The Platoon Player Stigma
As mentioned in the comments section of yesterday’s post regarding Gabe Gross, the idea of a player being limited to a platoon player seems to limit his perceived value. That leads me to an obvious question – does this perception agree with reality?
The crux behind many of the arguments against players with these high platoon splits is that their vulnerability to pitchers of the same hand makes them a worse value. A manager can merely put in a decent left-handed pitcher, in the case of Gross and, for example, Curtis Granderson, and the otherwise good hitter is reduced to a shell of his former self.
However, this doesn’t account for the ability for a manager to now leverage the situation. If the team has a right handed hitter with good or even normal platoon splits, by replacing the left handed hitter with that batter, the team could be in an equivalent or better situation. This is especially notable when facing a starting pitcher who would have the platoon advantage against your team’s hitter, as the pinch-hitting penalty wouldn’t be in play here. Overall, by taking the advantage in a vast majority of platoon situations, the team will get more wins out of that position or lineup slot than if the player did not have a large platoon split.
MGL puts it best, I think.
In fact, having good overall numbers with a horrible split is a POSITIVE and not a negative! If it turns out that he is truly (true-talent wise after accounting for small sample performance) poor against LHB, then you would be able to platoon him, sit him against tough (high splits) lefties, or pinch hit for him against lefties in high leverage situations, which would provide even MORE value to his team than his overall or historical numbers would suggest!
We can also infer, as MGL goes on to say, that we can apply this to anyone who has a large split in any sort of numbers – such as offensive value and defensive value, for example.
This isn’t to say there aren’t disadvantages to platoon players. If you can’t find a player with comparable defense to your platoon player, the gain from pinch-hitting or spot-starting another player could be minimal or even negative. We also are forced to deal with the limited number of roster spots. With 25 roster spots, we can only see so many players of this type on one roster, as eventually you run out of the roster spots for the players who cover their weaknesses. This is certainly at the center of the debate over whether teams should carry 12, 13, or 14 position players, and why many sabermetric writers implore teams to carry as many position players as possible.
In the end, though, what matters more than whether or not a player has leverageable platoon or defense or any other kind of skills is his overall talent. The decision of who to play becomes easy when one player is just clearly better than the other. Despite that, these issues will probably come into play for years to come as MLB teams attempt to squeeze every last possible run out of the resources that are available to them, and the smartest teams will properly leverage their platoon players.
Jack Moore's work can be seen at VICE Sports and anywhere else you're willing to pay him to write. Buy his e-book.
This is essentially the argument of keeping Mike Lowell around in Boston rather than eating his last year.
I don’t agree with people who think it, but it KIND of makes sense. Last year Lowell went .301/.363/.503 vs. LHP. Ortiz went .250/.346/.481 vs. RHP (much higher in the last 4 months of the season). Makes sense, because it’s been a couple seasons since Ortiz hit lefties.
A DH platoon? Hmmm… It wouldn’t be the worst idea.
I mean if we can’t dump him, might as well use him.
Well said, Jack. I never understand why the common fan looks down his/her nose at platoons.
Easy, to many, it can be viewed as insulting, or weirdly, hurting a team.
Say, for example, the Phillies sign Ryan Garko. Would it be crazy to start him vs. lefties? He has a career .313/.392/.495 line vs. them. Ryan Howard? .226/.310/.444.
But imagine the reception in Philly to hear that Howard would’s PAs would go from about 700 to 500-550. Even though clearly, it would help the team.
And it would piss Howard off and make him less likely to resign with them. Statistically, it would be a good decision but it would repercussions outside of the statistical realm that would hurt the team.
To be fair, will it be worth it?
He’s a guy who’s constantly finished higher in the MVP standings than he’s deserved. He’s a very good player that’s been confused as a great one.
Why spend all that money on Ryan Howard, essentially, when you can probably end up spending the same money to get Adrian Gonzalez, for example. If you can’t tell, I’m not one in favor of pandering to vets.
Personally, I would never platoon Howard. I don’t care how he does against LHP overall…when he’s on, he kills LHP just as bad as RHP. Its frustrating to watch him those other 4 months of the year when he looks like a A ball player against lefties but overall he earns his pay.
He’s a very good player that can get hot and carry a team for a month-6 weeks. He does it every year. He’s not a Pujols level guy but he’s in that tier below him.
He’s probably worth more to the Phillies than he would be to many other teams as he’s simply a good fit for their lineup and team. And he doesn’t hurt them defensively.
I can’t really speak at all to Howard’s defense, don’t see him play much, various statistical measures kind of suck for 1B’s, and given the split between the best and worst 1B via UZR, who cares about 1B defense?
I can imagine waiting for the Howard hot streak can be frustrating at times. I don’t see him much, is there something in his swing that makes him prone to wild fluctuations of hot and cold?
