Steve Pearce's MLE

Springing from the debate in the comments from my post yesterday about Steven Pearce starting the year in AAA, I dug around to see if anyone calculated the major league equivalency (MLE) numbers for his breakout 2007 in the minors. I remembered that I had seen Sean Smith's CHONE equivalencies on his blog, and I dug up the spreadsheet. This is how Pearce's minor league numbers might have translated if he spent his 2007 in Pittsburgh: .277/.327/.513 with 26 homers and 35 doubles in 551 PAs. You've probably noticed that that's better than the numbers that Nady (.278/.330/.476) and LaRoche (.272/.345/458) put up in 2007.

You can debate the predictive values of MLEs if you like, but like all stats or projections that I use here, I'm just using them as a jumping off point. I'm not arguing that Pearce would've been better in right field than Nady last year or better at first base than LaRoche was last year or that he'll hit 30 homers in 2008. The point is that Pearce doesn't have anything left to learn in the minors and it's pretty unlikely that he's going to be a considerably worse player than Nady and maybe even LaRoche in the coming season. He's killed the ball at every level he's played at and he has plate patience to go with that power. He's going to be 25. There's nothing left for him to do in the minors and that's that.