The prospect evaluation world seems to have moved on from Austin Beck. Entering the 2022 season, he didn’t appear on any A’s prospect list I could find–not the Baseball Prospectus Top 10, Baseball America Top 40, or most damningly, the FanGraphs Top 62 (including the “Others of Note”).
That represents a precipitous fall for a player who was once the 6th overall pick in the 2017 MLB Draft and received a $5.3 million bonus, a player who isn’t without some minor league success (most notably a strong first full season in 2018), and who remains just 23 years old. But by 2021, the prospecting industry had decided Austin Beck was not going to hit. Witness: he somehow fell from 10th on the FanGraphs A’s prospect list during the 2020 non-season to an honorable mention at the start of the next campaign, despite there being no official baseball in that timeframe. Perhaps that demotion in status reflected the notion that a player with his approach issues (126/24 K/BB in 85 games in 2019) couldn’t afford the lost year of reps that the pandemic unfortunately brought.
It would be hard to call that analysis anything other than prescient when examining Beck’s 2021 season, where he struggled to a .202/.253/.351 batting line in High-A, representing a 110-point drop in OPS, a 50-point drop in wOBA, and a 32-point drop in wRC+ from his already-mediocre first attempt at the level two years prior. Technically, Beck was included in the BP Top 10 after the season, but only in the unranked “Because You Are Going To Ask” spot, where Jeffrey Paternostro again states “Beck’s still an above-average runner with a shot to stick in center field, but none of that really comes into play until and unless he hits.”
The struggles in 2021 were enough to keep Beck from a promotion, so he’s now on Year 3 in High-A, Year 4 if you think of it in calendar time. All told, Beck struck out 34.1% of the time in High-A between 2019 and 2021 while walking only 5% of the time, and brief stints in Triple-A (13 K, 2 BB in 22 PA) and the Arizona Fall League (23 K, 5 BB in 60 PA) don’t paint any nicer of a picture of his approach. Sure, Beck dealt with some injuries in 2021, but you can only explain away this grade of struggle for so long. When a player is striking out about seven times as often as he walks over 700 plate appearances spread out over three years, it’s a pretty good sign that something is persistently broken.
Except in 2022, Austin Beck is hitting.
Granted, it’s just 13 games as of this writing, and his triple-slash line is .275/.375/.425, which isn’t so spectacular as to make one even begin to forget about everything in the previous paragraph. But what’s most striking out the start to Beck’s campaign is that he has already worked seven walks and only struck out seven times. I’m not sure which is more surprising: the near-tripling of his walk rate or the more than halving of his strikeout rate.
So, what’s changed? Should we care that Beck finally seems to be solving the lower minors? Does this make Beck a prospect again? Having watched most of his at-bats over the past ten months or so, I’ll share what I’ve seen from the enigmatic outfielder, but I also want to put this kind of developmental path in some historical context.
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Before we talk about the player Austin Beck is, or might be, now, let’s examine the player he has recently been.
When I first started watching Lansing games on milb.tv last June, it didn’t take me long to identify why Beck was once drafted and thought of as highly as he was. As Paternostro stated, Beck has above-average speed, and he has reasonable feel in center field in addition to a clearly plus arm. He also still is in possession of well-above-average bat speed, his setup at the plate is simple, his swing is workable, and he has above-average raw power and some feel for the barrel–enough to still put up a .148 Isolated Power last year despite his obvious struggles making contact.
This is important because, again like Paternostro stated, if Beck can hit, the rest of his skillset is there to make him a useful major league player. This is an important distinction we shouldn’t take for granted, and separates Beck from the player he’s (understandably) often grouped in with, Lazaro Armenteros. Armenteros is also a former top prospect who’s been stuck in High-A since 2019, and also like Beck, he’s off to a big start in 2022 (.286/.359/.657 as of this writing). But Armenteros’ complicated helicopter swing has far more holes than Beck’s* (even with his hot start this year, he’s striking out 38.5% of the time, which is actually an improvement), and though he also runs well, he’s got the Khris Davis problem of being quite athletic but lacking a feel for outfield defense. Armenteros has to find a way to hit like Davis to be a viable big leaguer; Beck just has to find a way to hit like Bradley Zimmer.
*Occasionally, Lazarito still does something to behold, though. He’s bringing his power into games this year, which is a nice development after an extremely rough 2021.
