Let us know what you think Hideki Matsui can do in 2012! Add your prediction here!
It’s time to ask ourselves:
Last year, in Hideki Matsui’s offense went from good with the Angels (120 wRC+) to woof with the Athletics (93 wRC+).
Is Hideki Matsui done? Could the 38-year-old be worth another 550 PAs?
I say: uh, yes. Exactly: “Uh, yes.” Because I’m not so sure. And neither should you be.
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The Los Angeles Angels have already made one big move this week, acquiring Chris Iannetta from the Rockies to hopefully solve their offensive woes at catcher. Now, they have been tied to free agent third baseman Aramis Ramirez. A Ramirez signing would give them a glut of infielders with him, Alberto Callaspo, Maicer Izturis, Erick Aybar, Howie Kendrick, Mark Trumbo and a healthy Kendrys Morales all established as MLB players. With Kendrick establishing himself as a premiere second baseman, the odd man out would probably be Callaspo. Let’s take a quick look to see if swapping out Callaspo could help turn the Angels into a legitimate post-season contender.
Chris Iannetta is finally free. After employing the worst starting catcher in baseball last season (min 250 plate appearances), the Los Angeles Angels decided to seek out an upgrade. Despite some success in the majors, Iannetta never endeared himself to the Colorado Rockies’ front office. After seasons of speculation, the Rockies finally gave up on the 28-year-old catcher, trading him to the Los Angeles Angels for Tyler Chatwood. With the full backing of his new organization, will Iannetta make the Rockies look foolish?
Yes, you read the title correctly. Bobby Abreu of the Los Angeles Angeles was Mr. Clutch during the 2011 season. He ended the season with the highest clutch rating in the majors, as measured here at FanGraphs.
I stumbled across this nugget while writing this Thanksgiving-themed post for our friends at Baseball Nation. I was hunting for players who’d accomplished little-noticed feats last season. I revved up the leader boards, sorted for clutch, and found, to my great surprise, Bobby Abreu’s name at the top of the chart.
I’ve always been intrigued by the concept of “clutchness” in sports and otherwise. People who can take their game to the next level in the most pressure-packed situations. Indeed, not just ones who can do it; ones who must do it; ones who thrive doing it.
At FanGraphs, clutch is defined as how well a player performs in high leverage situations in comparison to how well he performs in non-high leverage situations. It’s calculated using WPA, pLI and WPA/LI, as explained here. So if a player is a .330 hitter in non-high leverage situations and a .330 hitter in high leverage situations, then he may be considered a good hitter, but he wouldn’t be considered clutch.
Bobby Abreu’s clutch rating for 2011 was 2.70. Read the rest of this entry »
While the MVP award announcements are normally used as an opportunity to make snide comments and question the intelligence of writers, I prefer to think of them a different way. We know that we’ll never be able to convert everyone to sabermetrics, and there are always going to be one or two people that make questionable decisions on their ballots. Instead of focusing our attention on them, why not move that focus back to where it’s supposed to be: the players.
The MVP award (and the subsequent conversation surrounding it) is a chance for us to recognize players for having impressive, noteworthy years. Twenty-three players received a vote during this year’s AL MVP voting, but there were still more out there that had seasons worth remembering. These players aren’t necessarily “snubs”, since each player in the MVP voting also deserved recognition for their seasons; it’s simply there are sometimes more players doing exceptional things than can be highlighted.
So even if the BBWAA missed these players, let’s give a few of them the spotlight they deserve.
The top two vote receivers in the AL Rookie of the Year race are enough to make most saberists tear their hair out. Jeremy Hellickson won the voting despite posting a 4.44 FIP and 4.76 SIERA, and Mark Trumbo and his .291 OBP came in second. Both Hellickson and Trumbo finished heads and tails ahead of the rest of the competition, despite posting Wins Above Replacement totals that ranked them in the middle of the pack and behind players like Eric Hosmer, Michael Pineda, Desmond Jennings, Brett Lawrie, and Ivan Nova.
