasons with Seattle and Toronto?

Pre-season touts did not know what to do with the extreme gap between the two sets of performance data. Certainly, his Major League numbers were no longer representative. But any reasonable conversion of his foreign stats yielded levels much too high to believe. This could not be the next coming of Mike Trout; this was a 30-year-old journeyman outfielder.

But a look back at history can be revealing.

In 2010, in Class AA ball, Thames hit 27 home runs and drove in 104 in 496 at-bats, with a slash line of .288/.370/.526. He split the 2011 season between Toronto, where he hit 12 homers with a .262 average in 362 AB, and Class AAA where he hit .352 with seven homers in 210 at-bats.

The 2012 Baseball Forecaster said of Thames: “Called up in May, he won increased playing time as the season wore on, and showed even more power than his Major League Equivalencies suggested. Gap between BA and xFIP also suggests some BA upside. Overall, this is definitely a skill set with promise and a ceiling that could be a few years away.”

The seeds were already planted that Thames could be a special player. But not everyone follows a straight trajectory.

Thames beat out Travis Snider for the Blue Jays’ Opening Day left-field job in 2012, but struggled with a .243 BA and was demoted. After hitting .330 over two months in the minors, he was traded to Seattle, where he only managed to hit .220. Thames then spent the entire 2013 season in the minors, hitting .283 with 10 HRs in 368 AB.

At that point, he had fallen off everyone’s radar. The fact that he started putting up monster numbers in Korea was considered little more than noise. After all, he had already failed in the Majors.

But, “once a player displays a skill…” These days, some have taken to attack the adage as trite. The full description in the Baseball Forecaster provides a series of caveats and corollaries that better define the concept of skills ownership. Players do own their skills, but opportunity, health and a variety of external variables shape each development path.

There are many players who rediscover lost skills that have been dormant for some time. Sometimes it’s just our own recency bias that causes players to fall off the radar. A few bad seasons – or five, or eight – are not enough of a reason to completely write a player off.

I have often used Sean Rodriguez (pictured) as a recent case study. After eight nondescript years in the Majors, he broke out with 18 HRs with an .859 OPS in 300 AB last year. How does a 31 year-old have a sudden spike like that? Maybe it harkens back to the 29-HR, .307 season he posted in the minors in 2006? It would have been interesting to see what he could have done this year had he not gotten injured.

Starlin Castro has gotten off to a fast start behind a surprising .358 batting average. For a player whose BA has ranged between .245 and .292 over the past five years, where did a .358 mark come from? Well, he did bat over .300 in his first two years in the Majors, and was a .310 hitter in over 1,000 minor league plate appearances. That included two short 100-AB stints where he batted .376.

Can Zack Cozart sustain a .300 batting average? His current .351 level seems completely out of character given his lifetime .246 mark. He did bat .361 in April 2016 before fading sharply, but he is currently keeping up those numbers here in early May. Is there a precedent for this? Cozart did bat .310 in his last season in the minors before notching a .324 mark in his initial Cincy call-up in 2011.

Where did Trevor Cahill’s 3.06 ERA come from? Yes, he posted a 2.74 mark last year out of the bullpen, but he has not shown signs of being a productive rotation mainstay for five years. He once did go 18-8 with a 2.97 ERA but that was seven years ago. Truth is, he always had more upside than we thought. He posted a 3.19 ERA in the minors in 361 innings, and he never had an ERA over 2.78 in the three minor league stops prior to his first call-up.

In 2013, Derek Holland posted a 3.42 ERA in 213 innings, at the time a five-year high water mark for performance. Since then, he’s barely managed to keep his ERA under 5.00. So where does his current 2.02 ERA come from? He does have a history of posting miniscule ERAs over short periods (his 1.46 ERA in 2014 was in only 37 IP), but he also had some extended stretches in the minors. He had a 2.27 ERA in 150 innings in 2008 and a 1.78 ERA over 65 innings in 2010. Unfortunately, Holland has been saddled with spending his career in hitters ballparks so we always have to temper expectations.