Archive for Alex Rodriguez

I cannot venture to say that Alex Rodriguez is a complicated individual any more than any other person, but I can fairly easily say that Alex Rodriguez the baseball player is full of complications. He’s an all-time great who has twice signed two of the most expensive contracts in baseball history, been suspended for PED use, and is currently being shoved out of the organization he has played for the past 13 seasons despite putting up colossal numbers and leading the team to a World Series championship during the 2009 season. This post is not meant to analyze Rodriguez’s career, celebrate his accomplishments or discuss his flaws. The question here is should Alex Rodriguez retire, and like most Rodriguez-related issues, it is complicated.
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Alex Rodriguez has had an interesting few years. Ok, so that’s a big understatement. Besides the controversies, the 3,000 hits, and the various arguments with management and professional baseball catchers, we’re now witnessing something most people didn’t expect: a 39-year-old A-Rod putting together an incredible offensive year. As he heads toward the final two years of his contract in New York, two questions arise: has Rodriguez been worth the incredible amount of money he’s received over the span of his current contract? And has he been worth the money he’s getting this year?

First, it’s important to establish just how great and anomalous Rodriguez has been this season for, well, how old he is. It is pretty well known that most offensive categories should have taken a serious hit by the time a slugger approaches 40, but A-Rod has bucked that trend — in fact, he’s been close to his former greatness, at least offensively.

We can measure his success this year in a number of ways: by simple numbers (his current 152 wRC+ is in line with some of his better previous seasons — he posted the same wRC+ in his stellar 2008 campaign), average batted-ball velocity (he’s top five in the league), and fly ball/home run distance. The short story: A-Rod is hitting the ball really hard, really far, and he’s even being pitched to like he’s a slugger in his prime.

Now that we’ve established how great he’s been this season, let’s talk about the contract, and free agent deals. We often hear about teams backending contracts. They do so because inflation will devalue the later years of a deal, and they might be able to deal the player to a team who will eat some of the contract later on. It’s the free agent version of kicking the can down the road: sign the player now, get the production, and deal with the hard decisions later.

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When reports emerged in January that the Yankees were intending to contest the home run milestone bonus agreement the team entered with Alex Rodriguez back in 2007, it was unclear whether or not the matter would ever actually come to a head. Following a season-long suspension for performance enhancing drug use, no one knew for sure whether Rodriguez would even make the Yankees’ opening day roster, let alone be given enough playing time to hit the six home runs necessary to tie Willie Mays at 660 (triggering the first of five potential $6 million milestone bonuses under the 2007 agreement).

Rodriguez, of course, did make the team and ended up hitting his 660th career home run on Friday evening in Boston. As a result, attention has once again focused on whether the Yankees have any realistic hope of escaping the milestone bonus agreement.

As I noted back in January, because the bonus agreement has never been released publicly, it is difficult to fully assess the Yankees’ chances of escaping the $6 million payment. However, while there is still much that we don’t know about the contract, recent developments have shed some additional light on the legal arguments the Yankees will likely rely on when attempting to avoiding paying Rodriguez under the agreement.

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Remember Alex Rodriguez? He’s playing baseball again. He’s also just six home runs from passing Willie Mays for fourth on the all-time home run list. Now that we’ve left the frenzied Bonds record-breaking era behind, not many people are paying attention to who’s climbing the leaderboard, or even generally what’s going on with A-Rod. It feels like a saga that has run its course, and we’re left in the post-scandal haze when everyone is bored and has moved onto something else. The people that are talking about him either do so ostensibly to bash him, or love him in an ironically redemptive, friend of the anti-hero sort of way.

That’s understandable given the circumstances surrounding him, but he’s popped up a few times in this young season, like when he did this on Wednesday night:

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As Dave Cameron wrote two days ago, multiple reports have emerged about numerous baseball players connected to a clinic in South Florida that dispensed performance-enhancing drugs and has been nicknamed “BALCO East.”

Of course, as Cameron notes, “Rodriguez is going to get the most attention, because he’s Alex Rodriguez.” The Yankees are reportedly exploring all avenues to void the last five years and $114 million of his contract. But this is an interesting case, because, if they succeed, this would be the first time an active player would be successfully punished based on news reports.
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UPDATE: It appears that MLB agrees.

Every so often, like most baseball writers, I look at myself in the mirror and ask myself an important question: Why am I not writing about Alex Rodriguez? Thankfully, the richest Yankee provided me with ample opportunity this week, as Major League Baseball announced that they were once again investigating Rodriguez for his alleged participation in illegal high-stakes poker games. This isn’t the first time that the league has considered Rodriguez’s poker habits: back in 2005, the Yankees and MLB cautioned him about his involvement, informing him that it could be negative for his image and worrying about the propriety of his gambling large sums of money with people who may also wager on baseball.