Obviously, traditional statistics played a huge role in this voting. Hellickson had 13 wins and a 2.95 ERA over 189 innings in the AL East, and Trumbo finished the season with 29 home runs and 87 RBIs. This decision is being greeted with copious amounts of snark, but both Hellickson and Trumbo are exceptionally interesting players in their own right. Instead of being concerned about the snubbed players, I’m more curious about what the future holds for these two players.
How will their careers progress? Is there any hope they can fix the holes in their game? I took a look at some of Jeremy Hellickson’s issues today at DRaysBay, so let’s take a deeper look at Mark Trumbo.
On Tuesday, we took a quick look at the competitive balance in the MLB, and I made the claim that baseball may have more parity than most leagues, but it also has want of greater balance. During the course of the piece, I made this statement:
The NFL has decided it wants payroll to have essentially no impact on winning, so teams basically trot out the same amount of money every Sunday and hope their money was better-spent. Is that what the MLB wants?
Aft’wards, Paul Swydan pointed out to me that indeed NFL salaries are not flat. Despite their hard cap, their hefty revenue sharing, and their tight spandex pants, the NFL still exhibits nearly a $77M gap between the biggest and lowest payroll — impressive, but still nothing compared to the MLB:
Yesterday afternoon, Jayson Stark considered the question, “Is the MLB’s competitive balance a joke?” His answer was a rather blunt no:
MLB’s competitive balance is NOT a joke.
It beats the NFL.
It beats the league formerly known as the NBA.
And … I can prove it.
Stark’s method of proving it — plucking facts from the recent playoff series and comparing them generally to the NFL and other major leagues — was less than rigorous. In general, I agreed with his assertion: Parity in the MLB exists naturally far more than any other sports league.
HOWEVER, if my foot has less gangrene than your foot, does that mean I don’t need a doctor? No. I probably still need a doctor, and I probably need to stop playing barefoot tag on Rusty Nails Pier.
Relative success does not necessitate absolute success. And frankly, I feel the “parity” in the MLB indeed has a gangrene of sorts, a disease that is causing only specific segments of the league to rot while the rest hum along uncaring.
Of course, it is one thing to suspect something and demand more research, but it is another to pull the sabermetrician stocking over your head and answer that suspicion with a Falcon Punch of data.
Let’s do just that.
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By now most baseball fans realize that the majority of bunts decrease the bunting team’s run-scoring. However, we also know that bunting also makes sense in some situations, even for non-pitchers who can hit a little bit. It makes sense from the standpoint of game theory (keeping the fielders honest), can increase run expectancy in some situations, and in some situations in close games, it is better to play for just one run. As I did after last season, I would like to look at the three most successful bunts of the 2011 regular season as measured by Win Probability Added (WPA).
As noted by Mike Newman and Jim Breen this morning, a recent report out of New York suggested that the Mets would be willing to trade David Wright for Peter Bourjos (and some other stuff). I’m not going to get back into the issue of David Wright’s trade value, but I do want to point out the obvious – Bourjos is a far more valuable asset than Wright, and the Angels would have to be crazy to trade him at all.
Bourjos’ availability is only discussed because the Angels have some kid named Mike Trout, who you may have heard of, and also happens to be a pretty terrific young center fielder. If you view both as true center fielders (and you probably should), then you could argue that the Angels have a surplus of players at the position, and perhaps trading one to get an upgrade at another position would be a decent use of resources.
Of course, that’s only true in a world where center fielders can only play center field, and teams can only have one at a time. In reality, Major League teams need three outfielders per game, and there’s no rule preventing a guy with the ability of a center fielder from playing left field or right field. In fact, with players like Brett Gardner, Carl Crawford, and Ichiro Suzuki establishing themselves as legitimate assets in corner outfield spots over the last decade, teams have become more and more open to the value of having multiple center fielders playing side by side.
