Every Day’s a Halladay

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In Tuesday’s chat, a flurry of Baseball Prospectus readers wanted to know my thoughts on the possiblility of Blue Jays’ ace Roy Halladay being dealt:

Roopan (toronto): If the jays put a Halladay/Wells combo on the market – would [there] be any take[r]s. I don’t believe a mid-market team like the jays can afford to pay 2 players 20+ mil.

JJ: I don’t think there’s any team out there who could afford the blood and treasure it would take to land both at the same time. And I don’t think there’s any reason to trade Halladay given that he’s got another year on his contract. Pitching is what’s keeping the Jays relevant right now, and while I’m not really a believer that they can elbow their way into the postseason this year, there’s zero chance it happens without the Doctor.

The topic was still a hot one when I did Wednesday’s Toledo and Boston (no MP3 love) radio hits. Today I’ve got a BP/ESPN Insider piece examining the teams most in need of Halladay’s services, a short list which assumes that he won’t be dealt within the AL East, that he’ll be dealt to a team that can add payroll, and one whose minor league system isn’t devoid of blue-chip prospects:

Our Support-Neutral pitching stats tell us he’s been worth 3.9 wins above replacement level over a half-season of work — that’s a lot — and it’s no stretch to think he’d be worth three additional wins to nearly any team that bumps aside their fifth starter. It’s a truly massive upgrade.

The Jays’ ace won’t come cheap with regards to blood or treasure, however. Not only will he take multiple top prospects to acquire, he’s owed the balance of a $14.25 million contract this year and then $15.75 million next year, a price that will scare away some teams operating in a tight economy. That’s also before considering that waiving his no-trade clause might require a Johan Santana-style extension, though Ricciardi says he won’t open a negotiating window for a potential suitor.

Those obstacles suggest a trade isn’t imminent, but from the standpoint of these five teams, it should be. An extra three starts between now and the July 31 deadline would be worth three-quarters of a win beyond a replacement-level fifth starter. Ask the Brewers what that was worth to them last year.

…

1. Phillies: 5.02 rotation ERA (15th in NL), 6.0 SNLVAR (13th in NL)
No other team combines the resources and the motivation to deal for Doc better than the defending champs, who lead the NL East mainly because their offense is pummeling opponents into submission, scoring one-third of a run more per game than any other NL team. With Cole Hamels battling a post-championship hangover and Brett Myers probably done for the year due to hip surgery, rookie J.A. Happ is the only Phils starter who’s beating the park-adjusted league-average ERA. His arrival has coincided with an improved performance from the starting five (a 3.98 ERA since May 23), but they remain vulnerable to the long ball, allowing 1.3 HR/9, and 1.6 HR/9 overall. The staff as a whole is the league’s most fly ball-oriented, a bad match for Citizens Bank Park. Halladay’s ability to generate ground balls (doing so on 56.4 percent of balls in play, the fifth-best mark in the majors) would be an ideal tonic. Pairing him with Hamels as 1-2 punch should give potential postseason opponents night sweats.

…

3. Brewers: 5.01 rotation ERA (14th in NL), 5.5 SNLVAR (14th in NL)
Even with Ryan Braun pressing the case that the Brewers need better starting pitching to survive the NL Central race, general manager Doug Melvin has continually cautioned that he won’t trade his top prospects in another CC Sabathia-sized deal. Braun has a point, however. Yovani Gallardo is the only Brew Crew starter with an ERA better than the park-adjusted league average, and with David Bush injured and Manny Parra banished to the minors, the team has been forced to call upon journeyman Mike Burns, who earned his first major league win just two weeks shy of his 31st birthday. Like Sabathia last year, Halladay could dominate in the Central, which features four offenses scoring at rates below the league average.

Personally, I’d be surprised if a deal gets done before the deadline. The Phillies will be likely reluctant to give up the prospects Toronto wants, such as Kyle Drabek — good thing, as far as the Dodgers’ pursuit of the pennant is concerned — and the Rangers (#2 here) won’t be willing to take on the extra $20+ million.

