Archive for 2008

Not a lot of things have gone right in Washington this year, even if you just focus on their baseball team. Ryan Zimmerman hasn’t progressed into the franchise player as hoped, Austin Kearns took another step backward, Nick Johnson got hurt, and the GM and one of his top advisers are being investigated for crimes of fraud. Despite moving into a new park, the team has been horrible and is driving fans from the park.

However, in that overwhelming cloud of darkness, there has been one glowing light, growing in strength the last few months and giving Nationals fans some hope for the future. That unlikely bright spot is Elijah Dukes.

The oft-troubled Dukes is finally making noise for what he’s doing on the field, living up to the reputation as a potential all-star hitter he built while in Tampa Bay’s farm system. After a terrible start to the season (.167/.311/.208 in May after missing April entirely), Dukes is hitting .300/.404/.585 since June 1st, compiling 235 plate appearances while hitting like one of the game’s elite players. 29 of his 60 hits during that span have gone for extra bases, and he’s essentially become Washington’s only legit power threat.

If we extrapolated his production the last four months out to 600 PA, we’d see Dukes has been sustaining a pace that would give him 36 2B, 5 3B, 33 HR, 77 BB, and 26 SB in a full season. That kind of performance would make him one of the game’s best all around players, as we discussed yesterday.

Now, clearly, hitting well for 235 PA isn’t the same thing as doing it for a full season, and Dukes has a lot to prove after years of injuries and off field problems. But Jim Bowden’s strategy has always been to acquire high ceiling under-performers and watch one or two turn into legitimate stars, and he may have hit the jackpot again with Dukes. If he can stay out of jail and off the DL, he has the talent to be a frontline player, and the Nationals could certainly use more of those.

The Mississippi Braves players did not like to make things easy on themselves in 2008. The club started off the year with a 6-20 record in April but still managed to make the 2008 Southern League (Double-A) playoffs. The Braves then went on to win the league championship over the prospect-studded Carolina Mudcats, but all three wins occurred in extra innings.

The top hitters in the playoffs were infielder J.C. Holt (.323), first baseman Kala Ka’aihue (.364), and Jordan Schafer (.333). Holt, 25, was a former star outfielder at Louisiana State University and he actually began the season in Triple-A, where he struggled and hit just .212/.333/.228 in the first month. Upon his demotion to Double-A, Holt picked things up and hit .285/.351/.397 with 22 stolen bases in 393 at-bats.

Ka’aihue’s first taste of Double-A in 2007 was bitter as he hit just .127/.221/.186 with 51 strikeouts in 118 at-bats after dominating High-A ball earlier that season. The 2008 season was a different story though as Ka’aihue hit .274/.417/.457 with 14 homers and 88 walks in 376 at-bats. His brother Kila Ka’aihue, 24, also had a breakout season by hitting 37 homers and driving in 100 RBI before earning a September call-up to the Kansas City Royals.

Schafer, considered the Braves top hitting prospect as 2007 wore down, began the year on a low note with a suspension that was handed down in the spring. He missed the first two months of the season and had an up-and-down year. Schafer hit .269/.378/.471 with 10 homers and 12 stolen bases in 297 at-bats. He picked things up in August by hitting .323 with six homers and carried that momentum into the playoffs.

All three players should move on to Triple-A for the 2009 season, one step away from realizing their dream of a big league career.

Raise your hand if you have heard of Vernon Wells. You know, the Blue Jays centerfielder who served as an ESPN analyst in the offseason? The guy who hits about 27-30 home runs each season, has an OPS close to .900, and plays stellar defense. Right, we all know him… but do we really know him? After finding out that he has been one of the more productive players over the last thirty days I perused his career numbers, as well as this season, and was a bit shocked. See, I just assumed he put up seasonal lines like the one mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph. I, like many others, probably saw him in an all-star game, saw one really great season of his, and constructed the rest based on reputation.

In actuality, Wells’ current .831 OPS would be one of the highest of his career should the season end today. He has only played 98 games, so the counting stats are lower, but his offensive rates are right in line, or better than, those in 2001, 2002, 2004, 2005, and 2007. This leaves just 2003 and 2006 as being standout and tremendous seasons offensively. Here, I figured that 2006 was the norm, when he had an .899 OPS, blasted 32 home runs, stole 17 bases, and finished fourth amongst centerfielders with a +14 in the field.

