Chris Burke

by
December 15, 2008

On Friday, the Arizona Diamondbacks decided not to tender an offer of arbitration to Chris Burke. After coming over from the Astros in the Jose Valverde trade, Burke was a massive disappointment, hitting .194/310/.273 in 165 at-bats, yielding an awful -11 wRAA while only playing about 1/4 of a season. In short, he was a total disaster, and the D’Backs decided that they didn’t want to give him a chance to get a raise in arbitration after such a poor season.

For some team looking for a middle infield/utility player option on the cheap, however, Burke should be near the top of the list. Even with his poor 2007 and miserable 2008, his career is .241/.318/.363, which translates to a .304 wOBA. That’s not good, certainly, as Burke has racked up -29.5 wRAA over his career, but that averages out to about -13 runs per 600 plate appearances. That’s not good – Burke almost certainly won’t be an asset offensively going forward.

However, Burke is a good defensive player. In his career, he’s logged 854 innings at second base and has posted a UZR/150 of +10. He’s also logged 1,111 innings in corner outfield spots and posted a UZR/150 of +14. While he’s been used as a utility player, he’s put up very good numbers in his two primary positions of 2B/LF. Combined with positive scouting reports, we can be pretty certain that Burke’s a defensive asset.

As a guy who can be an asset as a defender at multiple positions, he doesn’t have to hit much in order to be a useful utility player, and if his offense rebounds to anything close to his 2006 performance, he’d be a league average starter.

At 29, Burke is simply too young to give up on and assume that his struggles the last two years represent a true collapse of his skills. Jerry Hairston Jr provided a great template for a resurgent player of this skillset, bouncing back from a horrible 2007 to be quite valuable for the Reds in 2008. A smart team with a need for a solid backup middle infielder with upside will bring Burke into camp and find a way to get his glove in the line-up on a semi-regular basis.

You Aren't a FanGraphs Member
It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed.
We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.
1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other.
2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.
3. Dark mode and Classic mode!
4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.
5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.
6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)
7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.
8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO.
9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members.
10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features!
We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it.




 

Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.

11 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Jason T
16 years ago

So, he’s like ‘Super Willy’? Is Burke someone the M’s could use to push Lopez and Betancourt a little? Betancourst especially.

0