Previous Four Factors Entries:
Shin-Soo Choo
Carlos Gonzalez
Joe Morgan
Brennan Boesch
Martin Prado

Earlier today, I stumbled upon this tweet from Dylan Hernandez, Dodgers beat writer for the Los Angeles Times.

Baseball insider recently said James Loney was “hands down” the Dodgers’ MVP in the first half of the season.

I don’t know who this baseball insider is, but he is flat out wrong – Loney is nothing more than a slightly above average hitter, and at first base, that makes his ceiling a roughly average player. Let’s dive into Loney’s hitting skills with the help of the Four Factors – walk rate, strikeout rate, power on contact, and performance on balls in play.

Let’s start with Loney’s supposed team-MVP first half of 2010.

Loney has had a solid year at the plate – his .334 wOBA is good for a 109 wRC+ in this year of the pitcher. However, that’s not nearly as good as any of the top three hitters on the Dodgers to date: Manny Ramirez (.396), Rafael Furcal (.386), or Andre Ethier (.380). Also, there are clear problems with Loney’s game that keep him from becoming anything more than an average hitter. First, he hasn’t showed much discipline this year – only 84% of the league average walk rate. Secondly, he hasn’t shown any power, as his POW score of .152 is exceptionally low for a first baseman. He does make a lot of contact, which makes his .329 BABIP help his line even more than the typical hitter. However, if that BABIP drops, that means that his one real skill – contact – won’t be quite as meaningful.

Is this typical of Loney’s career?

Loney actually showed better peripherals in 2009, particularly in the plate stats of BB% and K%. In both of those categories, he was excellent. However, his power was even lower, and his BABIP wasn’t nearly as high. That exacerbates his lack of power and lessens the impact of his impressive contact rates – simply put, it doesn’t matter if you make a lot of contact if it’s weak contact. His 2008 was similar to what he’s done in 2010 so far, but with a lower BABIP.

Loney hasn’t shown any power since 2007, when he posted a .240 POW. As we get farther and farther away, that 375 PA sample, the only sample in which we see Loney demonstrate MLB first baseman type hitting, it will factor less and less into our evaluations. Instead, we’ll see a high-contact, low-power, inconsistent discipline type of player. That’s an average to slightly above average hitter, as Loney has been the last three years, and that’s great if he’s at a premium position. However, Loney is a first baseman, and even if his defense is better than his -5 career UZR suggests, that bat simply doesn’t add up to more than an average player. Loney is a decent role player, but his perception, as the above tweet shows, is much more than his reality. Some team is going to spend way too much money for his services in a couple years. Just hope that it’s not your team.

When people dole out credit for the White Sox 33-15 run since the beginning of June, most of it usually goes to the pitchers. The team is headlined by John Danks, Mark Buehrle, Gavin Floyd, and Matt Thornton, all of whom make it tough on opponents to score many runs. However, after having watched a lot of the White Sox in the last week, I think that the real key for their success is the guy that never gets any notice – Alexei Ramirez.

Chicago’s shortstop has flown under the radar, but he’s quietly putting together a pretty terrific season. As a guy who played second base as a rookie and made a lot of errors last year after moving to shortstop, it can be easy to see his +10 UZR and assume it’s mostly small sample noise. Watching him defend the position, though, he’s earning every bit of love that the metric is throwing his way.

In the half dozen or so games that I’ve seen the pale hose play over the last week, Ramirez has made three or four plays that were legitimately shocking. He has been routinely ranging into the hole at shortstop to get to balls that looked like sure hits off the bat, showing far more ability at the position than I assumed he had. I’m not saying he’s a true talent +15 defender at short, but he’s far from the defensive liability he was made out to be his rookie year. This kid can play shortstop, and play it really well.

Unlike a lot of the other good glove guys in the AL, though, Ramirez can hit too. He started the season on the wrong foot, putting up just a .241 wOBA in April, but his wOBA has jumped to .345 since then, including a scorching .422 this month. Even though he’s extremely aggressive at the plate, he’s wiry strong and makes good contact, allowing him to hit for enough average and power to offset the lack of walks.

