Hitting Prospect Addendum: Isaac Galloway

And now we’ve come to the last post in this series.  For it, we’re going to look at fellow 2008 draftee Isaac Galloway.  Like Kyle Skipworth, he was considered a first round talent, but fell in the draft due to signability issues.  It looked like the Marlins had a steal on their hands when they draft and signed him in the 8th round, but so far things have not come to fruition.  After the jump, we’ll look at why.

We’re again looking at a horrible strike out rate and just flat out terrible BB/K.  Again like Skipworth, he both had problems making contact with the ball as well as showing an extreme aggressive approach.  The last time a qualified ML player put up a 0.13 BB/K or worse was in 2007 when Tony Pena somehow was the starting SS for the Kansas City Royals.  And as we went over with Scott Cousins, if a player is going to have a bad BB/K they need the power to make up for it.  But he showed the power of a slap hitter, barely breaking a .100 ISO.  The one positive to take from him offensively last year was his BABIP, but that nowhere near outweighs his negatives.

And while it’s a very small sample size, Galloway showed that he’ll likely end up as a RFer down the road.  He posted a -1 TZ in 238 chances in CF, +5 in 110 chances in RF.  Things weren’t pretty on the base paths either, stealing 15 bases but getting caught 9 times.

He does at least have an excuse.  He suffered a sprained wrist in early May and missed over a month.  Wrist injuries can be very, very hard on hitters and it showed on Galloway.  Before going down, he had an adjusted slash line of .312/.354/.468.  While part of that was BABIP driven (.383 BABIP) and he still struck out way too much (24.72%), he showed good power (.156 ISO) and walked a good deal more (6.10%).  Galloway will have to reshow those skills next year to retain his prospect status, otherwise he’s looking like another all-projection no-production prospect.