Archive for Shane Victorino

The Philadelphia Phillies aren’t accustomed to hovering around the .500 mark, let alone falling on the wrong side of it. Winners of five straight division titles, the team and its core members are used to playing solid baseball and firming up grasps on playoff berths. Throughout this recent run of success, the front office has used the trade deadline to bolster the roster, fix a glaring weakness, or just strengthen an area not previously considered an outright strength. All the while there was never substantial doubt that they would contend.

The situation may play out differently this season, as the Phillies are now 29-33, four games under .500, and eight games behind the first-place Washington Nationals.

While their struggles were somewhat predictable given the extended absences of Chase Utley and Ryan Howard — which were known before the season — and the in-season injuries to Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, Vance Worley, Carlos Ruiz, Jim Thome and Laynce Nix, the fact remains that the team isn’t playing good baseball and doesn’t really seem primed to right the ship.

With a number of roster decisions on the horizon, their play of late has raised questions about when the team should legitimately consider selling off assets in an attempt to replenish a depleted farm system and regroup for next year. Seeing that they are eight games behind the Nationals and 6.5 games behind the second wild card team, that time may be fast approaching.

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The All-Star game rosters were announced Sunday, which of course means chaos ensued when the selections were revealed. Player X shouldn’t have gotten in while Stats-Stud Y should have been a lock. Since many of the selections were pretty predictable, those snubbed from the festivities, as usual, garnered a tremendous amount of attention.

Of those who were not selected, perhaps nobody was more egregiously snubbed than Andrew McCutchen of the Pittsburgh Pirates. The 24-year-old center fielder ranks eighth among National League hitters with a .395 wOBA. His 6.9 fielding runs derived from solid play at the toughest outfield position ranks third in the league behind Shane Victorino (also snubbed, but on the final vote, unlike McCutchen), and Troy Tulowitzki.

All told, his 4.6 wins above replacement ranks him ahead of everyone except the two Joses: Bautista and Reyes. Any list of first-half MVP contenders would be incomplete without his name, and yet fans, players and the coaching staff of the National League team somehow found a way to select other less-qualified players. That he isn’t even included on the final ballot for fan voting — the list includes Victorino, Todd Helton, Ian Kennedy, Michael Morse and Andre Ethier — further perpetuates the madness. McCutchen is one of the top players in the sport right now, better than Jay Bruce, Carlos Beltran, Chipper Jones, Morse and Ethier. Yet the first three members of that group were voted in by the players, and the latter two still have a fighting chance of making the team.

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Almost three months into the season, more statistics are beginning to stabilize, and certain stars are emerging. It has become clear that some players, whose success was initially thought to be the byproduct of small sample trickery, are legitimately on their way to an All-Star caliber season. Some of these players are in the process of establishing new levels of performance. Some are merely reverting to a previously established high level of productivity that was thought to be long gone. Others are living up to their billings as prospects worth monitoring, perhaps reaching that destination sooner than was originally thought.

And in the cases of the players highlighted in this post, some are unexpectedly leading their teams in wOBA. Here are five players having fantastic seasons, but whose names are surprising to see atop their team wOBA leaderboard.

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Earlier in the week, we focused on the top two spots in the Phillies order. Specifically, the revelation that using Jimmy Rollins in the leadoff spot over Placido Polanco would only cost the team about 1.18 baserunners over the course of a season. The commenters pointed out, rightly, that this analysis ignored the slugging aspect of the two batters’ repertoires. Questions were also raised about the lefty-lefty tandem at the heart of the order. So, let’s dive right in and try to get this right by the numbers: A little moron, the Phillies’ batting order.

Remembering back to the LOOGY wonder that was Javier Lopez in the playoffs last year, you might over-rate the “problem” of batting lefties Chase Utley and Ryan Howard back-to-back. Lopez only pitched 4 1/3 innings, but his four strikeouts were memorable, and it seemed that he shut the duo down. But this wasn’t really a year-long problem. Yes, Howard has a nasty platoon split (.424 wOBA vs righties, .324 vs lefties), but Utley doesn’t. His work versus righties (.382 wOBA) is basically indistinguishable from his work against southpaws (.390 wOBA). Opposing managers can bring out their LOOGY for both guys at their own peril.

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The weekend took your faithful Phillie correspondents to places we didn’t expect, and none of those places featured wifi and a comfy moment to kick back and review the first two games of the NLCS. Better late than never. The Phillies and Giants split the weekend, which wasn’t great for the maroon marauders because the series tilted lightly in the Giants’ favor with those results – teams that win one of two games on the road in a seven-game MLB series win the series 56.2% of the time.