In the field, he has steadily declined since 2006, going from +14, to +7, to this year’s -14, meaning that he has made fourteen plays less than an average centerfielder this season. Last year, he had a very low .265 BABIP which contributed to his low .706 OPS, but this year it has risen to .300; however, his ISO is at .190, down from the .200-.233 range in other seasons. Essentially, Wells has been able to get hits at a decent pace but they do not account for as much power as most in Toronto would like. Add in his declining defense and he is quickly heading past disappointment-ville.

Maybe he can have a tremendous September and increase the rates. We’ve seen Ryan Howard make significant leaps in short times before. Over the last thirty days, Wells is hitting .321/.369/.571, a .940 OPS, with a .250 ISO. This is the Vernon Wells that many fans think of or that fans in Toronto hope for, but at this stage it just seems more like a teasing hot streak than sustainable production. Perhaps the defense this year is an outlier and perhaps the injuries have prevented him from reaching his full potential, but he definitely seems to be a case where the reputation inflates his actual production and causes ignorance to those who don’t astutely pay attention.

Like the AL MVP race, and unlike the AL Cy Young (Cliff Lee) and the NL MVP (Albert Pujols) races, the NL Cy Young has a few worthy candidates, each with their specific claim to the title of best pitcher in the National League for 2008.

Brandon Webb has the pedigree and the twenty wins that voters will gravitate toward and ranking third in WPA means that even by better stats, Webb is among the viable candidates.

If the Brewers hang on to take the Wild Card, will CC Sabathia get some consideration? His totals in the National League are certainly exemplary and best in the league, but he’s dogged but a sample size about half that of the other contenders unless you consider his AL stats as well. Which in and of itself raises an interesting debate, but in Sabathia’s case raises a further point of whether or not those combined stats are good enough to warrant a Cy Young.

Chad Billingsley of the Dodgers and Ryan Dempster of the Cubs have shiny ERAs and playoff teams to back their otherwise excellent seasons but overall weak case at a Cy Young award. Johan Santana hangs around 2nd place in many categories and warrants a mention as well.

In the end though, there’s one man that so far has risen above all these mentioned above and that’s Tim Lincecum. Not only does Lincecum lead the league in ERA (by about a quarter of a run) and strikeouts (by a whopping forty) but he has a gargantuan lead in WPA over Johan Santana in 2nd place 5.22 to 3.51. It’s just his second season but assuming the Giants don’t blow out his arm Tim Lincecum deserves the first of what should be multiple Cy Young Awards.

When scouts dream at night, they dream of five tool players – guys who can hit for average, hit for power, run, catch, and throw. These are considered the building blocks on which a superstar is built, and the very best players in the game can usually do most, if not all, of those things at a very high level.

There are a decent amount of true five tool players in baseball right now, and at one time or another, almost all of them have been referred to as “the best all around player in the game”. But who really has been the best of the bunch – the guy with a diverse skillset who exceeds in every area of the game – in 2008?

Here are the contenders, in alphabetical order:

Carlos Beltran, .280/.371/.490, 38 2B, 4 3B, 24 HR, 21 SB, 3 CS
Curtis Granderson, .293/.375/.504, 24 2B, 13 3B, 19 HR, 10 SB, 4 CS
Hanley Ramirez, .294/.396/.527, 33 2B, 4 3B, 30 HR, 33 SB, 12 CS
Jose Reyes, .295/.359/.474, 34 2B, 18 3B, 14 HR, 50 SB, 14 CS
Alex Rodriguez, .304/.393/.584, 33 2B, 0 3B, 34 HR, 17 SB, 3 CS
Grady Sizemore, .271/.379/.513, 36 2B, 3 3B, 32 HR, 38 SB, 5 CS
Alfonso Soriano, .291/.351/.561, 29 2B, 0 3B, 29 HR, 19 SB, 2 CS
Chase Utley, .289/.377/.533, 38 2B, 4 3B, 31 HR, 12 SB, 2 CS
David Wright, .298/.386/.534, 40 2B, 2 3B, 31 HR, 15 SB, 5 CS

Hits For Average

For the most part, they’re all pretty similar. A-Rod’s the only one who cracks .300, but besides Sizemore and Beltran, they’re all in that .290 to .300 range. Sizemore’s contact issues leave him at the bottom of the barrel in this specific tool.