The Montero Question(s)

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In yesterday’s chat, I had a two-part exchange with a reader regarding perhaps the Yankees’ top prospect:

Charlie (Bethesda, MD): Think Jesus Montero is a good enough catcher (and hitter) to play DH and backup catcher for the Yankees next year? If he’s their DH they could probably rotate him, Posada and Cervelli as catcher to use both of their bats and reduce wear and tear on Jorge.

JJ: You’d have to search far and wide to find anyone who thinks Montero will be a catcher at the major league level, or that it’s a good idea to take a raw 2019-year-old with his collection of strengths and weaknesses and let him fester on the major league bench. Horrible, horrible idea.

Charlie (Bethesda, MD): My point with Montero probably wasn’t clearly written. I think he should be the starting DH, and was wondering if you thought he could catch enough to have the occasional start back there sprinkled in.

JJ: To borrow a phrase from the Simpsons, we discussed this already and I said, “no.” He’s 19, he needs to learn a defensive position, and it doesn’t serve either his interests or the team’s to start his clock so early when there are better fits for now out there.

I bring that exchange up not because of my hardline stance or my expertise on such matters but because today colleague Kevin Goldstein surprised me with this bit about Montero in his Top 100 Great Leaps Forward rundown:

Jesus Montero, C, Yankees (Pre-season ranking: 38)
After a big full-season debut last year, Montero has gone from one of the better hitting prospects around to simply one of the best period, as after going off in the Florida State League with a .356/.406/.583 line, the 19-year-old hasn’t missed a beat as one of the youngest players in Double-A, batting .312/.379/.527 for Trenton, including a recent four-game stretch in which he hit five home runs. “He has improved his plate discipline, he’s making more contact, and he’s still going to get better,” said Mark Newman, Senior Vice President of Baseball Operations for the Yankees. “His balance is going to get better, he’s going to have a better plan at the plate… offensively, he’s as good as anyone we’ve had here.” Montero’s defense behind the plate has often been the bigger story, but he continues to make strides there, with a handful of scouts believing he could at least start his big-league career behind the plate. “He’s got a ways to go still,” admitted Newman. “But his arm accuracy and delivery times are much better. We knew that was an issue when we first signed him, but my confidence in his ability to stay at catcher grows all the time.”

It’s good to hear that Montero’s progressing defensively. It’s also timely given that it’s July, a month when any team would be well served to talk up its prospects in case they’re needed for a deadline deal. Note that the Yankees also have the well-regarded Austin Romine, who’s better defensively, in their system. He ranked fourth on Goldstein’s Top 11 Yankees Prospects list, where Montero was first. Regarding the two catchers, Goldstein wrote, “Romine has a far better chance of sticking at catcher than Montero, and should be seen as the catcher of the future….He’ll continue playing in the shadow of Montero at High-A Tampa, but his all-around skills could be part of what eventually pushes Montero off of the position.”

Note also that their second-round pick in this year’s draft was also a catcher, one J.R Murphy. They’re not exactly brimming with confidence that Montero’s the backstop of their future, though Baseball America’s John Manuel had this to say about the Murph: “People aren’t sure if he will stick at catcher defensively … he can hit, and he has some athletic ability, but there are only so many catchers that you can play in the minors at each level.”

In any event, I still think the day when Montero joins the Yankee lineup is a ways off, because he’s either got to prove that his catching skills are legitimate, or he’s got to learn another position. That won’t happen overnight, and if he shifts, it would make no sense for him not to be playing every day while learning the ropes. He’s an exciting prospect, to be sure, but the Yankees have every reason not to rush him.

Answers: Free. Correct Answers: $20

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A few choice cuts from yesterday’s Baseball Prospectus chat:

strupp (madison): Jay. Thanks as always for the chat. Are we about to see a long “drought” of pitchers being elected to the Hall Of Fame because of the change in usage and other factors that prevent pitchers from reaching milestones? Maddux, Glavine, Unit seem locks, Smoltz & Schilling solid, but then what?