The total package has been worth +2.5 WAR so far this year, putting him ahead of more heralded teammates like Buehrle and Paul Konerko. Ramirez has been the White Sox shining star in July and their unsung hero for most of 2010.

The 2010 Seattle Mariners have, to put it mildly, not quite lived up to pre-season expectations. A full post-mortem can wait until after the season, along with the attendant I-told-you-sos and other fun. Rather than focusing on what went wrong with the Mariners and why some people were wrong about them (including me — I didn’t think they’d win the division, but I thought they’d be around .500), I’d simply like to focus on a sentiment I encountered recently: that the utter collapse of the 2010 Mariners proves that the recent emphasis on defense (as exemplified by the Mariners’ personnel decisions) shows that fielding to be “overvalued.”

There are a number of related complex issues: the objectivity of recent defensive metrics, the difficulty of projecting defensive performance based on those metrics, integrating that data with scouting information, and so on. These are all important and should not be ignored (See here and here for some good recent work). For now, I want to deal with polemically the most basic claim: that the 2010 Mariners in themselves somehow show that pursuing players based on their apparent value in the field is a “flawed” strategy. We aren’t discussing whether or not current defensive metrics are good or not (after all, one could pick good defensive players based on scouting reports), or whether the Mariners picked the right players. Those are important, but I’m starting with the more simple issue of whether “defense is overrated.” Perhaps this is a straw man, but I think it’s one that at least needs to be cleared out of the way before more serious discussions can get underway.

The most obvious answer, of course, is that a run saved is still as valuable a run earned (generally speaking). Unless the Mariners or any other team emphasizing defense is likely to score zero runs a game (and if the 2010 Mariners didn’t accomplish that, I’m not sure who could, but more on that later), run prevention in general is a perfectly sound strategy. Moreover, one team failing to win through this strategy hardly “proves” anything. If it did, well, the San Diego Padres are winning the NL West against almost everybody’s expectations, and, what do you know, they currently lead the league in fielding runs saved according to UZR. So there.

While the Mariners’ fielders haven’t performed as well as expected, that they’ve been good (about 14 runs above average according to UZR) while the team has failed to win is the sort of thing that one might point to when saying that “defense is overrated.” Except, of course, that people have forgotten the one thing that everyone knew would be a problem for the 2010 Mariners: scoring runs. Again, this is not a full evaluation of what the Mariners could or should have done differently in putting the team together, but rather a look at what is happening right now. And right now, the Mariners have the worst team wOBA in the major leagues at .289 (league average is around .325).

To match some faces to this offensive futility, here are the current wOBAs of the 10 Mariners with the most 2010 plate appearances so far. In parentheses, I’ve included each player’s preseason Marcel projection, since that is the simplest projection system and gives a sample of what one might have reasonably expected from each hitter based on recent seasons:

Ichiro Suzuki .330 (.346)
Chone Figgins .293 (.344)
Jose Lopez .265 (.321)
Franklin Gutierrez .313 (.332)
Milton Bradley .289 (.372)
Casey Kotchman .289 (.334)
Josh Wilson .298 (.293)
Michael Saunders .331 (.313)
Jack Wilson .265 (.305)

Whoever you want to blame (or not blame), that is simply stunning. But I’m dancing around the issue: the point was not whether the Mariners should have seen this coming (on offense or defense), but rather whether this team’s actual performance shows that defense has been overvalued. Even if one thinks that a single season by a single team “proves” anything, I don’t think you can go much further than this: it doesn’t matter how good a team is on defense if they hit worse than Jason Kendall (.290 wOBA as of today).

