The World Baseball Classic is a cool idea. It is a bit hypocritical for me to write that, as I have not been terribly engaged by the WBC in the past, but I’m jumping on the bandwagon, such as it is. I am not here to convince you that you should love it, and I understand why many MLB fans would be almost impossible to win over. The WBC has its issues, one of which is the perceived lack of star power on the U.S. team. I do not want to enter that debate here. Writers like Craig Calcaterra and Drew Fairservice have done a good job of responding to that sort of hand-wringing. Fairservice makes another excellent point: it is up to the fans to turn the WBC into a thing that stars won’t miss.

I want to take a different tack on this by trying to look at things from the players’ perspective. In particular, I want to think about a certain subset of players — younger players still in their initial years of team control and without guaranteed contracts beyond this season — for whom the stakes are a bit higher.

Read the rest of this entry »

The distinction between observed performance and true talent is one that is, in a way, intuitive, yet tends to be elusive. Even the most careful of us can slip from talking of one to talking of the other. Determining the difference for a specific skill or a specific player can be difficult, but the general idea itself is not so hard to understand. Even the most casual fan of baseball understands that pretty much any player can go 0-4 or 4-4 in any given game without thinking that player’s true talent batting average is either .000 or 1.000. That understanding already contains the basic notion of a proper sample size and its relation to true talent. The reader can peruse the appropriate sections of the Sabermetric Library to get caught up.

Instead, this post is going to look at some specific metrics for hitters (in the near future I may do a similar post for pitchers) and compare how well they correlate from from year to year. This gives us an idea of how these assorted metrics compare (relative to each other) with respect to predicting a player’s future performance (another way of saying true talent). I have included a couple of tables for reference, along with some brief commentary.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Yankees take care of their own. Or something. Former Yankees, Rangers, Yankees (again), and Dodgers outfielder and designated hitter Marcus Thames has apparently retired, as the High-A Tampa Yankees announced that he will be their hitting coach in 2013. Thames was never a superstar. He was not even everyday player over even one full season in the majors, as the most plate appearances he ever received in a single season was 390 in 2006. However, he was surprisingly productive despite his limited playing time. During 2006, he hit 26 home runs for the Tigers on their way to the World Series. Thames was a good example of how hitter with a limited skill set can carve out a surprisingly long career, which included his share of dramatic hits.

Read the rest of this entry »

Stuff tends to fall by the wayside during the holidays, even for baseball blogs. Still, Hideki “Godzilla” Matsui’s retirement deserves a some attention. Even for Christmas Week, it seemed to pass quietly. So, about two weeks after the fact, here are some briefs thoughts on Matsui’s MLB career and some of his biggest moments at the plate.

Read the rest of this entry »

In a stunning development, the Yankees reportedly have no interest in former Rays, Twins, and Tigers designated hitter and “outfielder” Delmon Young. A glance at a current rumors (as of this posting) about Young’s free agency seems to turn up at least as many reports of teams not being interesting in Delmon Young as teams that might be. Part of that might be that Young is waiting to get serious about shopping his services until he recovers from ankle surgery. Part of it might be Young’s public history of less-than-stellar behavior, both recent and in the past. And part of it might just be that over 880 major league games and 3575 major league plate appearances, Delmon Young has been mostly terrible. But is there still reasonable hope for Young to be a decent everyday player? After all, he just turned 27, was once considered the best prospect in baseball, and he has mashed the ball in recent postseasons. It might just be worth looking a bit more closely at Young alongside a player with a somewhat similar history and skill set to see where that kind of thinking can lead.

Read the rest of this entry »

After having his 2011 season ruined by injury, Adam LaRoche had a nice comeback in 2012. He hit .271/.343/.510 (127 wRC+), including a career-high 33 home runs on the way to the postseason with Washington. The Nationals and LaRoche had a mutual option for 2013, but LaRoche turned down his side of it and opted for free agency as he entered his age-33 season.

LaRoche is reportedly looking for a three-year contract similar to the one Mike Napoli received from Boston, while the Nationals are said to be willing to offer only two years and $25 million. LaRoche is apparently talking to the Orioles, too. LaRoche had a nice year, but it is worth asking (assuming the Nationals are being serious in their pursuit of LaRoche) why Washington is bidding on LaRoche, given that they already have Michael Morse signed for 2013 at a considerably lower price.

Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball fans like to talk about splits. Some splits are more useful than others. Platoon splits are particularly interesting because they can be used both in evaluating players and in thinking about strategy. As has been emphasized elsewhere, observed platoon splits can vary quite widely from a player’s true platoon skill. For that, we need to know the platoon skill of the population from which he comes, at least generally speaking. The first step for doing that is to see what the overall platoon split of hitters is in any given year. Looking at that also leads to other interesting questions.

Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, in the aftermath of the big Royals-Rays trade centered around Wil Myers and James Shields, Dave Cameron wrote about the perception of relative risk with respect to veterans and top prospects. One issue in this case is the supposed reliability of a “workhorse” pitcher like James Shields. Dave rightly pointed out that although prospects are risky, there is risk associated with any player, even a supposedly reliable pitcher. I wanted to look a bit more closely at these workhorse pitchers. After a number of seasons of 200 or more innings, how many innings do such pitchers put up in the subsequent seasons?

Read the rest of this entry »

We have already run two pieces on Shane Victorino since he signed his new contract with Boston by Eno here and by Michael Barr at RotoGraphs. They are both fine pieces in their own right, but one issue that needs more discussion is Victorino’s platoon split.

As people noted elsewhere in the signing’s aftermath (and analyzed in some detail earlier this season by Jack Moore), Victorino, a switch-hitter, has a very pronounced platoon split, hitting left-handed pitching well and right-handed pitching poorly. In 2012 Victorino hit just .229/.295/.333 versus righties while facing them about in about three-fourths of his plate appearances. How much does this split really hurt his overall value?

Read the rest of this entry »

Way back in Ye Olden Days of 2008, Geovany Soto was the Cubs’ Rookie of the Year catcher. He hit for average, power, drew walks, and played acceptable defense behind the plate. He was just 25 years old. The best seemed to be to come.

Four years later, Soto got non-tendered by the Rangers, then reportedly turned around and signed a one-year, $3 million contract with them. For a contending team like Texas with a sizable payroll budget and in need of a catcher, the issue is not so much about the money. Rather, given the dearth of other catching options either internally (especially with Mike Napoli reportedly signing with Boston) or externally, the issue is whether Soto is good enough to be a regular starter for the Rangers in 2013.

Read the rest of this entry »