Still, this is the dreaded Lewis Brinson/Bubba Starling kind of profile–everything except, oh, y’know, just the most important skill there is for a position player. So where has it all gone wrong in this department, if Beck’s bat speed is intact and his mechanics at the plate look reasonable? After demoting Beck from 10th to honorable mention status in that 2021 FanGraphs list, Eric Longenhagen opined that “[his] downfall is his ability to lay off sliders away from him,” while Paternostro noted in the offseason BP writeup that “Beck’s…swing is too often late on average velocity.” Yep, that’s pretty much exactly what I saw throughout the 2021 season: too much chasing of breaking stuff (if anything, curves seemed to flummox Beck more than sliders) off the plate away or breaking down and out of the zone, and a perplexing tendency to hit mistakes hard…but late, and thus harmlessly fouled off into the right field stands.
Paternostro seemed to blame the swing for this latter issue, but it instead looked to me like these two problems were simply intertwined with one another. Lansing broadcaster Jesse Goldberg-Strassler had this to say about Beck this past offseason:
“Austin Beck has such flashes of genius. His arm, there’s that flash, that it was the strongest on the team, that he could play a carom, or play a bounce, and wing it, and that ball was arriving before the runner was ready. His bat had that flashes of…when he was locked in, you could not throw it to him, because he would destroy it…The difficulty still was that inconsistency, that he would have games of greatness, games where he looked like the best player in the league, and then the next game, it would be a frustrating first at-bat, a frustrating call, frustrating thing would happen, and then the game would turn frustrating for him…I think the key for him is how does he deal with adversity? Whether it’s adversity with his body, or whether it’s adversity with calls, or with a slump…I really do think that the question for Austin next year will be, when things go well, that’s great, but how are you when things start going in the wrong direction?”
I’ve never been great at this more mental/intangible part of prospect analysis: I’m not great at reading body language to begin with, and when you’re only seeing a player for one random series in a season (often how I saw players in my FanGraphs days), it’s recklessly presumptuous to extend any observations in this area and claim that’s how the player always is.* But what Goldberg-Strassler describes was palpable in 2021. There were games where Beck was locked in at the plate and had a reasonably sound approach, give or take one gratuitous rip at a breaking ball or high heat. In these games, he’d get on top of mistakes, lash them to the pull side, and even flash some ability to move the barrel around and adjust to offspeed stuff. But when he wasn’t locked in, Beck would start hacking away at junk out of the zone, trying to make something happen, and basically get himself out. After a bunch of empty cuts, he’d begin to second-guess his instincts and be that fraction late on the offerings he actually could drive. Hence all of the hard-hit foul balls to right, which in turn extended the at-bat for the pitcher to throw another chase pitch.
*Maybe it isn’t, if you know what you’re looking for. I certainly never had the kind of comfort level with this part of evaluation to have much confidence in my own assessments of mentality/intangibles, aside from a few obvious cases.
Beck’s 2021 season actually breaks down pretty nicely into thirds that are quite illustrative of what it looked like when he seemed to have confidence at the plate vs. when he didn’t:
May 12-June 25: .139/.219/.277, 28 K (38.4%), 6 BB (8.2%), 1 HR
July 15-August 21: .290/.325/.491, 30 K (24.4%), 6 BB (4.9%), 5 HR
August 22-September 18: .116/.164/.188, 33 K (45.2%), 3 BB (4.1%), 1 HR
I know these sorts of things are always subject to the arbitrary-endpoints critique, and fair enough, but even without the context provided above, this breakdown offers a compelling contrast. In the first third, Beck was understandably shaking off the rust, not only from the pandemic off-year but also an injury that delayed the start of his season (and then a second injury that sidelined him for two weeks at the beginning of June). After that, the A’s made the odd but seemingly helpful decision to give him that short tour in Triple-A (hence the 20-day gap, so that particular endpoint is actually not arbitrary), from which he returned a different player. Beck’s performance in that hot stretch isn’t overwhelming or anything—a 30/6 K/BB is still bad—but it’s not all just BABIP-fueled luck either, as he hit for way more power and struck out significantly less often than he did the rest of the season, or 2019 for that matter.
The season-ending slump—which seems like it carried over to the AFL—blunted the momentum of the hot streak to the point where Beck’s overall season numbers were ghastly. But during the offseason, as foolish as it kind of seemed given the extensive High-A track record he had compiled, I couldn’t help dwelling on the notion, as Goldberg-Strassler did, that a good version of this player exists. For a bit over a month in the middle there, that’s what he had been, and if Beck could recapture and sustain that version of himself, the rest of the skills were there for him to get back on the map. Even if the walk rate was still bad, a 24.4% strikeout rate is orders of magnitude less troubling than the season-long number, and would open up some Zimmer/Michael Taylor kinds of possibilities and get Beck off the Courtney Hawkins path he’s been heading down.*
*Credit to Hawkins, though: he’s become maybe the best offensive force in independent league baseball. I wouldn’t be shocked if he could slug some in Triple-A.