When we see that a team has used 10 different starting pitchers at this point in the season, it usually raises a red flag. A team will, under most circumstances, break camp with its five best pitchers in the rotation. Using starters beyond those five signals injury or ineffectiveness, since the team must employ pitchers who didn’t make the initial cut. To have used seven starters by this point is one thing. To use 10, well, there must be some problems in the rotation. Yet this isn’t the case with the Texas Rangers. Injuries and ineffectiveness have forced them to use 10 starting pitchers, but they rank third in the AL in ERA at 3.80. They also have the largest discrepancy between their ERA and FIP.

Much of that discrepancy comes from 23-year-old Tommy Hunter. He has been quite effective since his recall in June — as Andy at the Baseball-Referecnce blog notes, he has won eight straight decisions this season. His 2.31 ERA is best among AL pitchers with at least 60 IP. But we know the perils of basing analysis on wins and ERA. Good pitchers can slump and poor pitchers can streak, leaving us with a set of skewed numbers that will change in short order. This appears to be the case with Hunter. He’s not bad, really, but he’s currently pitching well above his head.

Hunter is currently experiencing one of the greatest combinations for pitcher performance: low BABIP and high strand rate. Since he has kept his strikeout and walk rates low he allows many balls in play — of the 251 batters he has faced 194 have hit the ball into fair play. Yet only 44 of those 194 have fallen in for hits, leaving him with a .234 BABIP, second lowest among AL pitchers with 60 IP. When those runners do reach base, they tend to stay there. Hunter has allowed 44 non-homer hits, has hit three, and has walked 15. Of those baserunners, 86.2 have been stranded on the base paths. This, too, is the highest mark in the AL.

The trend of stranding baserunners has come recently. In July it has been downright insane, as he has allowed 21 non-homer hits, has hit one, and has walked seven, yet has stranded 97.7 percent of those base runners. This might look a bit strange, since he has allowed six home runs this month, or one to every roughly 22 batters he’s faced. But five of those home runs have come with no men on base. The only other was his latest serving, a two-run homer to Hideki Matsui on Sunday.

In June his strand rate, 76.7 percent, was far closer to league average. Yet that month, despite pitching 27 innings at his home ballpark, he allowed just one homer. That, too, was a solo shot, coming during his complete-game season debut against the Rays. His HR/FB ratio that month was 2.8 percent. It is no surprise, then, that despite low strikeout totals he exited June with a 2.15 ERA.

This isn’t to say that Hunter is doomed to a steep and depressing decline. He does have something working for him. After his debut on June 5 Dave Allen wrote about Hunter’s high curveballs. That might seem like more of a burden, since it’s easy to associate high curves with hanging curves. Yet as Derek Carty found, high curves can be even more effective than their low counterparts. It can, perhaps, aid pitchers in inducing poor contact. Since high curves will presumably hit in the air, that can also bring down a pitcher’s expected HR/FB ratio. So while Hunter is certainly due a regression of some sorts, he very well might not see his ERA climb all the way to the level of his FIP, 4.41, or his xFIP, 4.81.

Hunter’s performance to date has helped the Rangers maintain their considerable lead in the AL West. They have faced some problems in the rotation, with injuries to Rich Harden, Derek Holland, and Matt Harrison, and ineffectiveness from Scott Feldman. Cliff Lee has come to the rescue, and so has Tommy Hunter. Even if he experiences declining numbers starting on Saturday, he’ll have made a big contribution to the 2010 Rangers and their quest for the AL West crown.

For most baseball players, having Juan Uribe’s recent track record after the 2008 season meant you had a nice little career and could either retire or play independent league ball somewhere. Uribe, who also got into trouble when he was alleged to have been involved in a 2006 shooting in the Dominican Republic (his name was cleared in 2007), simply was not producing on the field. Here are Uribe’s respective AVG/OBP/SLG lines and WAR from 2006-2008, which were his Age 27-29 years (when hitters normally peak):

2006: .235/.257/.441, 1.2
2007: .234/.284/.394, 0.3
2008: .247/.296/.386, 0.2

Not pretty. Uribe was simply refusing to take a base on balls during that timespan, with a BB% of 2.6% in 2006 and 6.0% and 6.2% from 2007-08. With the drop in power, Uribe’s lack of patience was frustrating to say the least. His five-year career with the White Sox, which included a World Series Championship in 2005, ended after the 2008 season; he latched on with the Giants for 2009.

