Where is he now? 2004 Buc Brett Bordes

I just wanted to write a short, snappy little article to get everyone up to speed on 2004 Bucs pitcher Brett Bordes. I wanted to have it done yesterday. Well, all that went out the window, because Brett Bordes can't be summed up in four or five paragraphs. No, he's a tougher nut to crack. I don't know if I've got him all figured out yet, but after hours of reading, researching, pondering, and asking anyone I can think of for their opinion, I think I might have a start at least.

Bordes came to the Bucs in 2004 and put up respectable numbers: 2-2, 3.63 ERA, 32K on 39.2 IP. The Arizona State southpaw was drafted twice: in the 24th round by Detroit in '05, and again in the 9th by the Orioles in '06. In the New York-Penn league during the remainder of that summer, Bordes was very effective and regarded as one of the O's better prospects.



As recently as 2007, Bordes was believed to be on the fast track to the major leagues. Inside the O's ventured to guess that a September call-up was not out of the question for him that season. Obviously he was fairly highly touted (for a reliver) as a draft pick and his 2007 season didn't disappoint. He was all set to make his way up the ladder leading into the 2008 season. That's when things started going wrong.

If you look at Bordes' career stats, the thing that stands out like a sore thumb is his inability to make the jump between the "low-A" South Atlantic League and the "high-A" Carolina League. Consider the following graphic of some of his basic pitching stats:

I consulted with stat-head friend and Pilots intern Rory to see if we could make some sense out of why in the world a ninth-round draft pick could not make the jump from the Sally to the Carolina League. I had already ruled out the difference in talent between the two leagues; obviously there has to be some sort of a difference to necessitate the distinction between the two, but as I understand it the "A+ / A-" thing is mostly an informal distinction. Officially they are both in the Single-A classification and therefore roughly on par; someone who performs well in the lower league should not get totally destroyed in the higher league.

And yet, Bordes did. Why? That's the burning question in my mind. As I started doing my preliminary research for this article it became obvious that more research was going to be required. I asked some of my fellow bloggers to see if they'd had a good look at him, but no one had seen enough of Bordes to give me a confident answer. This would have to be a statistical analysis (I don't catch many SAL and CL games, obviously). So with Rory's help I dug in.

At this point I'd like to take a minute to plug Fangraphs, which if you don't know, rules. For Brett -- and I'm sure almost every other player -- they have a bunch of advanced Sabermetric-type stats as well as a complete minor-league game log. Exactly what I needed.

Here's a basic timeline of Bordes' professional career: He pitched the entire 2007 season in Delmarva of the low-A Sally league. He started 2008 there and pitched very well until being called up to A+ Frederick. His statistics there are not pretty at first glance, but in reality he was mostly effective except for about four bad outings that got really ugly. In 2009, Bordes started the season where he left off, in High-A Frederick, where he pitched until he was sidelined in mid-June with an injury. After returning about a month later, he went back down to Delmarva, pitched extremely well, and came back up to Frederick for two appearances in September.

Watching the way his pro career has unfolded, and looking at some of the stats, my best hypothesis is that Bordes is suffering from two problems. He's been hurt, and he cracks under pressure. In 2008, at the A+ level, he made a total of 16 appearances. Of those he threw 11 scoreless plus a single one-run game (and that was over two innings). In the other four games he gave up 3, 4 or 5 runs, for a total of 16 (all earned) and was only good for a grand total of 1.2 IP despite facing 23 batters. In other words, he was effective about 75% of the time, but when he was bad, he was awful. It seems like he had a lot of trouble getting himself out of jams in 2008, which contributes to my theory about not working well under pressure.

Regardless, Bordes started 2009 in Frederick, where he was much more consistent...consistently bad. He struggled until about halfway through the season when he spent a month on the DL. After that he pitched very well (although most of the season's remainder was spent back in the SAL). That's another clue: could he have been trying to play through an injury?

Although I don't guarantee my interpretation of them, the statistics don't lie: in his 2009 first half in Frederick his K/9 rate was down, his BB/9 rate was up, and hitters were swatting him at a .300+ pace. It could be that Bordes got off to a bad start and tried to work the edges of the plate a little too much (he's never projected to be a finesse pitcher), got behind in the count often, and gave up a lot of hits and walks. And/or he could have been trying to work through a nagging injury and started serving up meatballs for anyone who wanted them.

So there you have it. I think it's as reasonable a theory as any to say that the thing holding Bordes back has been his inability to perform under pressure. Combine that with the possibility of trying to pitch through an injury, which could also be linked back to the pressure thing. As a ninth-round draft pick drafted out of D1, starting his third consecutive year in Single-A despite projections that he would shoot through the minors, it's not out of the question that he feared being set back by a DL stint and ruined half his season as a result.

As a 26-year-old reliever who will likely start another season in Single-A and has already been backed into the "left handed specialist" corner, I don't know that he's exactly a lock to have a long Major League career or even a cup of coffee for that matter. But as the perpetual optimist regarding ABL players, I prefer to focus on what he'll have to overcome to get there. If my predictions are correct, he's going to have to keep his head in the game and find out how to be focused when he gets into a jam. This is going to be difficult because he has to be wondering how long the Orioles are going to keep him around if he doesn't make the jump to AA soon. Hopefully he won't get caught up in that Catch-22. He's also going to have to stay healthy; no more setbacks. If he can put up good numbers in 2010 and advance a level, he could have his career back on track.