JJ: About to see a drought? You mean like the one where we haven’t seen a starting pitcher elected to the Hall of Fame since 1999, and haven’t seen a non-300 winner since 1990? My God, man, the next few years will feel like a flood by comparison.

The current electorate is stuck in the Seventies mindset of pitchers finishing what they started and wins being the top criterion for election. Beyond the 300 winners, it may take another decade of voter turnover before the Schillings and Smoltzes get in.

steveomd (Ohio): Jay, how do the Braves fix their absolute mess of an outfield, now and down the road?

JJ: Start by pulling the ol’ switcheroo the next time the traveling secretary hands out plane tickets to Jeff Francoeur and Garret Anderson, maybe something along the lines of a flight to Tijuana via Nova Scotia.

I’d start with the assumption that McLouth should be playing a corner position (does he have the arm for right?), platoon Gregor Blanco and Omar Infante in center, at least until you’re satisfied [Jordan] Schafer is ready, and try to find a lefty bat that can match with Matt Diaz in left. And look forward to the day when Jason Heyward is ready (two years?).

Eli (Brooklyn): What are your thoughts on Girardi and Cashman’s work this year? Overall I like the duo, but watching Jeter bunt in the 5th inning or Cody Ransom remaining on this team is not very encouraging…

JJ: While I’ve been a big supporter in the past, Cashman’s roster work at protecting A-Rod borders upon total f-ing incompetence. Anybody who rosters Angel Berroa for more than 48 hours deserves to be the GM of the Nationals, and anyone who can’t come up with a better alternative than Cody Ransom in the two months since he went on the DL deserves to be the GM of the Astros.

Girardi’s done a decent job with the hand he’s been dealt. He’s finally got a functional bullpen thanks to the work of Hughes and Aceves, he’s gotten productive stretches from both Brett Gardner and Melky Cabrera, and his failure to rest Rodriguez adequately can be seen as a response to the craptastic options Cashman’s provided him with.

There was also a Yankees-related question that deserves a separate post, and a Roy Halladay question I’ll save for tomorrow, as I’ve got an ESPN Insider piece in the pipeline.

Crime, Punishment, and Manny

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Via my boy Alex Belth comes this fantastically irreverent Slate piece by Charles P. Pierce on Manny Ramirez’s return to action:

Then, back in May, the test results came back. A chorus of moaning arose from the Church of the Perpetually Outraged. (This week’s sermon: “What about the children?”) But he slowly but surely made a goof even out of the Most Serious Crisis There Absolutely Ever Has Been. The drug for which he was nailed was only the beginning of it. Pundits were dispatched to the far corners of the minors to seek out the disheartened and disillusioned. Instead, they found fans who were just happy to see Manny Ramirez swinging for the fences of their little stadium. (My favorite was the guy who told Bill Plaschke of the Los Angeles Times that he and his wife had, like Manny, used a fertility drug. “Manny got suspended,” the man told Plaschke. “We got twins!”) With Manny in town, the game was a happy, not haunted, place. This seemed to come as a surprise to some people.

Ramirez’s weird pilgrimage to the bushes served as a living reminder that the great steroid hunt is almost solely an intramural problem between baseball and its various acolytes. The overwhelming number of baseball fans—who, given the economic problems of the moment, are filling ballparks in reasonably overwhelming numbers—have quite obviously made peace with what happened in the game over the past 20 years. Manny Ramirez was treated as though he’d pulled a hamstring or tweaked a tendon. Now, he’s back. That’s the way things are going to be from now on.

This isn’t the first time the Massachusetts-based Pierce has taken up the poison pen when it comes to Ramirez’s detractors. The day after he was traded to the Dodgers last summer, he marveled at the pitchfork-wielding mob which ushered him out of Beantown:

I was driving home late in the last afternoon of the Manny Ramirez Era in Boston, listening to the local ESPN radio outlet, when, suddenly, it seemed that the two hosts had decided that what the situation called for was the opinion of Margaret Hamilton’s character from The Wizard of Oz.