Game One was just one of those games, it seems. Seven innings, eight hits, seven strikeouts, no walks and more ground balls than fly balls doesn’t seem like a line that would normally produce four earned runs, but that’s what happened to Roy Halladay Saturday night. The difference between excellent and a -8.8% WPA night for the Doc could have been summed up in two fly balls from Cody Ross that ended up in the seats. This same Cody Ross had exactly average power this year (.145 ISO) and had gone -for-16 against Halladay in his career. The same Cody Ross that was Cody Ross the Marlin until Brian Sabean briefly made him Randy Myers by supposedly claiming him just to block the Padres. Then the Giants then realized that he was better than Jose Guillen, at least in the field, so that he could become the Cody Ross, Giant, that the Bay Area now knows and loves. Either way, you read that fateful name backward as Grant did on the McCovey Chronicles, and you get “ssoR y doC,” which is about all that can be said to Halladay, who pitched well enough to win.

It did seem like the Phillie offense could have put together a five spot – Tim Lincecum wasn’t at his best either. He walked more (three), and gave up equal numbers of fly balls and ground balls, but he also struck out eight – one of which was Ryan Howard with two batters on in a tie game in the third inning (worth 6.6% in WPA alone). Though the two teams had the same amount of baserunners, and the Phillies showed a better slugging percentage as a team, it was the Giants that strung together the hits in the big moments.

The following may seem random – and most likely was – but the big lineup change between games one and two may have had a little bit to do with the different outcomes. As Rob Neyer noted before the game Sunday, Charlie Manuel reversed Placido Polanco and Chase Utley in the batting order so that the heart of the order did not include two straight lefties in Utley and Howard.

It’s a little strange to see Polanco and his lack of power batting third, and it may feel like separating two lefties isn’t that big of a deal, but just look at what the Giants did in the two games for your pudding-based proof. In Game One, Javier Lopez brought his lefty sidearm release to the mound to get Utley to ground out and Howard to strike out before leaving in a double switch that would have made Dusty Baker proud. In Game Two, Bruce Bochy brought Ramon Ramirez out to pitch to the righty Shane Victorino, but after Victorino sacrificed, he was faced with the choice of walking the lefty Utley to keep Ramirez in the game and pitch to Polanco, or burning Lopez on Utley, bringing in Sergio Romo to pitch to Polanco, and then summoning Jeremy Affeldt to get Howard. That is a lot of relievers, but with the off-day coming today, the second move-heavy approach is probably what Bochy should have done. Instead, this is what happened:

Bottom 7th: Philadelphia
– R. Oswalt singled to shallow center
– R. Ramirez relieved J. Sanchez
– S. Victorino sacrificed to third, R. Oswalt to second
– C. Utley intentionally walked
– P. Polanco singled to shallow center, R. Oswalt scored, C. Utley to second
– J. Affeldt relieved R. Ramirez
– C. Utley stole third, P. Polanco stole second
– R. Howard struck out swinging
– J. Werth intentionally walked
– P. Sandoval at third
– S. Casilla relieved J. Affeldt
– J. Rollins doubled to deep center, C. Utley, P. Polanco and J. Werth scored
– R. Ibanez lined out to third

4 runs, 3 hits, 0 errors
San Francisco 1, Philadelphia 6

Don’t underestimate the difference the new lineup made, as it obviously made Bochy’s life difficult in the seventh inning Sunday night (and then he went and made some dubious decisions of his own). Now it’s clear that he’ll have to use both of his lefties to get through the heart of the order late in game three, provided his starter once again gets the job done against the new-look lineup.

Roy Halladay? Roy Halladay. Roy Halladay, Roy Halladay, Roy Halladay. Roy Halladay!

With due respect to Shane Victorino, whose two hits and two RBI helped him lead all batters with a .179 WPA, it was one of those games where you felt like the pitcher could have won it by himself, even with a lineup filled with nine Roy Halladays. In fact, Doctober’s one hit (a liner to left that Johnny Gomes misplayed) and RBI were good for a .079 WPA, second on the team, so in this case that was true. A team full of Roy Halladays would have won this game. He accounted for 80.4% of the teams WPA.

But of course it was his work on the mound that was so impressive. He showed legendary control in pitching his no-hitter, only producing 25 balls on 104 pitches. He induced weak groundball after weak groundball (12 of them, to 6 fly balls). He was efficient – using only 11.6 pitches per inning. He was dominant. He had the kind of game that will go down in history right next to Don Larsen’s perfect game. He produced a game of which everyone who watched felt unworthy. He was awe-some.

And yet, he had a tiny bit of help, including a great play by Carlos Ruiz to close out the game. Check out this game graph from Brooks Baseball, which shows that John Hirschbeck’s strikezone was a little bit generous on the sides, but nothing that Orlando Cabrera should have been whining about:

Doesn’t matter. Halladay deserves all the credit he can get. Look at the strikezone plot of his pitches, an exercise in control and command:

We wondered how hungry Halladay was in the Lincoln-Douglas Remix preview, and it seems he’s hungry enough to eat the postseason. Second no-no in postseason history? Amazing. First postseason appearance? Legendary. There are practically no adjectives that really get it all the way right.