Hits For Power

Again, A-Rod has a slight lead in longballs, with most of the group being around that 30 HR mark. However, power isn’t just hitting the ball over the wall, as we see from guys like Jose Reyes, who has 66 extra base hits even though he only has 14 dingers. Wright has racked up more XBH than the rest (73), but Rodriguez’s slight lead in HRs and fewer plate appearances make him the winner in this category.

Running

At first glance, we have our first landslide, as Reyes has 50 steals while no one else even has 40. However, Sizemore’s 38 steals and just 5 CS is more impressive. To catch Reyes, he’d simply have to go 12 for 21 in stolen base attempts the rest of the way, and I think we’d all agree that he probably could run at a 57% success rate if he really wanted to – he’s just choosing not to because it would hurt his team. We can’t ignore the extra bases Reyes has been able to take turning doubles into triples, however, so he wins this category even though Sizemore’s been the better base stealer. There’s a big dropoff after those two, with everyone else clustering around the same area.

Fielding

The combination of range and fielding ability, the Fielding Bible’s +/- system is quite helpful here. They have Utley at a ridiculous +39 plays above an average second baseman this year, but second base is comprised of worse defenders than shortstop, so we have to account for the position adjustment. John Dewan’s system has Beltran at +17 plays in CF, which is fantastic, and Sizemore at +9, which is also very good. It has everyone else at around average (or worse, in Granderson’s case) for 2008, so we can realistically look at Utley, Beltran, and Sizemore as the category leaders. Beltran’s +17 as a CF is extremely impressive, but no matter how many adjustments you make, it’s hard to get away from Utley’s +39. He could be a good shortstop or CF if the Phillies wanted to move him, and he’s proving it every year. Utley gets the nod here.

Throwing

Here’s where it gets a bit subjective – most people would agree that Hanley, Reyes, and Soriano have impressive arm strength, while Sizemore and Granderson certainly don’t. But we don’t have any seasonal data that tells us who has been more valuable throwing the ball this year, so I’ll just let you pick your own winner here. I’m going with Reyes, because he has more opportunities to use his arm at SS than others do, but I’ll let someone talk me out of that if they want to try.

So, after going through all five categories, what have we learned? A-Rod’s the best in the batters box, with small advantages in average and power, but he falls off in running and fielding. Reyes is the fastest and might have the strongest arm, but he hits half as many home runs as most of the others. Wright is solid across the board, but isn’t the best at anything.

For me, it comes down to Sizemore, Beltran, and Ramirez. Hanley has best average but the worst baserunning and the worst defense of the three, so he’s out. Sizemore’s average brings him down, and Beltran has a slight edge defensively, but it’s hard to get past 71 extra base hits, 38 steals at an 88% success rate, and terrific defense in center field.

So, my vote for the best all around player in baseball in 2008 goes to Grady Sizemore.

The Trenton Thunder (NY AL) won the 2008 Eastern League title last Sunday with a Game 4 victory over the Akron Aeros (Cleveland). It was the club’s second Double-A championship in as many years.

The club received a late-season spark from catcher Francisco Cervelli, who missed much of the season with a broken wrist suffered in a spring training collision at the plate. Cervelli hit .315/.432/.384 in 24 games. The 22-year-old was signed as a non-drafted free agent out of Venezuela in 2003 and projects as a solid big league second-string catcher.

Overall, the club featured a number of veteran players but prospects Jose Tabata and Austin Jackson had large roles in the season’s final outcome. Tabata had an inconsistent season but still hit .272/.339/.368 with 18 stolen bases as a 21-year-old. He was then used as bait to acquire Xavier Nady from the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Jackson, 21, hit .285/.354/.419 with 19 stolen bases, 56 walks and nine homers in 520 at-bats. his strikeout totals (113) continue to be a concern, especially with his limited power output to this point. That said, there are signs – 33 doubles – that the power is developing.

