Archive for Edgar Renteria

Paul Konerko is sitting at 381 home runs. The 35-year-old has averaged 32 homers per season in his last six, and he looks to be on pace for 30 to 35 more this year. Erring on the conservative side, let’s say he finishes with 30 dingers — 14 more than his current total. He would finish the 2011 season with 395 career home runs. He has two years remaining on his contract, and as long as he continues to hit like this, he should have no problem DH’ing for another few seasons after that.

Is it far-fetched to think that Konerko couldn’t average at least 21 homers from 2012 to 2016? Because with that average, he’d reach the 500-home-run milestone.

Along with achieving 3,000 hits, or winning 300 games as a pitcher, getting to 500 home runs — insert generic PED disclaimer here — tends to trigger automatic election to the Baseball Hall of Fame. But as Chris Cwik covered earlier this week, Konerko is obviously not a Hall-of-Fame player. Even if he joins the 500-home-run club, he’s unlikely to garner much HoF support, which is interesting because it would mean the milestone isn’t what it used to be.

With that idea, let’s discuss other players who might buck the milestone trend. These players would have achieved grand milestones almost under the radar, and would be considered longshots for the hall of fame despite their accomplishments.

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When the Tigers traded two of their top four prospects in Jair Jurrjens and Gorkys Hernandez for Edgar Renteria this past offseason, they had to have set high expectations for the Colombian shortstop. After all, in each of the last three seasons he has increased his batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, and OPS. Suffice it to say, close to the 100-games mark, he has not come close to meeting them.

In 82 games he has produced a .254/.301/.326 slash line, “good” for a .627 OPS. He has walked much less, doing so in 6.7% of his plate appearances compared to the 8.1-9.4% of the three years prior. In addition he is not only hitting less but when he does they are not normally of the extra-bases variety. He has just five doubles and five home runs. Add in his lone triple and he has 11 extra-base hits on the season. Of players with at least 300 plate appearances, that ranks as the second worst in baseball, ahead of nobody other than Gregor Blanco.

Now, just because he has performed this way to date does not mean he will continue to do so over the course of the season. Projection systems base their judgments on actual historical data, so they do not just come from thin air. Renteria’s Marcel projection for this year included a .295/.357/.425 slash line, a .782 OPS, 10 home runs, and 29 doubles. He is clearly off pace but how much so? How has his performance so far this year effected what should be expected of him?

Luckily, Sal Baxamusa of The Hardball Times created a spreadsheet that allows us to project performance in-season based on current statistics as well as those from the past three seasons. Using this, Renteria’s projection over the remainder of the season includes a .282/.342/.402 slash line, a .744 OPS, 5 home runs, and 13 doubles. His projected OPS in the second half comes relatively close to his pre-season projection, but what happens when we add back in his poor first half?

With the aforementioned second half, Renteria would finish this year at .267/.320/.360, a .680 OPS, 10 home runs, and 18 doubles. His OPS would be 100 points lower than his pre-season projection, and the only number he matched would be the 10 gopher balls. Quite simply, a .680 OPS from a shortstop expected to be a key ingredient on a team “that could score 1,000 runs this year” is terrible. Add in that he only had one year left on his contract—and a 2009 club option—entering this season and that the Tigers traded away two key prospects, and, while it is yet to be determined how the Braves will make out with Jurrjens and Hernandez, the Tigers end of this deal does not appear it will work out the way they hoped.

Of course, hindsight is always 20/20, and Renteria could be an outlier defying his projection, but he would have to recover from a hamstring injury to post some extra-gaudy numbers for this to happen.

There is no doubt that the Detroit Tigers organization has had a disappointing season up to this point. However, there is good news in the minor league system.

After purging most of its top prospects from the system this past winter to acquire such names as Miguel Cabrera, Edgar Renteria, and Dontrelle Willis, the Tigers organization was rated as having one of the worst systems in the game. But a number of the mid-level prospects in the system have improved their games. As well, top pitching prospect and 2007 first-round pick Rick Porcello made his much-anticipated pro debut.

Porcello, who was drafted out of a New Jersey high school, was considered a Top 10 talent but he fell to the 27th overall pick due to signability concerns. Every team in the league who passed him up now regrets it, as he is holding his own in High-A ball as a 19-year-old. He throws in the mid-90s and has a four-pitch mix that includes a fastball, curve, slider and change-up.

So far this season, Porcello has a 2.94 ERA in 67.1 innings. He has allowed 67 hits and only 19 walks, to go along with 41 strikeouts. Although he is not striking out a ton of batters, Porcello is inducing more than 2.2 ground balls for every fly ball out and only four balls have left the yard. He is actually having better luck against left-handed batters (.222 batting average), than righties (.283).

His worst game of the season came on June 1 when he faced the Dunedin Blue Jays for the fourth time in a month. He allowed four earned runs on nine hits and three walks over 4.2 innings. Porcello was been excellent so far in his pro career despite skipping over both short season ball and low A-ball. He could end up being one of the first pitchers from the 2007 draft to make it to the majors, which is good news for the Detroit Tigers.