The best Cuban hitter is coming to MLB

The best Cuban hitter is coming to MLB
Jose Dariel Abreu has hit like Ted Williams in Cuba.
By TED BERG – August 13, 2013 at 11:27am EDT

According to multiple reports, Cuban slugger Jose Dariel Abreu escaped
his home country this week and will become an MLB free agent once he
establishes residency elsewhere and is cleared by the U.S. Office of
Foreign Assets Control.

That could take months, but once it happens, a slew of MLB will bid
furiously for his services. The 26-year-old first baseman might already
be among the best hitters in the world.

The 6'3″, 250-pound Abreu seems prone to injury, and scouting reports
suggest he's not much on defense or the basepaths. But at the plate…
man. According to Baseball America, Abreu hit .382 with a .535 on-base
percentage and 13 homers in 42 games this season. Cuban stats require a
ton of context and don't perfectly extrapolate to the domestic game for
a variety of reasons, but comparing Abreu to Yoenis Cespedes — a fine
MLB player who defected from Cuba nearly two years ago at about the same
age as Abreu — bodes well for the recent defector.

Here's how Cespedes hit in his final two seasons in Cuba, according to
Cuban-Play.com:

.331 batting average, .420 on-base percentage, .624 slugging.

Here's what Abreu has done for the last three seasons, per the same site:

.393 batting average, .542 on-base percentage, .791 slugging.

To put that in perspective: Cespedes hit about as well in Cuba as David
Ortiz did in his best Major League seasons. Abreu has been more like the
best of Ted Williams.

If you work backwards using Driveline Baseball's Minor League
Equivalency calculator — far from a perfect method, granted — using
Cespedes' last two seasons in Cuba and first two seasons in the Majors,
you can estimate that Cespedes has put up the type of Major League
numbers you'd expect from a guy who posted his Cuban lines in Class AA
ball. Using the same translation, Abreu hits .301 with a .424 on-base
percentage and a .567 slugging in a neutral big-league park.

Cespedes is his own unique snowflake, of course, as we all are, and one
example really accounts for only anecdotal evidence — especially since
the two played in different parks and against different competition. But
that line — .301/.424/.567 — would make Abreu one of the top five
hitters in the game.

Yasiel Puig, for what it's worth, hit about as well as Cespedes did in
his last season in Cuba. Puig doesn't make for a great comparison,
though, because he defected while several years younger than Cespedes
and Abreu.

But the bottom line is that several guys who produced well in Cuba have
come to the U.S. and produced well in the Major Leagues, and now a guy
who hit way, way better than everyone else in Cuba is heading
(eventually) to the Major Leagues. Scouts question how well Abreu's game
with translate to the Majors, but scouts said similar things about Puig.

Jose Dariel Abreu is about to make a whole lot of money, and he's likely
ready to be at least an above-average Major League first baseman. And if
he's nearly as good as his Cuban stats suggest, one MLB team is about to
strike gold.

Source: "The best Cuban hitter is coming to MLB | For The Win" -
http://ftw.usatoday.com/2013/08/the-best-cuban-hitter-is-coming-to-mlb/