Despite his pathetic walk totals, there were some reasons to think that Uribe may be able to be a useful bench player. He could play shortstop, second base, and third base, and was solid defensively according to UZR. His BABIPs were brutally low during those years, and he had a HR/FB% in 2008 that was less than half of what it was in 2006. Brian Sabean knew the Giants’ offense wasn’t guaranteed for anything last year, and gave Uribe a chance. Uribe signed a Minor League contract, but made the team’s final roster out of Spring Training.

Since his arrival in San Francisco, Uribe has been an important part of the lineup, contributing 4.6 WAR in 215 games. Last season, his wOBA was .351 thanks in part to a rejuvinated .325 BABIP. The power also came back, as Uribe slugged .495, the best mark of his career since 2004. His walk rate decreased to 5.8%, but with the extra bases coming, nobody complained.

This season, Uribe’s BABIP has turned Mr. Hyde to 2009’s Dr. Jekyll. Aat .268, one would think a drop that dramatic would cripple Uribe like it did from ’06-’08. However, the infielder currently has a .328 wOBA, solid stuff from a guy playing premium positions. But how has he been able to relatively maintain his offensive value? He’s walking more. A lot more. He’s walking in 8.4% of his plate appearances in 2010, the single highest rate of his career. He does have three intentional walks this season to last year’s two, but that hardly makes up a significant chunk of his newfound patience. ZiPS thinks he’s good for a .330 wOBA for the rest of the year. Simply put, Uribe has adjusted his game this season in light of a depressed BABIP. As has been said before, staying afloat in Major League Baseball requires Darwinian-like adaptation. Juan Uribe has learned how to survive.

Twins rookie third baseman Danny Valencia will pass the 100 plate appearance threshold in his two-month big league career today, and will do so having grabbed hold of a position that has haunted the organization since Corey Koskie (though Nick Punto deserves credit for his great glove in 2006). Valencia is an unlikely Major Leaguer — 19th round draft picks always are — but has worked really hard in the Twins system, and was ranked third by Marc Hulet and sixth by Baseball America among Twins prospects this offseason. Still, I didn’t think anyone would have guessed Valencia would arrive on the scene in such style, batting .400/.449/.511 through 29 games. In his last four, he’s been the hottest hitter in baseball: 14-for-19 with four doubles and his first big league home run, off Zack Greinke no less.

The man is certainly tempting Dave’s post from yesterday about accepting randomness. Yes, however unlikely, even a 25-year-old with a lifetime .298/.353/.469 minor league batting line (and just .289/.322/.421 in 484 Triple-A PA’s) can be baseball’s MVP over a four-day stretch. I checked his minor league game logs, and he was never even this good for four days in the minors. The closest he came was back in 2006, during his pro debut in the Appalachian League. From July 27 to July 30 that year (interesting, and coincidental, how similar the dates are), Valencia went 11-for-15 with three doubles and two home runs.

While you don’t need me to tell you that Valencia will cool off, the question is whether he can be a viable option at third base for the Twins going forward. He’s amassed just 1.4 WAR in 98 plate appearances, not just because of his .427 wOBA, but also because he’s generated 1.5 UZR in 214 innings, computing out to +13.7 over 150 games. John Manuel’s scouting report last year said “[Valencia is] just not consistent defensively,” with praise for his arm strength and first-step, but minuses for his concentration and footwork. His minor league TotalZone numbers, like they often are, were a mixed bag: +18 in 2008 between High-A and Double-A, -10 in 2009 between Double- and Triple-A.