The Phillies fell to the Marlins last night, 8-2, dropping their lead in the NL East to just one and a half games. I missed the game due to attending a Hootie and the Blowfish concert, but upon learning the score, developed a real gut feeling that Shane Victorino was somehow involved in those two runs. You see, Victorino, otherwise known as “The Flyin’ Hawaiian,” has been on an absolute tear over the last month and yet very few have realized. Sure enough, the box score revealed that the Phillies two runs came as a result of a two-run homer off the bat of Victorino. Granted, replays showed it was likely a foul ball, but that isn’t changing the stat sheets or the fact that he has been one of baseball’s best over the last month.

Thanks to the ‘last 30 days’ feature here we can definitively check how his performance has been and gauge it relative to the rest of the league. Here are his numbers:

Last 30 Days: .347/.386/.705, 1.091 OPS, 6 2B, 2 3B, 8 HR, 1.30 WPA/LI

His WPA/LI ranks behind just Ryan Ludwick and Ryan Braun, meaning that Victorino has arguably been the most productive players in the NL over the last thirty days, let alone the most productive centerfielder. Additionally, his 1.091 OPS and 8 HR top all centerfielders. To add even more fuel to the fire, all of this has been built upon a .316 BABIP; while the BABIPs of other hot performers in this span are ridiculously high and unsustainable, Shane’s has been relatively normal.

The recent stretch has brought his overall seasonal line to read: .288/.351/.451, 20 2B, 11 HR, 1.20 WPA/LI, 1.00 REW. His WPA/LI ranks fourth amongst NL centerfielders behind Rick Ankiel, Nate McLouth, and Carlos Beltran; his REW comes behind just McLouth and Beltran.

As The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball as well as a few other studies have shown, hot and cold streaks have very little predictive ability, so this isn’t to say Victorino will outslug Ryan Howard from here on out. Still, he has been very productive and I would be willing to wager that the vast majority of baseball knows next to nothing about him.

Plugging him into the in-season Marcel, Shane would go .278/.343/.421 with 10 2B and 5 HR. This would bring his overall line to .284/.346/.441, with 30 2B and 16 HR. Compare then his projected 2008 finish to his 2006 and 2007 seasons:

2006: .287/.346/.414, .760 OPS, 19 2B, 6 HR
2007: .281/.347/.423, .770 OPS, 23 2B, 12 HR
2008: .284/.346/.441, .787 OPS, 30 2B, 16 HR

His BA and OBP would stay virtually the same while the value of those hits—more doubles and home runs—would increase. He may not get much better considering his age of 27 years old, but teams could do a lot worse than having a solid centerfielder with a very good arm who would top their speed charts and add a dimension of power. He may not get the publicity of Jimmy Rollins, Chase Utley, or Ryan Howard, but his contributions have definitely been key in getting the Phillies out of their recent funk.

For most of the season all eyes directed towards the Phillies offense have been focused on Chase Utley. And why not? After all, Chase can be found in the top five or top ten in just about every offensive category in the National League. Recently, though, Utley has hit a coldspell, posting a .203/.294/.356 slash line in his last sixteen games. Luckily for the Phillies, others have stepped up and filled the void.

My brother, who covers the Phillies at Phanatic Phollow Up, wrote yesterday about how not just one but many Phillies hitters are stepping up at this juncture. In his first 19 games, Shane Victorino had a .626 OPS; in his last 19 games it has been .773, raising his season OPS to .703. Geoff Jenkins had a .237/.284/.329 slash line through 24 games; in his last 21 it has been .339/.358/.468. Even Pedro Feliz is at a .304/.333/.478 clip over his last 12 games.

Of all the players stepping up, none is more satisfying to Phillies fans than Ryan Howard. Since May 7th, Howard has played 18 games, with a .264/.321/.681 slash line, 4 2B, 1 3B, 8 HR and 18 RBI. On the season he has 14 HR, coming in just behind Lance Berkman, Dan Uggla, and teammate Utley. Howard is still striking out, 28 K in these 18 games, but the extra base hits, about half of which have been to the opposite field, are definitely a promising sign.

He puts about one-third of his flyballs into the stands and hits a lot of balls hard, as evidenced by his ~20% line drives. Despite lacking anything resembling speed, Howard has had very high BABIPs for his career; .375 in 2004, .358 in 2005, .363 in 2006, .336 in 2007. This year, however, it is only .245. This should regress to his mean as the season progresses meaning Howard could, and probably will, defy his critics by having what ends up as a good season.

The strikeouts are definitely a problem but, unlike in April, when he was just striking out, now he is striking out and hitting the ball hard, often out of the stadium.