Another key ingredient for the Thunder title was the starting rotation, with five starters making at least 16 starts and posting ERAs under 3.70. All five pitchers also allowed fewer than one hit per inning pitched. George Kontos led the staff with 151.2 innings pitched, followed by Jason Jones (team leading 13 wins), Phil Coke (2.51 ERA), southpaw Chase Wright and Eric Hacker (who allowed just three homers in more than 90 innings). The general feeling is that Kontos and Coke have the best chance to help the big league club in the future.

On occasion I like to peruse the leaderboards here by position and see which players rank atop or on the bottom of the WPA/LI spectrum. Yesterday, however, I discovered a disturbing pattern while doing this for the junior circuit. It seemed that the bottom of each position was populated by members of the Oakland Athletics. The A’s stayed in the playoff race for half of the season before shipping away parts like Rich Harden, signaling a throwing in of the towel, so to speak. Their poor performance from that point on was largely attributed to the trading away of Dan Haren in the off-season and Harden in-season. From what these numbers showed, though, their struggles have a whole heck of a lot to do with their offense.

Since WPA/LI is a counting stat, I did not use the qualified only field, but found that all but Frank Thomas and Jack Cust were above 0 in this category. In fact, some of the others are so below 0 that they rank within the bottom five or bottom ten at their respective positions, if not at the very bottom of the list. Here are some of the players and their context-neutral wins:

Kurt Suzuki, C, -0.89
Daric Barton, 1B, -1.81 (lowest)
Mark Ellis, 2B, -1.16 (3rd lowest)
Bobby Crosby, SS, -2.87 (lowest)
Jack Hannahan, 3B, -0.81 (5th lowest)

Additionally, five of their six outfielders rank in the bottom twenty, as Emil Brown is ninth from the bottom, Carlos Gonzalez is eleventh, and Eric Patterson, Rajai Davis, and Travis Buck rank eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth from the bottom. The WPA/LI of these players range from Buck’s -0.72 to Brown’s -1.37. The other outfielder, Ryan Sweeney, is at -0.01, making him essentially a league average hitter, keeping him away from the bottom twenty. That leaves the Athletics with Jack Cust, Frank Thomas, and Ryan Sweeney as average or above average hitters, with Cust being far and away the best.

The team has an MLB-worst .683 OPS on the season, from a .318 OBP/.365 SLG. To put that in perspective, it would be the equivalent to having Felipe Lopez occupying every spot in the lineup this year. Their pitching may still be relatively solid and may only improve in the years to come, but the offense of their personnel needs drastic improvement, regardless of how solid defensively some of these players may be.

After dropping another game last night in Dale Sveum’s debut as manager, the Brewers have now lost five in a row and are no longer leading the wild card chase. September has been a disaster for Milwaukee, as they are now 3-12 in the final month of the season, frittering away what seemed to be a pretty solid shot at a playoff berth.

Most of the blame lays squarely on the shoulders of the offense, and in particular, four hitters who have just laid a giant egg.

Ryan Braun: 11 for 56, .196/.286/.286
Corey Hart: 9 for 55, .167/.207/.255
Mike Cameron: 5 for 45, .111/.200/.222
Bill Hall: 5 for 30, .167/.219/.233

As a group, they’re 30 for 186, a nifty .161 average. Hart has the lowest WPA/LI of any player in baseball in September, while Cameron comes in 3rd and Braun comes in 4th. When you have three of the four worst hitters in baseball in a given month, it’s hard to score many runs. The simultaneous collapses of that foursome have basically sunk the Brewers offense, and potentially the Brewers season.

Even things that have gone well haven’t helped – J.J. Hardy has four home runs this month, but all four have been solo shots. Prince Fielder went deep twice last yesterday, but CC Sabathia chose the same day to take his first loss since coming over to the National League.

They’ve fired their manager in an effort to salvage what’s left of the 2008 season, but unless Sveum can figure out how to make half his offense remember how to hit, they’re in a lot of trouble.

