A Post About Ned Yost
Actually, the title is a misnomer. This is a post about what Ned Yost thinks about his catcher position, and maybe about how baseball works in general. Yesterday, Ned Yost told the Kansas City Star that he was going to try and get Brayan Pena about 15 starts between now and the end of the season. That’s 15 of the final 49 games, or just a tiny bit more than a regular backup catcher might get.
This is on a team that features Jason Kendall as the first catcher. Kendall, who has lost all of his non-existent power (.091 career ISO, .044 this year) and is putting up a stellar 71 wRC+, for his whopping sixth year in a row with a sub-100 wRC+. He’s also 36 years old (or old as dirt in catcher years), and on a team with a 47-68 record that should be looking to next year, and yet the catcher is somehow on pace for 575 plate appearances.
Who knows how much promise Pena actually has. His .241/.285/.360 career line and 68 career wRC+ don’t scream ‘play me’ and do a lot to dampen the snark storm that would normally arise on a statement like Yost’s (a storm that is doing its best to permeate this column despite our best efforts to the contrary). But Pena does have a BABIP of .231 and an ISO of .038 right now, and those two numbers take much, much longer than 59 plate appearances to stabilize. In fact, those two stats would take longer than his 373 career plate appearances to become predictive. All we really have are his minor league numbers, and a catcher that can put up 180 walks to his 239 career minor league strikeouts deserves a little more attention from these Royals than he has gotten to date.
So we have a young catcher who is under team control for the next three years, and an old catcher obviously in decline who is under control just for next year. If we take current levels of production going forward, and use the math shown by Dave Cameron here, the old catcher would cost his team 4.7 batting runs above replacement assuming 34 games and 136 plate appearances while the young guy would cost his team 11.1 runs with the same playing time. Perhaps a team trying to create a ‘winning feeling’ in the clubhouse would care about those seven runs above replacement.
But there’s Pena’s BABIP. And his ISO. And his contact rate. If those returned (even mostly) to career levels – say, if we used the ZiPs projections from here on out – then Pena would cost the team only 2.4 runs in 34 starts. Since Kendall’s production right now is so in the norm for him, he would cost the team 4.5 runs going forward – he might actually be worse than Pena.
The worst part of this whole thing is – even if Kendall wasn’t worse than the youngster, wouldn’t a good organization pay a possible win in the standings to find out what they might have at a key position? Wouldn’t a coach that would like to stick around for next year want to know if the young guy could do more than just ‘work real hard?’ The fact that it’s not Pena taking the 34 starts, and Kendall the 15, is yet another reason why the snark storm always seems to settle around Kauffman Stadium.
With a phone full of pictures of pitchers' fingers, strange beers, and his two toddler sons, Eno Sarris can be found at the ballpark or a brewery most days. Read him here, writing about the A's or Giants at The Athletic, or about beer at October. Follow him on Twitter @enosarris if you can handle the sandwiches and inanity.
Its a bit of a stretch to call Pena a youngster.
Haha. Kendall will tend to skew the relative youth of those around him. Still, three years of control left, so maybe we need a new term for old dudes that are still under control. Cheapster?
Unestablished?
Certainly more a future than Kendall, though.
This post wasn’t really about Ned Yost.
One question for me is, why is a likely interim field manager making these kinds of calls in the first place? Not that Dayton Moore is likely to know any better, but still…Yost’s thoughts about who should be in harness for the rest of this year should count for less than nothing.
Except for the part about Yost being extended through 2012 at the trade deadline…
First of all, does that mean anything? Aren’t managers (and GMs) routinely fired before their contracts are up? When the Royals get off to their usual 15-40 start next year, won’t Yost’s neck be on the chopping block lickety-split, regardless of what his piece of paper says?
Second, even if we assume he will be around through 2012, he still is ostensibly there for his in-game strategy and clubhouse presence, not to determine the future of the organization by benching cost-controlled players with relative upside. So I still don’t see why he should have the final (or even any) word on this.
So catcher defense is still one of those gray areas, right? I mean, there are only so many good offensive catchers in the game anyway.
A bit of an aside, but I wonder why I have not seen the article about John Buck being the new Miguel Olivo, except for the part about his bad defense and unwillingness to murder any hitter who looks crosswise at his pitcher.
In the scheme of things, the point about Brayan Pena being under team control is only relevant if he dramatically improves his production, which is not being argued. Lucas May is a better bet to outperform him and he will have 6 years of control starting next year.
We expect the snark train to stay parked in front of the K, just don’t think anybody cares.
Well, I did argue that none of Pena’s career major league statistics (or at least ISO, BABIP) have become predictive, and that his ZiPs RoS makes him better than Kendall, but your point about defense is well-taken. I just avoided the matter really, but that’s another thing I’d pay some wins for if I was the Royals: more defensive information about Pena.
If it was me, I would have started Pena this year to see what he has and signed some random guy to back him up. My point is twofold: 1) Catcher valuation when you get outside of the top 5 in baseball are more fluid than any other position, and perhaps it follows that it’s legitimately more subjective; and 2) As bad as they are and have been, even if Pena does improve his production up to ZIPs and RoS levels, it makes them a marginally better team. I just don’t think it’s enough to effectively counter the “veteran catcher” argument, as much as I wish it was.
I, for one, am shocked that the manager who started Jason Kendall 91% of the time the last time he managed him is doing the same thing again.
See? The post is about Ned Yost! Haha.
What’s the expression, an old dog can’t learn new tricks?
If you think his catcher usage is bad, wait until you see how he uses the bullpen.
If I were a Royals fan, I’d be depressed over Yost securing an extension.
While Moore seems to be getting things in order in the draft and development areas, many of his decisions at the major league level are head scratchers. Maybe KC needs to revise its org chart: move Moore to farm director or scouting, and name a more well-rounded executive as GM.
Every manager that manages Jason Kendall plays him a lot. He did it before he came to Milwaukee. He played a lot under 2 different managers in Milwaukee(one being Yost) and now he is playing most of the games in KC. Kendal is a bad catcher both offensively and defensively. There is no reason to pay or even play the guy as more than a backup. The only thing I can come up with is that he scares managers into playing him every day.
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