I’m not here to congratulate myself for having that offseason thought, promising though the early returns are. It’s been thirteen games, and as much as the above streakiness offers a note of hope that isn’t apparent in the overall season-long performance, it also tells us that Beck can fall into a prolonged slump, which he can ill afford now that he’s older than the average player at his level for the first time in his career. All I’m saying is that he has established more of a precedent for success in Lansing than might’ve been clear, and thus we perhaps can take his early-season success a bit more seriously.
So, what has that early-season success looked like? Well, he’s…honestly had a legitimately good approach at the plate. It certainly hasn’t appeared to me that he’s lucked into the walks or the strikeout avoidance. I don’t have a complete sample of every pitch he’s seen,* but in the 94 pitches I’ve charted, he’s offered at 28 of 46 within the strike zone (a 60.9% Z-Swing) and just nine of the 48 outside of it (an 18.75% O-Swing). I don’t have data on how good those metrics are for a High-A hitter, but MLB average is about 65% Z-Swing and 28% O-Swing, so Beck has been slightly more passive than average at attacking stuff in the zone, but way less chasey than a major league hitter. Of course, it’s only 94 pitches (I’ll be compiling more data, of course, as the season progresses), but swing rates, and even walk and strikeout rates, stabilize very quickly relative to most stats, so it’s more encouraging than most April data can be.
*Lansing’s recent series with Lake County wasn’t on milb.tv, and there’s about two games’ worth of pitches to Beck I’ve watched but not charted.
To my eyes, Beck clearly came into this season with a plan: see more pitches. The first couple of games, he seemed very tentative, avoiding chases but reverting to the foul-mistakes-off pattern that was so frustrating last season. It wasn’t clear whether he actually had a better approach or had just made up his mind (or been told by the coaching staff) to be more passive. If you don’t have the ability to recognize pitches, a passive approach doesn’t really do you much good, because you’re still swinging relatively indiscriminately when you do decide to let it rip (which ends up often being when you’re down in the count and thus more likely to see junk off the plate). So it was a welcome surprise when, after those first couple of games, Beck settled into a much more relaxed, confident approach and maintained the plate discipline while starting to jump on mistakes like he did when he was locked in last summer. Doing that straightaway in the Michigan cold–the Midwest League is notorious for heavily favoring pitchers in April–isn’t easy.
So that’s where I’m at with Austin Beck right now. His improvement looks pretty legit–it’s supported by the underlying plate discipline metrics, he’s hitting the ball hard, and I’ve seen him flash this kind of offensive ability at the High-A level for an extended period (barring the plate discipline) before. He’s still a good athlete, and I still think the swing is fine. It’s early, and he absolutely could fall into a rut again, but he’d make my organizational top 50 prospects if I were to make such a list now (I’d guess he’d be about 40th). If he keeps building on this, by the time I actually construct a top 50 list (I’ll probably do one midseason right before the draft), he could rise higher, especially if the A’s test him in Double-A and he passes.
If you came here for that verdict, there it is, and you can stop reading here. But Beck’s development got me thinking about some other stuff.
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When we look at a situation like Beck’s, we’re asking a version of one of the most common questions posed in sports analysis: “Is this change for real?” A lot of the time, as it seems to be here, the answer is at least somewhat affirmative. This is especially true in minor league baseball, where players are generally supposed to be improving. But there’s an additional wrench that minor league baseball provides: whether Austin Beck has improved to the point where he is an asset to the Lansing Lugnuts is not really the important question (though answering it does tell us something for sure). Obviously, we want to know whether he’ll be an asset to the Oakland A’s, or some other major league team, at some point. Of course, that’s impossible to know right now, but in general what we want to come away with when we investigate a prospect like this is
What’s the magnitude of his improvement?
Can he keep improving from here, or is this it?