Of the top eight relievers by innings pitched in the majors this season, six of them are part of a pair of relievers on the same team.

Paving the way so far is Josh Rupe of the Rangers with 84.2 innings in just 43 games while teammate Jamey Wright checks in at seventh with 79.2 innings spread over a more conventional 70 games. Among all the pitchers mentioned herein, Rupe is alone in that his entering leverage index is a meager 0.56 and also showing a mediocre 47-41 strikeout to walk rate

At fourth and eight in the majors lies a pair of Phillies relievers. Chad Durbin‘s 81.2 innings in 64 appearances and Ryan Madson’s 75 innings over 69 games. When your rotation is so bad that it continues to give Kyle Kendrick starts, you are going to have a lot of innings for your bullpen to soak up.

Finally, sitting back to back at fifth and sixth are a pair from the nation’s capital in Joel Hanrahan (81.1 innings in 66 games) and Saul Rivera (80.2 innings over 72 games). Saul Rivera has been quite the horse for the Nationals as he logged 93 innings last season as well and 88.2 innings split between the majors and Triple-A in 2006. Hanrahan was previously in the rotation so his high inning count for a reliever is a moderate one for a pitcher trained as a starter though it’s noteworthy that he hasn’t been used more in long relief stretches.

What these six do have in common beside a laborious workload is that each pitch for teams with sub par (and that’s a British-style understatement there) rotations. But what is interesting is that this trend was not present last season as each of the top five relievers in usage during 2007 were from different teams and the top team relievers in 2006 were all from differing teams. It’s another curious aspect to the 2008 season.

The best part of what analysts call a “slash line” is that we get to see the on-base percentage and slugging percentage stacked up next to the traditional barometer, batting average. Looking at the three of these metrics, side by side, can help us understand which players are great all-around, which are purely power hitters, or which ones have a tremendous eye. For instance, a .333/.420/.560 slash line looks Pujols-esque; the player has a high percentage of hits that consist of singles as well as those of the extra base variety. A Dunn-type line of .244/.368/.571 would offer that the player has a great eye, as his OBP vastly exceeds his BA, and that he is a great power hitter, because although the BA is low, the value of the hits put into the equation are, more often than not, greater than a single.

When we see the slash line, though, sometimes it looks a bit “off.” We are almost trained to see the three numbers increase as we move from left to right, but occasionally a player will post a higher OBP than SLG, which looks nutty in slash line form. Someone hitting .273/.332/.328 just looks, well, different from the mold. It tells us that he has almost no power to his name and that the vast majority of his hits are singles.

This year, five players that qualify for the leaderboard are posting higher OBPs than SLGs: Willy Taveras, Gregor Blanco, Chone Figgins, Jason Kendall, and Ryan Theriot. To no surprise, these five players have combined for a whopping six home runs this year. If a player has absolutely no power yet still holds down a major league job, he either must play Ozzie Smith-caliber defense, or serve as a menace on the basepaths. As we might expect, while these five combine for just about half the amount of home runs Ryan Howard has over the last month, they have stolen 141 bases between them.

Curious to see if players have posted a higher OBP than SLG for an extended period of time, I probed the Baseball Reference Play Index, looking for anyone from 1983-2008 with at least 3,000 PA. The following thirteen names surfaced:

1. Dave Magadan, .390/.377
2. Willie Randolph, .375/.347
3. Quilvio Veras, .372/.362
4. Luis Castillo, .367/.356
5. Walt Weiss, .351/.326
6. Ozzie Smith, .351/.346
7. Mark McLemore, .349/.341
8. Jose Oquendo, .346/.317
9. Otis Nixon, .343/.314
10. Wally Backman, .343/.335
11. Garry Pettis, .332/.309
12. Darren Lewis, .323/.322
13. Felix Fermin, .305/.303

Pretty safe to say these guys fit the bill described above, as either defensive wizards, menaces on the basepaths, or utility players that can fill any and all gaps for teams. While there were thirteen players that have posted a higher OBP than SLG over 3000+ PA, the number seems relatively small given a 25-26 year span. None of these players are hall of famers, other than Ozzie, but it is still pretty remarkable they were able to stick around for so long with next to no power in their arsenal.