… disgrace to the game … I get sick of people in Boston adoring a guy who didn’t play hard. … blackmailed the Red Sox … an affront and an embarrassment … What about the integrity of playing the game right? … When it comes to the Hall of Fame, there will be a lot of people who have a lot more questions about Manny Ramirez than they do about Mark McGwire.

And his mangy little dog, too, one supposes. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that one of the sources of this particularly violent magma displacement was ESPN’s Peter Gammons. This is like being heckled by one of the heads on Mount Rushmore. It’s also gloriously unmoored from reality. Gammons’ own record on covering the Steroid Era is a decidedly mixed one. Not that I care, because that cause was never my frenzy of choice, either.

There’s no question in Pierce’s mind that Ramirez’s positive test and suspension mark a turning point in baseball’s battle against steroids. Without trying to belittle the need for that fight, I agree with him. Here we have a popular superstar who has been caught by Major League Baseball’s increasingly sophisticated testing program; recall that he didn’t test positive for a steroid but for elevated testosterone, which gave MLB license to examine his medical records, where they discovered a decidedly unkosher prescription for hCG. While certainly granted more coverage than was necessary, there was no innuendo, no violation of guaranteed anonymity, no illegal governmental leak. Just crime and punishment, the violation of baseball’s drug agreement triggering a 50-game suspension served as eager fans awaited his return.

And not just Dodger fans; as Pierce points out, ESPN devoted plenty of space to Ramirez’s day-by-day progress during his suspension and “rehab” assignment. For once, the chattering classes notably failed to agree that history’s greatest monster was walking among us. Plaschke’s curmudgeonly colleague at the LA Times, T.J. Simers, went so far as to call himself a Ramirez apologist because with Ramirez around, “The Dodgers are not only relevant again, but a show worth watching.”

While there have been outbreaks of handwringing here and there since Ramirez returned to the lineup last Friday, a long last, it appears we’re at least incrementally past the simplistic outrage that equates steroid users as Evildoing Cheaters Who Have Destroyed the Game and Should Be Banned For Life, Plus Spanked and Sent to Bed Without Supper. Ramirez broke the rules, the rules were enforced, the penalty was handed down, Ramirez served it unflinchingly, and the sun still rose in the East. That’s healthy, and if somebody wants to Think of the Children, how about reminding them that after serving their punishment, people deserve their second chances.

As I write this, Ramirez has just been ejected in the fifth inning of Tuesday night’s Dodgers-Mets game. Home plate umpire John Hirschbeck wouldn’t stand for him tossing his elbow pad to express his disgruntlement with being called out on strikes via a ball that, conservatively speaking, was closer to Rockaway Beach than home plate. That’s a punishment disproportionate to the crime, but thankfully, at least Manny is back to being Manny.

Midterm Report

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On Sunday the baseball season reached its midway point in terms of total games played, and this week at Baseball Prospectus and ESPN Insider, we’re using that as an opportunity to examine how our PECOTA forecasts have held up over the course of the first half. Yesterday, Christina Kahrl examined team-level performances. The top six: 

Team     PECOTA   Act.   +/-
Rangers   .432   .563   .131
Rockies   .438   .519   .081
Marlins   .438   .518   .080
Giants    .469   .543   .074
Angels    .500   .563   .063
Dodgers   .574   .634   .060

Today I take a stab at the hitters:

In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s been a rollercoaster season for Alex Rodriguez. Steroid revelations, hip surgery, a .219 batting average balls in play, an inflated walk rate, a recent eight-game, five-homer tear — he’s done plenty to confound expectations, both good and bad. Yet the ever-controversial 33-year-old slugger’s .313 Equivalent Average through the first 81 games is just two points off his PECOTA weighted mean projection of .311.