This idea of what to do about evaluating improvements has been weighing heavily on my mind recently. As I said earlier, most* of my pre-2021 prospect analysis was built off of watching singular pitching outings or a couple of games + batting practice of hitters. In that sort of mode, you’re seeing a guy quickly and trying to discern what his skillset is, whether it’s synchronized with his current level of performance, and how it might project going forward. What I’m doing now, in watching a ton of A’s minor league baseball, is very different, because once a player has had a few games in full-season ball, I can compare the player to all versions of his past self. Beck’s approach is better! Tyler Soderstrom’s defense has improved! Logan Davidson is staying back on the ball a lot better! Jack Owen ditched his curve and cutter and is now throwing a sweeper! Kumar Nambiar added a cutter! Brock Whittlesey and Diego Granado lowered their arm slots! Those are maybe a bit shy of half the changes I’ve noticed in 2022, and I haven’t even watched more than a series or so of Midland and Stockton.
*At various times, I had some continuity on White Sox, Rangers, Orioles, and occasionally Marlins prospects, so it’s not like this is a completely foreign idea to me. It’s just that, knowing I often wouldn’t get to have that context, my default mental orientation to prospect analysis hasn’t typically made a ton of space for it. Now that that context basically always exists for A’s guys, I have to think through how it fits in more.
But what do we actually make of these improvements, whether or not all of them immediately manifest in a notable statistical change like Beck’s? Surely, most players are improving in some way: that’s their job, they work hard at it, and how else do players move up levels? Noticing an improvement and treating it as a trajectory-altering eureka moment by default is going to be a wild overreaction. But meaningful changes happen all the time: in the A’s organization witness Lawrence Butler’s, Mickey McDonald’s, and Garrett Acton’s 2021 seasons, or Colin Peluse and Chase Cohen’s velocity gains over the 2020 non-season. Look at how seismically Austin Briggs' 2021 shifted after June 20.
When somebody does what Beck is doing right now, it’s often discounted by analysts. “But he’s repeating the level” is a phrase we hear a lot. The improvement at that level might be real, the analyst thinks, but the fact that it took so long says in itself that further improvements are not particularly likely.
I’m honestly not clear why repeating levels is seen this way, though there are some understandable possibilities. For one, almost by definition, repeaters are going to be older than non-repeaters–a quick, crude investigation pins the difference at something like .85 years at the High-A level, historically. Second, the fact that the player struggled initially/took longer to “solve” the level might indicate more difficulty making and/or implementing adjustments, which would compound over developmental time. Third, some of the player’s opponents are also repeating the level, so his improvement might just be that he learned to beat up on other repeaters once he figured them out rather than actually mastered the level wholesale.
That said, of course, repeating the level also means the book gets out on that player more than his first-time teammates. Beck, for instance, has seen a copious amount of breaking balls from Day 1 this season, as pitchers have doubled and tripled up on breaking stuff trying to get him to chase (also, only 49% of pitches against him have been in the zone, which is below average). 39 of those 94 coded pitches (41.5%) have been of the breaking variety. By comparison, his righthanded-hitting teammates Euribiel Angeles (30.6%), Brayan Buelvas (29.1%), Brett Harris (27%), and even the repeating Armenteros (just 25.8%, surprisingly) haven’t been thrown benders at anywhere near that rate in my sample of coded pitches. In that sense, you could weirdly consider Beck’s improvement extra impressive, since it’s come against a plan of attack designed to exploit his weaknesses more than the typical hitter would face at this level.
As I've said, the pressing question in the medium-term (say, next 12 months) for Beck will be whether he can get to the upper minors and hold his own there. If he can, then all of a sudden he’ll be quite proximal to the big leagues at a reasonable age, and the industry will likely start to buy in again on his potential. The jump from High-A to Double-A is a notorious challenge and a huge litmus test. So I wanted to take a look at some data to see how much a repeater like Beck might struggle with that transition versus somebody who only spent one year in High-A. For purposes of this piece, I’m mostly going to look at the strike zone control part of the equation (I’ll throw triple-slash stuff in real quick later for curiosity), since a) that’s been the big improvement for Beck this year and b) introducing batted ball stuff runs into a bunch of park/league factors, among other confounds.
Let’s start by establishing a general baseline. When a player gets promoted from High-A to Double-A, how much should we expect his walk rate to decrease and his strikeout rate to increase? I examined all 500 player seasons since 2006 where the player had at least 160 PA in High-A and at least 160 PA in Double-A, and the answer appears to be that the walk rate gets cut by 14% and the strikeout rate increases by 7%. If you want to use more precise linear* regression, here are the equations (to paraphrase Baseball Prospectus’ great Russell Carleton: beware of lots of incoming math for the rest of this piece!):
AA BB% = .579(High-A BB%) + 3.03%
AA K% = .904(High-A K%) + 3.37%
*I tried quadratic, cubic, log, etc. as well, and all basically have an r-squared of .39 or .40 for walks and .58 or .59 for strikeouts. So we’ll just stick with linear for simplicity.