While the games may have been illegal, it’s not clear that Rodriguez himself broke any laws by merely playing. (The relevant laws depend on where the games took place; Alex is alleged to have played a couple games in California, but RadarOnline.com has also published allegations that Rodriguez attempted to organize his own game in Miami in 2009.) The trouble is that, of all the potential illegal activities Rodriguez could have been connected to, there are few so troubling to baseball as gambling, which has a 90-year history of being baseball’s cardinal sin, inspiring baseball commissioners to overpunish those suspected of gambling for nearly a century.
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They got it right. Hideki Matsui was unequivocally the right choice for World Series MVP. His raw numbers were incredible. In 15 plate appearances, the Phillies only managed to get Matsui out 5 times. His 8 hits, 2 doubles, and 2 HRs add up to a .761 wOBA.

Of course, context neutral numbers don’t tell the whole story. in the clinching game 6, Matsui’s grand night tallied a .339 WPA, effectively single-handedly winning the game for New York. Matsui also led Yankee hitters in game 2, where Matsui’s go-ahead home run led to a .223 WPA and a 3-1 Yankee victory. Overall, Matsui totalled .639 WPA, good for the best in the series.

As such, he was a no-brainer. The more interesting discussion, in my mind, stems from discussions from Wednesday afternoon, prior to game 6, regarding Chase Utley‘s validity as an MVP candidate. As everybody knows, Utley had an impressive series, tying Reggie Jackson’s record with 5 home runs in a World Series. Thanks to an 0-3 dud in game 6, Utley’s line fell to 6-21 with 3 walks, but all 6 of hits went for extra bases, resulting in a .555 wOBA.

Again, we need to give these numbers context. Utley’s two home run games in games 1 and 5 combined for a .455 WPA and his game 4 (2-4, 2B) was worth another .131. Unfortunately for Utley and the Phillies, that accounts for all of his hits in this World Series. His hitless games in games 2, 3, and 6 (all won by the Yankees) combined for a -.377 WPA, essentially cancelling out games 1 and 4.

Utley’s power performance was impressive. Still, we can’t forget about the bad games. Although Alex Rodriguez and Johnny Damon didn’t have any games, in terms of raw hitting, that compared to Utley. A-Rod, however, put up .269 WPA in game 4 with his game winning double, and Johnny Damon put up .250 in the same game with an RBI single, a hit in the 9th inning, and the legendary double steal that led to the game winning run. Both A-Rod (.330 WPA) and Damon (.421 WPA) had better overall series than Utley, by this measure.

For the Phillies, the best candidate is Cliff Lee. No Phillies hitter consistently put up solid games. Lee more than singlehandedly won game 1 with his memorable complete game (.519 WPA), and pitched well enough in game 5 to lead Philadelphia to their only other series win (.085 WPA). That leaves Lee with .604 WPA for the series, nearly as much as Matsui.

Mariano Rivera, fittingly, finished the game for the Yankees. He did pitch well this series, as he didn’t allow a run, but he only saw one high leverage situation (game 2, +.166 WPA). His contribution was important (total of +.259 WPA), but pales in comparison to Matsui’s and Lee’s, and is still less than Rodriguez and Damon.

The fans got this one right. Hideki Matsui had the game of his MLB career tonight, and he completely deserves this honor.

Alex Rodriguez entered the Yankees ALDS against the Twins with a playoff wOBA of .377 in 170 plate appearances. Certainly an impressive mark, given a league wOBA ranging from .330 to .340 in the years in which Rodriguez’s teams reached the playoffs. However, his playoff stats pale in comparison to his regular season performance, where he performed as one of the top hitters in the game, with a wOBA of .412. This 35 point difference works out to roughly an 18 run difference over 600 plate appearances. This large difference in regular season and playoff performance has led to the media blasting Rodriguez with such names as “Mr. April.”

Is it really fair, though? We in the sabermetric community certainly understand the dangers of judging a player on 170 plate appearances. Players slump. Players play while injured. Many things can happen to produce 170 plate appearances below a player’s natural ability. BABIP luck can come into play with samples of a full season, and even more so with the sample size of less than a third of a season we have with Rodriguez. Due to the small sample size, his wOBA is actually within one standard deviation of what we’d expect based on his career numbers.

That’s even without considering that the pitching staffs of playoff teams have allowed a .301 OBP over the last decade, for an OBP+ allowed of 89. Similar results occur with other statistics. Simply put, we should not expect hitters to fare as well against the superior pitching staffs they encounter in October. What makes Derek Jeter so remarkable isn’t that he performs so much better in the post-season. His wOBA in the playoffs is only 2 points higher than his career norm – .377 vs. .375. What is remarkable is that he’s done it consistently (a significant sample of 576 PAs) against superior run prevention.

As Rodriguez showed in the series against the Twins, it just plain doesn’t work to make the kind of assumptions that Rodriguez’s reputation as “unclutch” would have many making regarding his playoff hitting ability. So let’s take a quick look at his numbers before and after this year’s ALDS.

