The Angels have a lot of exciting pitching prospects. Andrew Heaney and Sean Newcomb are the only arms that get any real national hype, but aren’t the lone pitchers of promise in the system. Guys like Nick Tropeano, Nate Smith, Chris Ellis, Jeremy Rhoades, and Tyler DeLoach are solid in their own right, and (along with several others) have helped give the organization a depth of young pitching it’s lacked since at least the Dan Haren trade.
Sadly, the same cannot be said for the club’s positional prospects.
Not one of their young hitters would be likely to end up on a top 200 prospect list, let alone a top 100. Among MLB dot com’s Top 30 Angels prospects, there are 13 position players: none is in the top five, and only eight weren’t drafted last month. 21-year-old Cuban signee Roberto Baldoquin is atop the list among positional players, ranking sixth overall despite a .223/.267/.293 over 191 PA in the very hitter-friendly Cal League. Depressingly, his slash line is far from the worst in the group. In fact, of the eight ranked players who’ve been with the organization since the start of the year, half own OPSes under .620 this season.
Long story short, Kaleb Cowart might very well be the Angels’ best positional prospect above Rookie Ball right now. Yes, that Kaleb Cowart. As in, the once top prospect who posted a sub-.600 OPS in over 1,000 plate appearances at Double-A between 2013 and 2014, and who was another bad month or two away from being converted to a pitcher. After two mostly miserable months at High-A to start 2015—he was demoted following a poor spring—Cowart was promoted to Triple-A Salt Lake in June to fill at third while Kyle Kubitza got a cup of coffee with the big-league club. No one really expected Cowart to hold his own in the PCL after failing everywhere else, they just needed a warm body to man the hot corner.
And yet, here we are two months later and Cowart is batting .327/.405/.513 with through 173 plate appearances with the Bees. Not too shabby for a kid who just turned 23—he’s the youngest hitter on the team and eighth youngest in the league—and downright incredible for someone who was utterly lost at the plate against mostly lesser pitching the last two-plus years.
The question now is whether what we’re seeing is a real improvement brought on by some tangible change in approach or if this is simply Cowart’s dead cat bounce, serving only to delay his inevitable move to the mound. I can’t provide a definitive answer without access to a time machine, but what I can do is put forward a number of positives and negatives related to his recent resurgence and let you make up your own mind. So I will:
Positives
1) OMG Cowart Is Actually Hitting the Ball
After trying and failing for so long, it’s a testament to Cowart’s tenacity that he didn’t just throw in the towel when he was demoted back to High-A. I can barely muster the will to get out of bed on time most mornings; I can’t imagine fruitlessly toiling away at something so taxing for two years like Cowart did, especially when so many others were succeeding around him. That his hard work might finally be paying off has gotta do wonders for his confidence both on and off the field. Whether that confidence translates into sustained success remains to be seen, but for now it’s more than enough that he has some positive results from which to feed off.
Per the OC Register, Cowart’s apparent return to form might have something to do with him reverting to the batting stance and swing he used as a 20-year-old in 2012, when a .276/.358/.452 line and an elite arm made him a consensus top 100 prospect in baseball. That his recent resurgence corresponds with the change in approach at the plate raises two questions: 1) How sure are we that this isn’t merely a convenient coincidence to create an easy narrative?; and 2) Why the hell did someone think it was a good idea to change his swing immediately after his best season as a professional? (Seriously, though. Who do we have to tar and feather for that?)
Whatever the case may be, the important thing is that he seems to be seeing the ball well again, and hitting it hard. He has 17 extra-base hits in 44 Triple-A games thus far, which is nearly two-thirds of the total he had in 126 Double-A games last year. Cowart may not be among the league leaders in the PCL, but given where he was at the start of the season, any sign of life is a pretty huge deal.
2) He’s Holding His Own Even At Sea Level
The Pacific Coast League is infamous for its hitter-friendly confines. Despite having the word “coast” in the name, which would seem to imply sea-level stadia, many of the league’s parks are at extreme elevation. The Albuquerque Quakes, Colorado Springs Sky Sox, El Paso Chihuahuas, and Salt Lake Bees all play in cities at least 3,800 ft above sea-level, meaning the league consists of a four-pack of Coors-lites. As Cowart plays half his games in Salt Lake, he’s no doubt been the beneficiary of a friendly home park.
However, not all the parks in the PCL are conducive to offensive success. If we separate Cowart’s Triple-A numbers by ballpark, we find that while the bandboxes have certainly boosted his numbers, it’s not as though he’s completely rolled over and died in some of the league’s harsher environments.
