“If you don’t get on base, then you suck. That’s basically what they’re saying.” So said Brandon Phillips to USA Today Sports on Tuesday, in a vehement defense of the way that he plays baseball. And to be sure, there are plenty of people who have said this (more or less). I cut my sabermetric teeth on Gary Huckabay and Joe Sheehan proclaiming that “OBP is life. Life is OBP.” But there are plenty of ways to skin a cat, and not focusing on on-base percentage has worked out just fine for Phillips. In fact, it’s worked out better for him than most players in baseball history.

In the FanGraphs glossary entry for on-base percentage, the rule of thumb for an average OBP is listed as .320. With a .319 career OBP, Phillips is basically right at that average mark. And that is a touch unfair to him. During his time in Cleveland, before he put it all together, he logged a paltry .246 OBP in 462 plate appearances. In his time in Cincy, his OBP has been .325, just a shade over average. He has had an OBP above league average in three of his nine seasons in Cincy. Last season, when he posted a paltry .306 OBP — his worst in his nine years in Cincy — it was still better than the average National League second baseman. Of the 11 NL second basemen who compiled at least 400 PA last season, Emilio Bonifacio, Kolten Wong, Aaron Hill and Jedd Gyorko all posted worse OBP’s than did Phillips. In other words, while Phillips isn’t the OBP messiah, he’s far from a pariah.

In fact, among his average or worse OBP peer group, Phillips is a top-20 player all time:

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Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times, orange for TechGraphs and blue for Community Research.
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The Orioles are projected to have the seventh-best offense this season, and they had the seventh-best offense last season. Yet looking at the offenses projected to be better and slightly worse than the Orioles reveals something interesting about Baltimore, and how you can take it one of two ways. We’ll get to that part later.

First, let’s go through and examine just how many players on each team are projected to have a positive and negative batting runs above average.
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Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times, orange for TechGraphs and blue for Community Research.
Read the rest of this entry »

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Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times, orange for TechGraphs and blue for Community Research.
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The Blue Jays have new players up and down their lineup — Russell Martin, Justin Smoak, Josh Donaldson, Michael Saunders, Devon Travis, etc. Dalton Pompey basically qualifies here as well. But one incumbent player may end up being just as, if not more, important than all of the new acquisitions — middle infielder Maicer Izturis.

Signed early in free agency after the 2012 season, Izturis hasn’t really done what the Blue Jays had hoped he would in a Toronto uniform. He was, by WAR, the worst position player in the game in 2013, and then he missed all but 11 games in 2014. Ankle and knee injuries were culprits, though the ankle injury in 2013 may not explain the near-career low walk rate and career-low pitches per plate appearance. Either way, Izturis hasn’t gotten good results for awhile.

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