Rodriguez’s is hardly the only on-the-nose projection our projection system has had halfway into the season. Of the 227 players with at least 200 plate appearances through Sunday, the schedule’s official midpoint, 97 are within 15 points of their PECOTA weighted mean EqAs. The variations are normally distributed, with 154 players within 29 points — one standard deviation — of their projections, and 213 within two standard deviations. Here’s a non-random selection of players within 15 points either way: 


Player             Tm    PA     Act   Proj     Dif
Justin Upton       ARI   325   .302   .287    .015
Matt Kemp          LAN   336   .302   .290    .012
Robinson Cano      NYA   347   .271   .264    .007
Jacoby Ellsbury    BOS   338   .275   .270    .005
Jason Bay          BOS   348   .299   .295    .004
David Wright       NYN   353   .325   .323    .002
Hanley Ramirez     FLO   336   .326   .324    .002
Alex Rodriguez     NYA   221   .313   .311    .002
Mark Teixeira      NYA   356   .309   .308    .001
Miguel Cabrera     DET   330   .306   .308   -.002
Ken Griffey        SEA   250   .265   .272   -.007
Emilio Bonifacio   FLO   347   .223   .233   -.010
Dustin Pedroia     BOS   365   .270   .284   -.014

This list is simply a baker’s dozen of players, mostly from the East coast, who have been surrounded by lofty — and in some cases unreasonable — expectations. We’ve got three of the game’s six highest-paid hitters (Rodriguez, Teixeira, and Cabrera), the reigning AL MVP (Pedroia), the whipping boy of Queens (Wright), a prodigal son returned (Griffey), a 21-year-old phenom (Upton), arguably the game’s best all-around player (Ramirez), a horrible idea for a leadoff man (Bonifacio), and a few others who frequent conversations in the Northeast corridor. Despite the varying shapes of performance hidden by EqA, they’re all about as productive as PECOTA — if not the chattering classes — expects.

Recall that EqA basically is an expression of runs created per plate appearance, adjusted for park and normalized so as to be expressed on a scale of batting average, with .260 defined as league average, .230 as replacement level and .300 a mark of excellence. None of the Yankees or Dodgers make the leaderboards at either extreme. The Brewers’ Prince Fielder (.305 projected, .355 actual) is eighth among the overachievers, and the Mets’ Gary Sheffield (.271 projected, .318 actual) is 12th, one of just three over-30 players (along with Ichiro Suzuki and Raul Ibañez) among that group. That’s after his 43-point shortfall ranked second-to-last in 2008, and after he was released earlier this spring by the Tigers.

As for the trailers, the Brew Crew’s Bill Hall (.270 projected, .204 actual) is third. Former Yankee Alfonso Soriano (.294 projected, .241 actual) is eighth, and Boston’s David Ortiz (.297 projected, .248 actual) is ninth even after a scorching June performance. The Dodgers’ Russell Martin and Rafael Furcal, both 40 points below projected, just missed joining that party.

Anyway, there was a lot of fascinating stuff to be found within the numbers, more than I could get to on a word count, and enough that I may spin that into another piece soon. Stay tuned.

Beating the Rush

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Last week’s Hit List, submitted for Thursday publication prior to my departure for Milwaukee (hence the holiday traffic title reference) but alas, not run until Friday. The list marks the first time since Opening Day that the Dodgers were not #1; they were one point short of the Rays. Ouch.

Meanwhile, at a Fourth of July barbecue in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, my in-laws challenged me to repeat a recent feat of box score archaeology. As White Sox fans during their pre-Milwaukee days in Chicago, they rarely frequented Wrigley Field, but they recalled a rare visit. It was a game where the Expos’ Warren Cromartie led off with a home run, but only after Cubs third baseman Steve Ontiveros dropped a pop foul and was charged with an error. “That might have been all the scoring,” said my father-in-law.