These equations are not as intuitive as the blanket “multiply walks by .86 and strikeouts by 1.07,” because they suggest that a batter with a walk rate below 7.2% in High-A would actually see his walk rate increase in Double-A, and a batter with a strikeout rate above 35% in High-A would actually see his walk rate decrease in Double-A. Therefore, they suggest that 2021 Austin Beck, had he been moved up to Midland at some point in the season, would’ve actually had a better K/BB ratio than he had in Lansing, with his strikeout rate more or less holding constant and his walk rate jumping up a bit north of 6%. This actually is supported by the historical data:
High-A BB% Group | # of Players | Avg. High-A BB% | Avg. AA BB% |
0-4% | 24 | 3.25% | 4.22% |
4-7% | 113 | 5.83% | 6.36% |
7-10% | 152 | 8.46% | 8.1% |
10-13% | 133 | 11.37% | 9.41% |
13%+ | 78 | 15.27% | 11.9% |
High-A K% Group | # of Players | Avg. High-A K% | Avg. AA K% |
0-11% | 33 | 8.95% | 11.33% |
11-19% | 252 | 15.34% | 17.32% |
19-27% | 180 | 22.37% | 24.07% |
27%+ | 35 | 29.74% | 29.88% |
Mostly, this is a reflection of regression to the mean–extremely low walk rates and extremely high strikeout rates likely have a touch of luck/noise sprinkled in there. Anyhow, even though strong walk and strikeout numbers are more harshly punished by comparison, if Beck’s 14.6% walk and strikeout rates are legitimate, then the formulas would translate that to 11.5% walks and 16.6% strikeouts in Double-A. If the A’s were to promote Beck to that level right now and he were to do that the rest of the year, that would a) be a pretty freaking historic improvement from where he was in 2021 and b) probably get him back to organizational Top 20 status.
I don’t think that’s a realistic expectation, because the 14.6% rates themselves undoubtedly are still subject to regression to the mean. I’ll spare you the math, but if we regress Beck toward the Midwest League means for walk and strikeout rate based on his sample size of 48 PA, we come up with something like an estimated “true talent” walk rate of 12% and strikeout rate of 21.6% for Beck this season.* Translate those to Double-A with the above formulas, and he’d project for walk and strikeout rates just a shade under 10% and 23%, respectively, if he were promoted.
*It can be argued that Beck should be regressed not toward the MWL mean, but his previous performance, which would yield a more pessimistic result (true talent 8.2% BB% and 25.5% K%, translating to 7.8% and 26.4% in Double-A). Even these numbers are already better than what you’d get from using Beck’s numbers in his hot stretch last year (translated 5.9%/25.4%), let alone his full-season numbers.
I understand if you greet that analysis with a shrug. I kind of do, too. Every player is an individual, and statistically modeling how they’ll handle a promotion based on data like this isn’t all that helpful in individual cases (It’s interesting in the aggregate though, hence why I said my actual opinion on Beck ends above* and this part is just sandboxing around). But now that we’ve established this baseline for translation, let’s turn to the issue of High-A repeaters. Do they, as a group, handle promotions to Double-A worse than those who don’t get sent back for a second year?
*Given my analysis above, though, I don’t think 10% and 23% is ludicrous or anything. Beck is a pretty volatile player, so his performance could go any number of directions, but I don’t hate those numbers as a mean estimate. I’d probably bump it down just a touch toward the 7.8/26.4 mentioned above, and say like 9/25. Somewhere in there. Even that would count as a developmental success given where Beck was last year and offer some hope for him going forward. And the more he sustains this level of performance and avoids going back into slump mode, the more appropriate it is to lean toward a more optimistic estimate as the season progresses.
It is worth noting, first, that repeating High-A in itself does not seem to do wonders for players’ success in Year 2 at that level. I collected all the player seasons of at least 250 PA in High-A since 2006 and looked at the 725 cases of players repeating the level.* On average, their walk rates were 8.03% in Year 1 and 8.49% in Year 2, and their strikeout rates were 20.59% in Year 1 and 20.24% in Year 2, so their K/BB ratios improved from 2.56 to 2.38. That’s something, but it’s not as much as I would’ve intuitively expected, and does show that players like Beck who significantly improve their plate discipline numbers upon repeating this level are actually fairly rare. Only 149 of the 725 players improved their walk rates by more than 2.5%, and only 140 cut their strikeout rates by more than 4%. Only 30 did both. Their triple-slash lines also only improved mildly, from .251/.320/.374 to .262/.332/.400.