When he’s hot, he doesn’t offer at sliders low and away. When he’s cold, he will chase repeatedly. His tendency to chase leads umps to call pitches low and away as strikes even if they are 3-4 inches off the plate so it has a snowballing effect on him. A good comparison would be Utley. Utley rarely chases and thus gets that low outside call on the exact same pitch that is called a strike on Howard. Also, when he’s hot, he waits on a pitch and swings later…which leads to him hitting a good number of opposite field HRs as he’s making contact deep in the zone.
Defensively, Howard has always had good range and that improved last year when he dropped some weight. His issues have always been with pickoffs and throws to 2B…he tends to drop his arm slot when he rushes the throw and this leads to errors. Last year, he worked alot on that and got a bit better at it. He was throwing overhand more and it cut down on his error rate. He’s one of those guys that will make a spectacular reflex play but then muff a routine throw…does that make sense? He’s quite athletic for a big guy…particularly at his now lower weight.
Makes sense to me. Thanks.
“In fact, having good overall numbers with a horrible split is a POSITIVE and not a negative! If it turns out that he is truly (true-talent wise after accounting for small sample performance) poor against LHB, then you would be able to platoon him, sit him against tough (high splits) lefties, or pinch hit for him against lefties in high leverage situations, which would provide even MORE value to his team than his overall or historical numbers would suggest!”
I would argue that this is plain wrong. A player with good overall numbers and a horrible platoon split is likely to have played the vast majority of his time against the pitchers which he hits best. Let’s say you have a Gabe Gross-type, who has (all numbers totally plucked out of the air) a .360 wOBA against RHP but a .260 wOBA against LHP, but he has a .340 wOBA overall because he faces RHP nearly exclusively. Compare him to another player with a more regular right-handed split who has a .345 wOBA against LHP and a .330 wOBA against LHP, and a .340 wOBA overall. He has a similar overall wOBA BUT HE TAKES MORE PLATE APPEARANCES BECAUSE HE CAN HIT BOTH SIDES.
Are you really going to able to leverage Gross’s minor advantage in wOBA against LHP to such an extent that it bridges the gap between the two players created by the fact that a) the other player can hit adequately against both sides and b) he can take considerably more plate appearances?
Gross’s overall wOBA might be relatively high compared to one of his peers, but if it is artificially inflated because he faces right-handed pitching almost exclusively, the player with the similar wOBA who faces BOTH sides is more valuable.
The only time mgl’s comment above makes sense is if a player has an extreme split with an average wOBA BUT STILL has taken a relatively normal % of his plate appearances against the pitchers which he struggles against. In practice, I’d say they probably aren’t too many players for whom this is the case, and the advantages they’d gain by properly leveraging their plate appearances are nullified to some extent by the fact that you have to find someone else to make the plate appearances they MISS by being bad against one type of pitching when you only have a 25-man roster.
And this is all coming from someone who’s a huge fan of platoons as a cheap way to get league average production out of roster spots – I’m a cardinals fan and I was strongly in favour (in a Non-Holliday scenario) of us grabbing someone like Jack Cust to platoon with a right-hander (Allen Craig) in LF and finding a left-handed or switch-hitting platoon partner at 3B for David Freese (such as Branyan, Hinske or Felipe Lopez) this year. Still, I think the MGL comment above is an over-simplification, although this article is an interesting and thought-provoking one.
You may be right generally about players seeing greater numbers of PAs against the strong side of their platoon, but I can tell you that Jim Leyland ran Curtis Granderson out there against lefties incessantly despite his horrible split. Obviously with there being more righties than lefties overall, he had more PAs against them, but Leyland refused to platoon him and very rarely pinch hit for him even late in the season when the rosters were expanded and there were suitable players on the bench to play the field in his spot. There was a notable game in mid-September in Minnesota where the Tigers were down 2-0 with two runners on and 1 out in the 7th inning and the Twins brought in (LHP) Jose Mijares to face Granderson and Leyland did not lift him from the game, even in that circumstance playing against the team that was chasing them from behind in the division. I was driving to work listening to the game and screaming at my radio that night.
How many teams are going with an 11-man staff these days? If you’ve got a 4 man bench, you need to use one for a back-up catcher, one for an outfielder who can probably play centerfield, one for a middle infield back-up. It is not a bad idea to have a second infield back-up rather than a platoon corner outfielder.
On the other hand, if you’ve got a 5 man bench, you can platoon one corner OF spot, have a centerfielder 5th outfielder, a middle infield back-up, a back-up catcher and platoon at one of the corner IF spots, perhaps ideally at third base.