Bingo: July 4, 1979 — thirty years to the day! It was a low-scoring affair, with Cubs starter Bill Caudill allowing just one other hit besides Cromartie’s homer, an Ellis Valentine solo shot. He wound up on the short end of a 2-1 decision, with Spaceman Bill Lee getting the win. Years later, my brother-in-law recounted, he was getting Caudill’s autograph after he’d moved on down the line and said he’d seen him pitch a good game in Chicago. “Is that the one where Ontiveros dropped the ball?”

They never forget.

Look Me Over Closely

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I’ve got another Baseball Prospectus/ESPN Insider twin killing today, this time devoted to players who might be left off the two leagues’ All-Star teams.

By midnight tonight, the All-Star balloting will have ended, and on Sunday the starting lineups will be announced. Inevitably, deserving players will be left out in the cold (even after managers Joe Maddon and Charlie Manuel have stocked their benches and bullpens), whether they be unheralded veterans amid career years, youngsters whose stars haven’t fully risen, or players nudged aside to ensure that every team is represented. What follows is a mixed-league lineup of players who might not get that trip to St. Louis, though they should. Space considerations prevent me from showing the entirety of my mental math for both leagues at each position, so I’ve spotlighted what I felt was the more interesting decision of the two.

…Outfield: Adam Dunn, Nationals; Adam Jones, Orioles; Matt Kemp, Dodgers
In the NL, Raul Ibañez, Ryan Braun, and Carlos Beltran lead the voting. With the latter out of commission due to injury, Mike Cameron or Shane Victorino (who rank fifth and sixth in the voting) are likely to replace him as starter, but Kemp is even more deserving. He’s hitting .302/.363/.474 with the second-best EqA (.302) among NL starting center fielders. The fact that Joe Torre has mainly hit him sixth, seventh, or eighth in the lineup suggests that his accomplishments, which include outstanding defense (+12 FRAA, +11.5 UZR), could be overlooked; he’s just 13th in the voting. Also likely to be overlooked is Dunn, who’s batting .260/.396/.528 while ranking second in walks and fifth with 20 homers. A polarizing figure, he hasn’t been invited to the midsummer party since 2002, but only Pujols and Alex Rodriguez have bashed more homers since then. From the AL ranks, I’ll channel Joe Sheehan and put in a plug for 23-year-old Adam Jones, who has tacked superb defense onto his .305/.359/.509 performance while ensuring that the name “Bavasi” will be cursed in Seattle for years to come.

Starting Pitcher: Edwin Jackson, Tigers
Figuring out who’s in or out on the All-Star pitching staffs is a trickier game than it is for the hitters due to starters’ schedules and teams’ understandable reluctance to part with their aces. Rather than pull my hair out overthinking this, I’ll simply stump for a less-obvious choice: Jackson, who’s finally living up to the promise shown when he beat Randy Johnson on his 20th birthday. He’s second in the league with a 2.49 ERA, fifth in SNLVAR (ahead of his more heralded teammate, Justin Verlander), and ninth in strikeouts.

Yeah, as a Dodgers fan, that Jackson one still stings.

The New Nick Green

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The Baseball Prospectus/ESPN Insider soup du jour is a roundtable devoted to dissecting the performances of a few unlikely first-half heroes. ESPN editor Matt Meyers, columnist Buster Olney, BP colleagues Kevin Goldstein and John Perrotto and I discussed whether the work of Red Sox shotstop Nick Green, Mets pitcher Fernando Nieve, and Rays utilityman Ben Zobrist are sustainable. My job was to throw around the big numbers, and I wound up in the middle of the fray in this exchange regarding Green:

Buster Olney: Green may not be a .290 kind of hitter, but guys, I’d say he’s not a fluke: he’s a decent player who is taking advantage of his surroundings. He is playing as part of a deep lineup, in Fenway Park, and hitting .310 at home. One scout mentioned this week that Fenway has a knack for making average hitters into above-average hitters. He has always been able to hit a high fastball, and he’s playing in a park where there’s some payoff for that (12 extra-base hits in 87 at-bats).