Note: I am not including SB/CS numbers in wOBA calculation

Regular Season: 9611 PA, .390/.576/.965, .405 wOBA, .362 BABIP

Postseason (Pre-2009): 170 PA, .376/.483/.859, .372 wOBA, .333 BABIP

Postseason (Current): 182 PA, .381/.519/.900, .388 wOBA, .355 BABIP

It only required 12 ridiculous plate appearances to boost Rodriguez’s playoff wOBA by 16 points. Over 600 plate appearances, this would be an 8 run swing, or nearly a win. Not only that, his postseason numbers approach his career numbers, and are a statistically insignificant distance away (roughly .4 SDs). Again, this is even without adjusting for the quality of run prevention he’s facing.

Next time you hear somebody telling you about how unclutch Rodriguez, or for that matter, any other player, is in the playoffs, there are things we must keep in mind. First, wOBA and all other offensive stats are extremely volatile over the small sample sizes we have with the playoffs. We see this even with teams like the Yankees that reach the postseason on an almost yearly basis, due to BABIP fluctuations and other factors. Second, it’s not reasonable to expect (or demand, in the case of some fans) a superhuman increase in production in the postseason, due to the increase in the pitching and defensive talent they will face.

I’ll be honest, I have not really been following Alex Rodriguez since his return from injury, so his consecutive games with a home run streak led me to believe that he had been performing just fine. A quick glance at his OBP/SLG and wOBA entering last night’s action confirmed that, at .412/.595, and a wOBA north of .400, Rodriguez had certainly been helping the Yankees throughout their impressive winning streak. Then my attention quickly shifted to the first component of the slash line, BA, since his seemed ridiculously low. Coming into last night, Rodriguez had been slashing .189/.412/.595. Despite a sub-.200 BA, A-Rod was OPSing over 1.000!

After an 0-4 showing, his numbers look like this: .171/.382/.537, .398 wOBA. Can you recall an odder looking line of statistics? Rodriguez’s BABIP currently rests at a microscopic .069. He has seven hits in 41 at bats, five of which are jimmy-jacks. Some more oddities: the league average hitter is swinging at 24% of his pitches seen out of the zone, though A-Rod has swung at such pitches just 12% of the time. On these outside pitches, the league average makes contact 63% of the time; just 33% for Rodriguez.

Curious, I looked through my database for the leaderboards in two different areas: the highest OPS for players with batting averages of .200 or lower, and the lowest BA for players with OPS marks of 1.000 or higher.

Highest OPS, BA < = .200
#  NAME           YEAR      SLASH         OPS
1) Mark McGwire   2001  .187/.316/.492   .808
2) Elijah Dukes   2007  .190/.318/.391   .709
3) Roger Repoz    1971  .199/.333/.374   .707
4) Ruben Rivera   1999  .195/.295/.406   .701
5) Rob Deer       1991  .179/.314/.386   .700

You knew McGwire’s name had to be on here, but this definitely shows that A-Rod is currently performing in uncharted territories. The highest single-season OPS for a player with a sub-.200 BA is .808, over 100 points lower than Rodriguez’s current mark. There is no way Rodriguez continues to get hits on balls in play just 6.9 percent of the time, but don’t you dare ruin my fun! Here are the lowest batting averages for players with an OPS >= 1.000:

Lowest BA, OPS >= 1.000
#  NAME           YEAR      SLASH         OPS
1) Barry Bonds    1999  .262/.389/.617   1.006
2) Mark McGwire   1997  .274/.393/.646   1.039
3) Mark McGwire   1995  .274/.441/.685   1.126
4) Jim Edmonds    2003  .275/.384/.617   1.001
5) Reggie Jackson 1969  .275/.409/.608   1.017

So the lowest BA with correspondingly awesome OPS marks is .262, which is in no way what we consider to be a poor percentage of hits in at bats. The league averages, for hitters with at least 200 plate appearances:

OPS >=  1.000: .324 BA
BA  < =  .200: .542 OPS

A-Rod isn't going to sustain this low of a batting average if he continues to take walks and put the ball in play the way he usually does, but a slash line like his at the present certainly merits a few different double-takes. When those balls inevitably do fall in, watch out. Rodriguez is still an absolute beast and his slash line right now serves as the perfect example for why batting average tells us next to nothing on its own.

It’s an old bar argument that we’ve all had – who is the best player in baseball right now? It’s generally been a two horse race for the last couple of years, but we’ve got a new candidate thrusting himself into the discussion:

The best hitter alive is Albert Pujols, and no one really has any chance to claim otherwise. Alex Rodriguez is an inner circle hall of famer, but at 33, he’s a tick behind Prince Albert at the plate and the defensive difference isn’t large enough to close the gap. But now, entering his prime at age 28, Chase Utley is throwing his hat into the ring and demanding to be noticed. He’s absolutely destroying the ball right now, adding tremendous power to a package that already made him the best second baseman in the game.

That kind of offense from a guy who can really play defense at an up-the-middle position is just unbelievably valuable. While most teams are happy to have their second baseman avoid being a black hole at the plate, Utley gives the Phillies a middle of the order star, and that kind of comparative advantage is the main reason that Philadelphia is a playoff contender. Utley may have two teammates with NL MVP awards, but they’re playing in his shadow now.