The sample size is small all around, of course, so it’s impossible to come to any definitive conclusions, but it doesn’t appear that Cowart’s offensive production is solely the result of hitter-friendly confines. Even if we scale his numbers back to account for the fact that his most prodigious output has come in games at Salt Lake, El Paso, and Las Vegas, his overall line would still be right around league average (.751 OPS), which, again, is a hell of a lot better than anything he did the last two years in the Texas League.
3) His Plate Discipline is Solid Again
A side effect of Cowart’s inability to maintain a consistent approach at the plate the last two seasons was the steady erosion of his plate discipline. The Georgia native walked an impressive 67 times in 605 plate appearances (11%) during his breakout 2012 season, but then drew only 81 free passes in 1,033 PA (7.8%) the next two seasons. He didn’t quite turn into Brandon Wood in terms of plate discipline once at Double-A, but he seemed to be well on his way.
This year, though, Cowart’s walk totals have kicked right back up to his 2012 levels and maybe even passed them. He’s walked 43 times in 394 PA (10.9%) overall on the year, but also 21 times in the 173 PA (12.1%) since his promotion to Triple-A. Even if we can’t take his slash line at face value, we can at least point to his walk rate as an indication that he’s “back”.
Negatives
1) That BABIP Though
I think we all knew this was coming. Cowart reached base once on two balls put in play Wednesday night, pushing his BABIP at Triple-A up to a lovely but extremely flukey .433. For all its hitter-friendliness, the PCL as a whole still has just a .275 BABIP, meaning Cowart’s batting average will take a serious hit eventually (unless he manages to cut down on strikeouts significantly).
Right now, his BABIP is largely buoyed by a ridiculous 30.56% line drive rate. The last two years that rate was about 18% for Cowart—slightly below average, but not so bad. His rate this season wouldn’t just lead all of Major League Baseball were he in the majors, it would also be the second-highest LD rate of any qualified batter this decade. Cowart may have refound his swing, but that doesn’t mean he’s suddenly become Al Oliver reincarnate. As that rate dips, so will his overall numbers. That doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll be awful all over again, but it does mean he’s been very fortunate thus far.
2) Platoon Splits
Perhaps the biggest issue with Cowart going forward, assuming that he’s actually reestablished himself as not a complete lost cause at the plate, is whether the Angels decide to have him scrap switch-hitting for good before giving him a shot in Anaheim. He hit exclusively from the left side for a little while at the end of 2014, but quickly reverted back to batting from both sides this spring. The result? Well, you might say things so far have been a little … [puts on shades] … one-sided.
On the season, there is an exactly 400-point gap in OPS between his numbers as a left-handed batter (.903) and a right-handed batter (.503). That divide is quite a bit smaller if you take his Triple-A numbers alone—there it’s .997 vs. .706—but it’s still large enough to wonder why he doesn’t just focus his efforts on batting from the left side only.
The lone switch hitter I can think of who found sustained big-league success with such a massive production gap (i.e. > 200 points) between his two swings is Lance Berkman. But that was only because he was an absolutely elite hitter from the left side (.995 OPS), and merely average from the right (.777). Had he been merely above average from the left and abysmal with the right, he would have likely gone the course of Pablo Sandoval and J.T. Snow, abandoning the right-handed swing altogether.
I don’t know what the Angels have planned for Cowart in this regard, considering they were probably planning to take away his bat entirely not too long ago, but you’d think they’d want to remove his biggest weakness from play while things are still going relatively well.
3) Not The First to Dominate PCL
The list of players to post a greater than .900 OPS in the PCL only to do nothing in the big leagues is extensive. Turks Teeth over at Halos Heaven compiled a pretty exhaustive list recently of guys you’ve mostly forgotten were in the Angels system who put together some of these seasons. A brief excerpt from each of the last seven years:
2008: Freddy Sandoval (.903 OPS)
2009: Sean Rodriguez (1.016)
2010: Cory Aldridge (.923)
2011: Paul McAnulty (.902)
2012: Vernon Wells (.934)
2013: Drew Heid (.943)
2014: Brennan Boesch (1.017)
2015: Kaleb Cowart (.918)
That’s not exactly exclusive company. There’s no guarantee that his success is merely a flash in a pan like it was for those players, of course, but there’s really no way to say it isn’t either. Cowart certainly has age and pedigree on his side, but only time will tell if what he’s doing now will continue beyond his first ~175 plate appearances the PCL.
Given the sorry state of positional prospects in the farm system, and considering how hard he’s worked to get back on track, I really hope his rebound is legit.
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