*Yeah, this probably will catch some guys who spent exactly half of one year and then exactly half the next in High-A. My methodology in these analyses also doesn’t distinguish demotions from Double-A to High-A from promotions the other way. Those are still going to be a relatively small part of the sample, but they are confounds of some sort.
What happens when those guys are promoted to Double-A when compared to others? Here you go:
Repeating players:* average High-A BB% 8.59%, K% 18.72%; average Double-A BB% 7.57%, K% 20.76%
Non-repeating players:** average High-A BB% 9.60%, K% 18.41%; average Double-A BB% 8.62%, K% 20.13%
*Players who spent more than 250 PA in High-A Year 1, then more than 250 PA in HIgh-A and 160 PA in Double-A in Year 2. N = 74.
**Players who spent at least 160 PA in both High-A and Double-A in a season who did not meet the repeating player criteria above. N = 426.
Out of curiosity, let’s take a quick look at triple-slashes too:
Repeaters: .288/.356/.447 in High-A; .256/.319/.387 in Double-A
Non-repeaters: .293/.368/.456 in High-A; .261/.332/.402 in Double-A
So…yeah, that’s pretty similar. The one thing that jumps out in these data is that the players defined as “non-repeating” here had better statlines at both levels by a little bit, mostly driven by a 1% higher walk rate.* But “repeating status” had no tangible effect on how a player would translate to Double-A, given his High-A stats. I tested it as a covariate to double-check, and on all five of these statistics, it was not a significant predictor (walk rate and OBP were closest, with p-values between .10 and .15).
*I’m not sure why this is. Perhaps there’s a slightly lower threshold for a repeater to clear to be promoted, since he’s been languishing at High-A for longer. Or it could be noise with the fairly small sample of repeaters under this definition.
So, no, there doesn’t seem to be a “repeater penalty,” at least as far as translating to Double-A is concerned. That still doesn’t remove the fact that repeaters are going to, on average, be a bit older than players who move up more quickly, and thus still can fairly be considered slightly lower-tier prospects than non-repeaters, on average. But the idea* that taking extra time to “solve a level” is in itself a black mark doesn’t seem to be well-supported by the data.
*It’s important to say, as I kind of hinted at like halfway through this piece, that I haven’t really seen explicit rationale for dinging repeaters spelled out anywhere–it’s just kind of casually mentioned in discussion of certain prospects–and it thus may be that this “extra-time-solving penalty” is kind of a strawman, I’m not sure. I just thought it was an interesting idea to investigate: these results are informative, and they would’ve been informative if they had supported the idea of such a penalty, too.
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Taken as a whole, this analysis seems to be good news for the Austin Becks of the world. Dramatic improvements when repeating High-A are not particularly common, so they ought to be taken seriously* rather than being damned with faint praise, and taking extra time to get from High-A to Double-A doesn’t seem to lower the chances of success after that promotion.
*Caveats apply. Obviously, if somebody improves in High-A from age 25 to age 26, that only gets him so far, whereas improving from age 20 to 21 is massive. Also, again, performance is not the main concern in High-A. But if the performance does dramatically improve, it certainly invites a possible reassessment, because it may mean the player has made a meaningful positive change in not only his current skillset, but his future one. Cases like Beck’s, where the tools are there and the performance hasn’t followed, and then all of a sudden it snaps into place, might actually be the times this buoys a player’s projection the most.
As with last week's piece on David Leal, when I started to write this, I thought I had kind of a sneakily optimistic take on the player in question, but wanted to run some related analyses as both a sanity check and point of intrigue. I didn't start running the analyses until I was halfway through writing, and thus didn't know whether they would point toward similar conclusions as my eyes. In both cases, though, they seem to have, and I've been left almost wondering if my initial take was too conservative. It's always nice when analytics agree with the eye test.
It's still early, and it's thus impossible to know whether Beck will fall back into his streaky pattern. But if the early data and video is any indication, improvements like this don't come around that often, and the belated nature of them does not hamper the player from continuing to adjust to more difficult competition in the near future. So when a player manages to get things together after some struggles, he merits our attention, even if it seems like it's taken quite a while.