The Mummey Returns
May 28, 2010
Yesterday, we paid homage to a favorite of ours, Florida State OF Tyler Holt and his appearance at #7 on our College Draft Board. Today, we turn to another player who had previously caught our eye, Auburn's Trent Mummey. The operative word there, as you'll soon be reminded, is "caught".
Mummey checks in at #9 in our stats-only ranking of draft-eligible college players, and he is the third-ranked college position player overall. It's taken us a while to get used to the idea of typing "position player" instead of "hitter", but we hope you'll soon get used to doing so too. Sure, his park- and schedule-adjusted .541 wOBA is impressive. And that alone would be reason enough for our spreadsheets to wonder why he doesn't seem to be getting more love. But it's really the rest of his game, (and the position he plays), that sets him apart.
Really, we're hard-pressed to decide which is more impressive - the fact that last season he was nearly 11 defensive runs above an average center fielder based on our play-by-play metric (over the course of only ~60 games), or that this season he missed almost the entire first half the season with an ankle injury and still manage to make up for lost time by registering an above average defensive rating.
Now then, we'd never want to set Mummey up to be some type of sabermetric poster boy. That's a heavyy cross to bear for any young man. And neither would we want to start calling for MLB Scouting Directors to only draft players who fit the Trent Mummey mold.
But we wouldn't exactly encourage teams to keep drafting future first basemen and left fielders, either.