The defense is going to have to be good, because once Valencia’s BABIP comes off its insane .449 mark, his offensive weaknesses will become apparent. The University of Miami product is below average in both the power and patience categories. The latter has been highly inconsistent during his minor league career, averaging out at just 7.8 BB%, though it comes with wild variance. Valencia spent each year 2007-2009 splitting half the season between two levels, and had these BB% splits each year: 2007 (10.3 then 6.4), 2008 (10.8 then 6.3), 2009 (12.3 then 2.8). This year, so far, a promotion has actually brought improvement, going from 6.9% in 200 AAA plate appearances to 8.8% in his 100 in the bigs. Going forward, I think anything from 6.5 to 11% in his walk rate wouldn’t surprise me, which over the course of a full season is the difference between 39 and 66 walks.

His power numbers should be a little easier to predict. Valencia has always been praised for gap power, and scouts have never confused his power with harboring some projection. In 2008, he hit 37 doubles, 5 triples and 15 home runs. In 2009, he hit 38 doubles, 4 triples and 14 home runs. While his home run rate (HR/FB) in 2010, including his Triple-A appearances, is something like 1.1%, I imagine that will stabilize some. Valencia has consistently hit doubles in 5.5 to 8.5% of his plate appearances, with the number going higher when his HR/FB goes lower. Whether you think he’ll hit seven home runs or 15, his likely extra-base hit total for a full season should consistently be 40-50.

Valencia is a good contact hitter, and sometimes, that can lead to a 14-for-19 stretch. While discounting him for this hot streak is easy, I do think Valencia can become a pretty solid player. Something like a .350 wOBA and +2.5 defense is about 3 WAR, and given their recent performance at the position, Valencia is a nice extra piece for a competitive Twins ball club.

Ever since the Los Angeles Dodgers signed Kenley Geronimo Jansen out of Curacao in 2004, his Howitzer-like arm strength has stood out. A catcher with a burly 6-foot-6, 220 pound frame, Jansen threw out 37 percent of base runners attempting to steal on his watch in the minors. He achieved fame during the 2009 World Baseball Classic as part of the Netherlands team that toppled a Dominican Republic juggernaut featuring Hanley Ramirez, Jose Reyes, David Ortiz, Miguel Tejada, Pedro Martinez, Ubaldo Jimenez and Edinson Volquez, among others. Jansen helped seal a 3-2 victory by gunning down Wily Taveras on a ninth-inning attempted steal of third base. Do you believe in miracles? Ja!

Unfortunately, dude couldn’t hit. The “switch hitter” posted a .257/.347/.341 triple-slash in 475 Rookie Ball plate appearances and .203/.281/.353 line in 347 trips to the plate in A-ball. Not wanting Jansen’s cannon to go to waste, the Dodgers shifted him to the mound toward the end of last season. Jansen logged 11.2 innings with Inland Empire of the High-A California League, punching out 19 batters but handing out 11 walks and surrendering six runs.

He then competed in the Arizona Fall League, where he opened eyes by popping the catcher’s mitt with 96-97 MPH radar gun readings. Jansen averaged about 95 MPH with his fastball, according to Baseball America. While he didn’t pitch much in the AFL (just 4.2 innings), he offered enough promise for L.A. to add him to the 40-man roster, protecting him from the Rule V Draft. Kenley got some prospect love, too, with BA naming him the 14th-best prospect in the Dodgers’ farm system. They lauded the right-hander’s mid-to-upper-nineties velocity and his promising, if unrefined, low-80’s slider.

This season, Jansen has spent time at High-A Inland Empire and Chattanooga of the Double-A Southern League. In 45 combined frames between the 66ers and the Lookouts, Jansen fanned a jaw-dropping 78 hitters (15.6 K/9) while issuing 23 free passes (4.6 BB/9). According to Minor League Splits, the 22-year-old’s park-and-luck adjusted FIP was 2.36. Throwing lots of high Gouda, Jansen induced infield flies 26.5 percent of the time. Jansen has tossed two innings since the Dodgers called him up on July 23rd, chucking his fastball at an average velocity just short of 95 MPH while sitting around 80 MPH with the slider.

Within the course of a year, Jansen has gone from flailing at A-ball pitching to flinging heat in the majors. As Sergio Santos and now Jansen have shown this season, the path from minor league position player to big league bullpen arm is short if you can bring it.

