If, during Spring Training, you predicted Aaron Crow would make the Kansas City Royals 25 man roster, it’s likely people would have laughed at you. After all, he was coming off a poor season at Double A; in which he posted a 5.66 ERA and a less than spectacular 4.74 xFIP. If, once he made the team, you predicted he would be the Royals best reliever two months into the season, people would have had you committed to an institution. Well, we’re two months into the season and it looks like you should be the newest member of Mensa. Aaron Crow has already far surpassed expectations in his rookie season. Can he continue his dominance going forward, or does his current performance scream small sample size fluke?
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I think I’m like most baseball fans in that when I think of a designated hitter, I think of home runs. The DH spot has usually been filled by power hitters since its inception in 1973, and that makes sense. If a player is playing a position with no defensive value, he needs to produce on offense. Home runs are the most valuable offensive event. The most valuable hitters in any given year usually have plenty of home runs and extra base hits. One often hears that a player who doesn’t hit for power doesn’t have the bat to play on the “easy end” of the defensive spectrum, and and even moreso in the case of a player who is primarily a DH. Billy Butler is a current example of a player who mostly fills the DH spot, but since he hasn’t hit for much power (yet), you will sometimes hear people say that he doesn’t fit the profile of a DH. Without focusing specifically on Butler, I’d like to write briefly about what it means to “hit well enough to be DH,” and then to see how often that actually happens with a relatively low amount of power.

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It’s time for interleague play, again. Even moreso than the interminable disputes about which “style of play” is aesthetically superior, complaining about fairness of the presence/lack of the DH in away games, perhaps the most contentious debate among many fans (contentious despite the overwhelming evidence on one side) is that interleague play proves that the American League has been significantly stronger than the National League for at least a decade, no matter what this fine representative of the Best Fans in Baseball believes:

The American League’s domination of interleague for an extended period of time is good evidence for its superiority, whatever the causes of that superiority might be. However, some will point to individual players as being independent demonstrations. For example, Matt Holliday was a great hitter with the Rockies through 2008. He started the 2009 season in Oakland and “struggled” relative to what he’d done before. Some people attributed that simply to him being a product of Coors Field (sigh), but when he was traded to St. Louis, he started raking at almost the same level. It must be the league, right?

Or how about Pat Burrell, who came off a number of successful seasons in Philadelphia, signed with Tampa Bay, then bombed so badly for a season-and-a-half the Rays let him go for nothing in 2010. He then signed with San Francisco and tore the cover off the ball to help the Giants on their way to a World Series Championship.

Naturally, it is silly to argue from individual cases to a league-wide issue. However, I wondered if taking all the cases like Holliday’s and Burrell’s and putting them together might show us something about the relative strength of leagues, both now and in the past.

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Earlier this afternoon Dave raised an interesting point regarding newly promoted Royal Eric Hosmer. Plenty of prospects have produced high BABIPs in the minors, which has led to results that simply aren’t sustainable in the majors. Among the BABIP casualties he lists is Alex Gordon, former top prospect turned bust, who is now ripping through the league with a .385 wOBA. Yet much of his success this season rides on his .380 BABIP.

This is clearly — wait for it — unsustainable. Gee, how did I ever come to that conclusion? Of course, if it were merely a matter of inflated BABIP driving Gordon’s success, he wouldn’t warrant a further look. You could glance at the number on his player page, see that it’s out of line with his career totals, and write him off as lucky and a severe regression candidate. But it’s not that simple. BABIP is not composed 100% of luck.

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The Royals went into the season stating that they were determined to see what Kila Ka’aihue could offer them as a regular first baseman, but it only took 96 plate appearances for them to come to the conclusion that Ka’aihue is no Eric Hosmer. Yesterday, they made the switch official, swapping the two between Triple-A and the majors, and Hosmer will take over at first base for the Royals this evening.

It’s easy to see why the Royals made this switch – Hosmer is killing Triple-A pitching, putting up a .502 wOBA to start the season, while Ka’aihue is struggling again at just a .282 mark. Hosmer is the future in Kansas City, and given how well he was hitting down in Omaha, it’s not hard to conclude that he’s the better player of the two right now as well.

That said, I do find it interesting how differently batting average is treated as a possessor of predictive power at the minor league level. Hosmer’s results are fantastic, but the basis of his batting line in Omaha is a .500 batting average on balls in play. Of his 43 hits, only eight of them have gone for extra bases, the kind of total you’d expect from a leadoff hitter, not a slugging first base prospect. I’m sure Hosmer is hitting the ball hard, but I’d also suggest that he’s also a bit fortunate in how many of his balls are finding holes – you don’t rack up 35 singles in a month without a decent amount of luck, no matter how hard you’re hitting the ball.