Yes, I know teams believe that it is easier to leverage the platoon advantage by use of multiple pitching switches. I still think that the reasons are primarily cultural, and begin with the emergence of the save rule. In other words, it is (somewhat ironically) “stats” driven.
I blame Tony LaRussa. His emphasis on multiple defined/specialized BP roles helped killed the 11 man bullpen and that in turn killed a lot of platoons.
I think it’s quite possible to have 1-2 platoons, provided you have guys with positional flexibility. We’ve been kicking around the idea of a Ben Zobrist double-platoon, in which:
Left-Handed Starter: Zobrist RF/Sean Rodriguez 2B
Right-Handed Starter: Zobrist 2B/Matt Joyce RF
Re-signing Kapler makes this somewhat redundant, but if you have guys that can competently play a couple of positions, it can make managing a bench so much easier. I think this is an under-developed market inefficiency that the Rays have done a great job of exploiting, thus far.
I agree with Sandy here.
I think the difficult players (and the ones who, perhaps rightly, are devalued in the current market) are guys who can play one position (especially an easier one) and who HAVE to be platooned. Guys like Gabe Gross.
I have to profess ignorance on the subject–why is it that having extra position players is considered superior to carrying extra pitchers? It sure seems like any advantage you gain pinch-hitting is going to be offset, more or less, but the other team being able to “platoon” their relievers, and therefore a 1-for-1 trade.
Teams usually don’t like to burn through their entire bullpen in one game, whereas you can easily go through your whole bench of pinch-hitters and not impact your roster negatively.
Let’s say you’re in the NL, and have a bench with 2 good right-handed hitters and 2 good lefties (plus a catcher), and are playing against a team with 2 good LOOGYs and 2 decent right-handed bullpen guys, plus a closer and a long-man.
Whilst you can quite easily throw your 4 “situational” hitters into pinch duty in the later innings, if the other manager wants to reciprocate by having a LOOGY up for every left-hander, or a right-handed set-up man take the mound every time you throw up a right-handed hitter, he’s realistically going to have to have EVERY pitcher in his bullpen warm up, and the majority of them take the mound. So who pitches out of the bullpen the next night, and the next?
In practice, even extreme LOOGYs tend to make about one third of their plate appearances against right-handed hitters. It’s because relief pitchers can’t warm up and pitch at 100% every single night of the week. A manager with good hitters on his bench can exploit this.
But the problem with this philosophy is that the pinch-hitting penalty is so extreme that it’s almost impossible to find a viable pinch-hitter who isn’t actually a worse option than the guy he’s replacing.
By contrast, relievers actually outperform starting pitchers.
@ Paul
Isn’t that part of the point of a platoon. If Gross is coming up and a Loogy comes in, then you have Kapler sitting there. Even with the PH penalty in effect, he’s still the better option because of what he does to lefties. I think people that are sour on a platoon have seen ineffective ones put into play. I’d rather have one comprised of 2 above-average defenders that are brutal against one arm, but quite a bit above average when they have the advantage. Something maybe the Tigers should have looked at with Raburn and Granderson, just off the top of my head.
Considering a huge stat split as a positive is the wrong way to look at things, in my opinion, because presumably teams are smart enough to value a player based on how they think he will perform in a certain role (although maybe I’m giving teams too much credit).
For example, if a team signed Adam Dunn they would be doing so because he’s a great hitter, they are already taking into account his poor fielding. His defensive shortcomings are either a disadvantage because he has to play the field, or they are irrelevant because it’s an AL team and he can DH. I don’t think that Dunn going from 1.5 WAR to 4 WAR by DHing is a positive, at best it’s not a huge negative. The same logic can be used on a platoon guy.
Here’s why people hate large-platoon-split players IMO: they’re “not clutch.”
Hitters have the platoon edge significantly more often in the early innings than when a team can bring in an appropriately-handed reliever to face them. Meanwhile, there’s an asymmetry at work, because relievers outperform tired starters while starting position players outperform pinch-hitters. As a consequence, guys with bad platoon splits are disproportionately likely to be left in to face guys they really can’t hit well against and, thus, to appear to “choke” in late-game situations.
Fans hate choking (even when it’s not really the player’s fault) and put disproportionate weight on high-leverage at-bats. (They ARE more important, to be sure, but not as much so as fans think.) Players who are disliked by fans are paid less money. And there you have it.
Platoons can definitely be used effectively, but I think there are two cautions. First of all, let’s stay lefty is starting and your RH hitter comes out in favor of a LH hitter when the first reliever, a RHP, comes in. That’s fine, but if that LH hitter is really bad against LHP, the team is kind of stuck if he gets one or more additional ABs.
Second, the effects on a player who is platooning can be relevant. For example, maybe Ryan Howard really does need to play just about every day to hit right-handers well, and if he sat against lefties he might slump against righties as well. Just some thoughts…