If Monday night became the catalyst to a billion Year of the Pitcher columns then perhaps Tuesday night should at least be labeled the Night of the Trainer.

Stephen Strasburg

The most well known injury in the league seems to lack one thing: an injury. Most reports have Strasburg undergoing every medical test known to man (and some) because he could not get loose during his pregame routine. The Nationals scratched Strasburg and replaced him with Miguel Batista who in turn bruised the Braves’ egos; pitching five innings of shutout ball with six strikeouts and a walk. As of now, there is no word on the long-term status of either Strasburg of the egos.

Huston Street

Like Strasburg, Street’s ailment did not occur during a game or even stretching. Instead, a batted ball nailed him in the nether region during batting practice. Loaded onto a stretcher and rushed to the hospital, the scene was surreal in its apparent seriousness. He’s being listed as day-to-day, but most fans would understand if he takes a day or two off.

B.J. Upton

The first of the night’s injuries to occur during the run of play; Upton sprained his ankle after the second batter of the night hit a single into center and he gave pursuit. It appeared Upton’s foot either was caught in the field turf or he simply landed the wrong way. Upton began hopping on one leg while scooping up the ball and tossing it, he then stayed on the ground for a few minutes before leaving the game. He too is day-to-day, with Joe Maddon suggesting he’ll miss two-to-three days.

Justin Upton

A bad night for the Upton family. Justin left minutes after big brother with a hip injury. His injury isn’t too severe and he should beat B.J. back into the lineup.

Shane Victorino

After making grab in the seventh inning against the Diamondbacks, Victorino walked off the field with the trainer for what is being described as a strained oblique. The hope is that he’ll avoid a trip to the DL, yet with the way the Phillies luck has went, expect him to miss at least a few days, and maybe a few weeks.

This post is a combination of primer and thought about the post-deadline waiver period that comes each August. It came up during a conversation I had with Jonah Keri yesterday and we both agreed on the premise that this August could see more waiver deals than those in the past based on the financial fears buzzing around the league.

Take Chad Qualls for example. His contract calls for roughly $4.19 million to be paid to him this season. Since we’re right around 60 percent of the way done with the season, we can estimate that Qualls’ is still due somewhere between $1.6 and $1.8 million. Qualls will qualify for free agency after the season and seems unlikely to reach Type B compensation. Essentially, at season’s end the Diamondbacks will lose Qualls for nothing unless they re-sign him.

It is impossible to know whether Qualls has trade value equal to or exceeding the Diamondbacks’ desired return. The only indications we have are that Qualls is not on a new team and his performance seemingly calls for a lowered value from previous seasons. The combination of poor performance – even if only by prehistoric metrics – and pending free agency is not the kind that produces a euphoric potion of prospect goodness.

Say the Diamondbacks don’t find an offer to their liking by Saturday. They aren’t in contention and Qualls’ giant ERA probably won’t cause too much of a public relations nightmare, so what they can do after Saturday is place Qualls on waivers. The first time, these waivers are revocable. If a team, the Yankees for example, claimed Qualls, the D-Backs would have a few days to work out a trade with the Yankees for someone else who either A) cleared waivers (and thus is able to be traded throughout the n waiver deadline period); or B) is not on the 40-man roster.

If they could not agree to a trade then the D-Backs could either let the Yankees take him (and his $1.6-1.8 million price tag) or pull him off waivers. They could then place him back on waivers, but this time it would be irrevocable. Meaning, of course, the D-Backs could do nothing if the Yankees again got their paws on him besides pass the check.

The incentive for the Yankees (or whatever team) is simple. They (presumably) don’t give up much in the way of talent or players with major league roles at the time for an upgrade with a reduced cost. The D-Backs get some cash they can put towards whatever, and while it’s probably not the ideal return, it’s better than nothing.

And in a league where teams are supposedly more conscious about the bottom line than in recent years, that could be all it takes to acquire talent.