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The opening of any MLB season brings with it a host of underperforming players, and 2011 is no different. Superstars like Carl Crawford, Carlos Gonzalez, and Hanley Ramirez have taken up lodging in the unfortunate sub-50 wRC+ club. Although Crawford’s .199 wOBA and 15 wRC+ are the worst among qualified players, not even he can approach the unfortunate season Alcides Escobar is suffering through. Escobar’s league-worst Win Probability Added of -2.01 is nearly a full win worse than second-place Crawford’s -1.02.

Escobar’s context-neutral stats aren’t much better, but his .224/.248/.265 line is still, somehow, significantly better than what Crawford has managed through his inaugural Red Sox campaign. Unlike Crawford, though, Escobar has had his poor season magnified by multiple failures in extremely high leverage situations. Escobar has seen seen six situations with a leverage index of 4.0 or higher — given that 1.5 is considered high leverage, these were extremely important situations. Except for receiving one intentional walk, Escobar made an out in every single one. All told, his WPA for these six plate appearances alone adds up to -0.911, nearly equaling Crawford’s WPA from his entire horrible season. Expanding our scope to all high-leverage situations, Escobar holds a .059/.158/.059 triple-slash. He even breaks wRC+, with a -38 mark in those situations.

The Royals have quickly fallen back to earth since opening up the year at the top of the AL Central. Escobar’s incompetence in high leverage situations has been a significant reason why. It is a tiny sample, and one will imagine that Escobar can turn things around at least a bit, and get some hits to drop in. Unfortunately for the young Escobar, though, nothing can change what’s already happened: one of the worst clutch stretches imaginable for an MLB player.

“I heard the jury was still out on… Science…”

–G.O.B. Bluth, Arrested Development

Saunter over to the Shutdown and Meltdown leaderboard and you will find a curious leader: The San Diego Padres.

Yes, the Friars have somehow amassed an absurd 31 shutdowns (SD) while winning a sport-worst nine games. This seems somewhat surprising, because experience has taught me — among many things about cats — that bad teams typically do not need great bullpens. They might have them (*cough* Joakim Soria *cough cough*), but they do not need them because they get destroyed early and often.

Take my hand and follow me down Logic Avenue: The worst teams will not often participate in three-run, save-opportunity games — or even one-run games. Instead they will presumably watch this and employ a slew of mop-up long men who do not affect the game’s already-decided outcome. I mean, c’mon, three-fifths of the Royals rotation is likely to allow five runs before finishing the 6th inning. What can a bulllpen possibly do when the score is 5 to -1?

In the same stroke of logic, wouldn’t we expect the best teams to have fewer save opportunities? Unlike impressively mediocre teams, like the Chicago Cubs, the New York Yankees spend a good deal of time slapping homers and trouncing weaklings. As a result, we should expect they play fewer close games than the Cubs, who must crawl, snarl, and curse their way into every victory and loss.

Well, that may be logical, but it’s not entirely correct.
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Johnny Damon’s case for the Hall of Fame has recently come up (again). Indeed, some people seem to think it is time to start discussing which hat he should be wearing for his induction. My initial response is “he’s been good, but not good enough,” but hey, I’ve been wrong before. Many times. While the voters have made some progress in recent years, they aren’t exactly known for their objectivity or consistency. What the voters will do with Johnny Damon is one question, one that involves stuff like history and folk psychology, things I’m not interested in dealing with here. Instead, I want to address what the voters should do in Damon’s case.

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“Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast.”

-ye olde Bill Shakespeare (Friar Laurence from Rome and Juliet)

After waiting many hard winter months without any baseball, it seems unfair to ask us sabermagicians to wait even longer to saberize our favorite teams and players. Unfortunately, that is what we must do. One of the core principles of sabermetric thought is the value of sample size.

We cannot do as our detractors think we do: We cannot resort to looking for greater truths from lesser findings.

So, this early part of the year features a lot of articles about players’ plate discipline numbers and pitchers’ pitch f/x changes — small slivers of reality that give us clues to how the big reality will start to look.

One such thing we can look at early in the season: batting average on balls in play (BABIP). Why? BABIP stabilizes slowly, but tends to stay in a particular range for hitters (somewhere between .250 and .350, with most hitters being quite near to .300). So, early in the season, we can usually take a gander at the Luck Loserboard (those hitters with BABIPs at or beneath .200) and get a good idea about which players are poised to rebound.
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It happens every year. A manager gets an itchy trigger finger early in the season and buries a guy before he even gets a chance to earn the faith the manager put in him to start the season. This year is no different, and with an idea sparked from Eric Seidman’s piece yesterday on Brad Emaus — an article that the Mets completely ignored when they waived him today — I present the 2011 Brad Emaus All-Stars.
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