Rebutting More Pirate-Centric Analysis: Catcher
By
Amanda
Posted at 10:29 am
The discussion of the NLC rankings generated by bloggers from teams around the division was so lively that Cory of the Pittsburgh Lumber Company has continued along the same lines with a position-by-position comparison of the teams. Today he talks about the catchers and first basemen.
You can read the ground rules and the see the assumptions he's made about who will be playing each position for each team here. This is worth checking in to because the numbers he uses are from a projection mechanism rather than, say, 2006. So if you think it's pretty odd that, for example, David Ross could have 247 ABs last season when he was the #2 catcher and only 197 next season when he's the #1, you don't have any room to argue. ZiPS said so.
Me, I'm going to get right down to saying why he's wrong, starting with the catcher position. Cory says:
[STL] Molina 423 AB .232/.279/.338 8 HR 53 RBI 1 SB + Def [HOU] Ausmus 328 AB .232/.309/.284 1 HR 31 RBI 2 SB + Def [CIN] Ross 197 AB .234/.326/.482 12 HR 37 RBI 0 SB [MIL] Estrada 401 AB .277/.323/.404 8 HR 49 RBI 0 SB [PIT] Paulino 452 AB .272/.327/.378 8 HR 49 RBI 1 SB [CHC] Barrett 403 AB .285/.349/.481 15 HR 63 RBI 0 SB Eerily similar, no? I’d split them into four groups: The complete player (Barrett), the decent bats (Estrada and Paulino) with promise, the light-hitting gloves (Molina and Ausmus) and should be Javier Valentin (Ross). Even Barrett has his concerns, though, as he missed significant time to injury in 2006. Johnny Estrada should be a nice fit in Milwaukee, but Damian Miller will see playing time, too. Paulino has the most upside in the group, but that also means that he could flop. (The homer in me says that he won’t.) Ausmus and Ross are both one-tool players. If I had a choice, I’d go with the glove man over the “power†bat.
Now, to assign a ranking system to those numbers and categories. I’m going go from one to 10 (bigger is better), starting with 10 for the best player in the group and subtracting for the drop-off from player to player. (This is where you call me out for being an idiot.)
CHC=10 | MIL=7 | PIT=7 | STL=5 | HOU=3 | CIN=3
If you follow the link to the page where this comparison is done, you'll see this sentence in the introductory paragraph:
“Baseball is driven by numbers”
I'd like to know how you can claim that baseball is driven by numbers, list the numbers above, and rank David Ross last among them. You're talking about a guy with half the number of ABs of the other guys in the list, but more home runs than all but one. In fact, I'm failing to see a single category in which Ross comes in last, let alone support for ranking him last over all.
I guess that the sin of being a “power” bat must be his downfall. Given that driving in a lot of runs is bad, plus my suspicion that Ross is actually more powerful than the magic 8 ball says, he probably ought to be ranked even lower. A negative number, maybe.
And while I enjoy a nice jab in favor of Javier Valentín as much as the next person (much more than the next person, in fact), it doesn't make sense here. By his own projections, half the time the catcher *is* Javy. In that case, it would make a whole lot more sense to combine Javy's number with Ross's before doing the comparison.
If you want to rag on the Reds about their catching situation, you don't have to project (and then ignore) the numbers. There's plenty of actual material there.
For example, how about the fact that Krivsky seems hell-bent on keeping three catchers on the active roster? Adding in Chad Moeller's contribution, small as it is likely to be, wouldn't do anyone any good. (Unless I'm right about that power-is-bad thing.)
Or, considering that manager Jerry Narron used 140 different starting line-ups last season, there's a non-zero probability that he'll have Scott Hatteberg or Ryan Freel catching a game at some point. Where's the projection on that?
But the fact is that the catcher's position has been a major strength for the Reds for two years running, and there's no reason to think that's going to change in 2007.
Projection systems are always weird about at-bats, and while I can’t quite remember the basis for ZiPS AB projections, my recollection is that they’re largely based on prior seasons and perhaps age…and that the originators wouldn’t stand by them as meaning much of anything. The best are probably those by PECOTA, which use similar players for comparisons, and even those don’t really explicitly take into account playing time.
I do think that Ross is likely to regress substantially from his amazing performance last season. But a 0.326 OBP and 0.486 SLG (0.812 OPS) would be a really nice season for him, especially if he gets the ~350-400 AB’s I’m expecting him to. Furthermore, the evaluation of Ross as a one-tool player is completely incorrect. Ross showed good patience (though that’s not a classic tool), great power (for a catcher), and furthermore is a very solid defensive catcher–in fact, when we traded for him, that was the primary reason that Krivsky gave for adding him to the roster. His caught stealing percentage last season (45%) was excellent, and pitchers had a 4.25 ERA with him behind the plate compared to 4.51 overall.
-j
“Baseball is driven by numbers”
Talk about putting the cart before the horse.
Stand back…I feel a rant coming on.
The statheads who come up with ZiPS projections and similar stuff seem to forget one fact from time to time…like, every five minutes or so: The players are human beings, not Strat-O-Matic cards. That is to say – the numbers are the result of what happens on the field, not vice-versa.
When the umpire yells “Play Ball!” and Aaron Harang prepares to throw the first pitch of the Reds’ 2007 season, his ERA will be 0.00, his WHIP will be zero; the batter’s batting average, slugging percentage, and OBP, and OPS will be zero.
And – oh yeah – what do the ZiPS projections have to say about defense?
Bottom line – study numbers all you want, you still can’t predict with any degree of certainty who’s going to win the World Series this year. Or who’s going to play in it. Or who’s going to make the playoffs. Or which team is going to win any particular game. Or what’s going to happen in any specific inning, or any specific pitch, or even on the very next play. All the numbers can do is try to explain what happened, after it’s happened – and there’s absolutely no guarantee that the same thing will happen again next time in the same siituation.
Even the worst team in the majors last year managed to win 61 times. The two teams with the best records each lost 65 times.
Baseball is not driven by numbers. It’s driven by human beings. Hey, maybe that’s why people who wouldn’t spend a penny to sit at GABP and watch a bunch of geeks in three-piece suits sit at computers typing data into Excel WILL fork over a minimum of $175 a seat to sit in the Diamond section and watch Harang whip fastballs past Jim Edmonds!
Oh, you go boyeee!
I’m just callin’ ’em as I see ’em, RHM.
Imagine, if you will, a team finishing fifth in a six-team division. The catcher hits .223, the first baseman hits .245, the third baseman hits just six homers all year, the second baseman has w whopping 14 RBI for the entire season (in 109 games). The manager gets kicked out of baseball for life in August. Only one starting pitcher wins in double figures. Seven shortstops combine to commit 31 errors.
I think most people would agree that would be quite a mess. Not likely that the “experts” would poke all that into their spreadsheets and give that team much of a chance going into the following season, is there?
Well, all that stuff happened to the Reds in 1989, and all they did in 1990 was lead the NL West wire-to-wire, kick Pittsburgh to the curb in the NLCS, and maybe thumb their noses at the experts a little bit on their way to the bank to cash the $112,533 checks they earned as the winner’s share after they swept Oakland in the World Series – with me sitting here in Buffalo watching every pitch on TV…and eventually collecting a small fortune from guys who thought they were being smart betting on the outcome of the series with the apparently drunk Reds fan at the end of the bar, who turned out to not be as thought as they drunk I was.
😉