Daily Graphing – Coco Crisp

The Red Sox and Indians are apparently close to completing a deal that will send Coco Crisp and David Riske to Boston in exchange for Andy Marte, Guillermo Mota, and Kelly Shoppach. The past two seasons Coco Crisp has been quite good, batting essentially .300 with a combined 31 home runs and 35 stolen bases. Consider it the two year approach to 30/30 (hey, not everyone can do it in one year!). He also managed to wrack up 42 doubles in 2005, which puts him 18th on the leader-board. Assuming this trade gets completed; let's see how he'll do in Fenyway next season.

His walk to strikeout ratio (BB/K) isn't too shabby as it climbed to just above league average last year. His problem isn't so much striking out as he only does so 13% of the time (which is good), but he doesn't walk all that often. Essentially he puts the ball in play a lot which isn't necessarily a bad thing considering his fairly high batting average on balls in play (BABIP) of .326. Furthermore, it looks like his BABIP is really starting to settle in around .325, so I wouldn't consider either his 2004 or 2005 season lucky.

Being a switch-hitter, he was much better batting left-handed in 2005, but historically he's been better batting right-handed. I'm not entirely sure what's going on with that, but looking at his PitchZone chart, you'll see that he just couldn't muster a hit with balls up-and-in or down-and-in when batting right-handed. Batting left-handed he has some trouble handling pitches down in the zone. In general, it looks like he prefers pitches up in the zone and as a result, has a tendency to chase high fastballs. Other than that, there's not really any glaring weakness that I can see.

If Coco Crisp walked a little more he'd be the perfect replacement for Johnny Damon since he'd be able to bat leadoff too. Either way, he's a good bet to bat .300 again, but don't expect many stolen bases since the Red Sox were second to last in stolen base attempts. In the home runs department, his isolated power has been on a two year rise, so he should be good for at least 15 home runs, possibly closer to 20. I really like Coco Crisp and at only 27 years old, I think he'll continue to get even better.