John Perrotto: Green has always been a guy with some tools, decent pop, and a strong arm, so I don’t think it’s totally unexpected that he has put together a pretty good stretch for the Red Sox. He was always the kind of guy who was awfully hard on himself, and perhaps now that he is getting older he has learned to relax. Like Buster said, he is in the right ballpark with the right lineup to succeed. He is a one-year wonder? Perhaps. At the very least, he is a viable major league player.

Jay Jaffe: Coming into the year, Green had done nothing to distinguish himself from among dozens of Quadruple-A futility infielder types. He was a 30-year-old who owned a career line of .240/.309/.347 in nearly 800 PA, he’d gotten just seven at-bats in the majors since 2006, and his 2008 minor league numbers at Scranton were horrible, with a .191 EqA. On that basis alone, for him to be where he is right now is a total fluke.

Which isn’t to say he hasn’t learned a trick or two (the Chipper Jones tap) or gotten some breaks in his favor (a starting job in a great hitters’ park? Yes, please!), but I’m not terribly optimistic it can continue. Would you be, if you were Theo Epstein or Terry Francona?

Green’s numbers look to be the product of Fenway, where he’s hitting .310/.348/.517 in 92 PA, compared to .256/.326/.354 in 92 PA on the road, which is the Nick Green we know and love. His overall line is being driven by a .344 batting average on balls in play, and his batted-ball types say he should be around .290. That 5-to-1 strikeout-to-walk ratio doesn’t suggest he’s got the control of the strike zone for all of this to continue, and that pitchers will figure out how to exploit him.

Matt Meyers: Some dissension, I like it! But even conceding some “realness” to Green’s performance, wouldn’t it be foolish for the Red Sox to have any faith in him beyond this year? Didn’t we just see this last year with Mike Aviles? I am not sure Jed Lowrie is any sort of long-term answer, so the Sox might actually have a hole at short. Is there a world in which Green is more than just a stopgap for them?

Jay Jaffe: In the context of Lowrie’s slated return in July, Green’s a perfectly suitable stopgap. I just don’t think the Sox should let themselves get overly attached to the guy based on a park-driven 92 PA sample that’s well out of context of the other ~900 PA for his career.

Green kind of reminds me of Miguel Cairo circa 2004, the year he hit .292/.346/.417 for the Yankees. You knew it couldn’t last, but you had to appreciate a guy like that coming out of nowhere to give the team a major boost.

The New Juan Pierre

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A couple weeks back, on one of my Boston “Young Guns” radio spots, I joked with host Chris Villani about Red Sox outfielder Jacoby Ellsbury being the new Juan Pierre. Yesterday, Rob Neyer’s got a blog entry ruminating on that prospect, and concluding that while he’s been a disappointment, time is on the 25-year-old Ellsbury’s side.

I tend to agree, but at the same time, I’m rather alarmed — and as a Sox-hater, amused — that he hasn’t come anywhere close to approaching his sizzling 2007 debut. Ellsbury’s hardly developed into the Johnny Damon clone that some expected him to be, and his power appears to be more a function of park than of anything else. Check these career numbers out: 


Split               PA    AVG   OBP   SLG
Ellsbury, Fenway    499  .304  .361  .441
Pierre, Home       2942  .311  .361  .375   

Ellsbury, Away      552  .285  .332  .374
Pierre, Away       2962  .292  .336  .371

On neutral turf, they’re virtually the same slappy hitter, but at Fenway, Ellbury packs considerably more punch, enough so that his career Equivalent Average dusts Pierre’s, .279 to .258; recall that the latter has spent more than a third of his career in hitter-friendly venues like Coors and Wrigley Fields, depressing the value of his offensive “accomplishments.” As I’ve said to Villani and company, I don’t think that makes him a particularly strong choice as the Sox’s leadoff hitter, but his game is a stronger one than Pierre’s