Link Roundup: Adam LaRoche's Value
by Charlie Wilmoth on Dec 14, 2008 1:46 PM EST
Email
PrintSorry for the absence of updates yesterday; I've had a really hectic travel schedule for the last week, and yesterday I was flying from San Diego back to Pittsburgh.
-P- The Post-Gazette on Adam LaRoche:
Consider that he made $5 million last season and, yet again, failed to perform to his peak capability -- or even close to it -- until June. On a contender, that might actually be a pretty neat trait to have. In Pittsburgh, it is virtually worthless, as the meaningful games tend to be over right at that point.
The Post-Gazette has written variations of this last sentence many times, and I don't particularly understand it. If LaRoche is likely to post an .850 OPS in any particular year, what difference does it make if he has, say, a .650 OPS in the first half and a 1.000 OPS in the second, or vice versa? If LaRoche needs to post a 1.000 OPS in the first half to help the Pirates hover around .500, and his collapse after that is predictable, then the Pirates aren't playing meaningful games in the first half. If what you'd like from LaRoche is for him to post a 1.000 OPS the whole season, fine, but that doesn't seem especially realistic to me.
That's a mouthful, but the point here is that until the Pirates get a whole lot better, they'll never play a meaningful game in the usual sense. It's true that more people watch the Pirates earlier in the season, when LaRoche is incredibly frustrating, but in pure baseball terms, it isn't terribly relevant how his .850 OPS is distributed over the course of the season.
It's true that hovering around .500 for an extra few weeks could make the Pirates' games appear more meaningful for a while, but the same is true of the effect of a good streak of play at any point. In 2006, the Pirates went 37-35 in the second half, then crowed about it all offseason. LaRoche can help the Pirates create that kind of second-half record as well as anyone, and then they can talk all winter about how much they're improving. The point is that, until the Pirates have more talent, these streaks of decent play are about creating illusions, not playing "meaningful" games.
-P- The Pirates dumped Denny Bautista rather than take him to arbitration, which shows that not even Neal Huntington wanted to go into 2009 with a 'pen that featured three control-challenged flamethrowers in Bautista, Tyler Yates, and Craig Hansen.
-P- Here's the non-tender list. Here are some names that jump out at me:
-Chuck James, Braves: James will miss most of next season with shoulder trouble, but he posted good numbers as a starter when healthy, and he isn't old. He might be worth signing to a cheap multiyear deal.
-Chris Capuano, Brewers: Another pretty good starter when healthy, but he missed all of last season with elbow problems.
-John Bale, Royals: He missed time with injuries last year, but he returned in September and pitched well. He can start or relieve, and he has a history of posting pretty good strikeout rates.
-Ty Wigginton, Astros: It's not often that a player can post an .876 OPS and still be non-tendered.
-Daniel Cabrera, Orioles: He's a terrible player, but he's an extreme example of the kind of pitcher Huntington likes: he has not just good but great stuff, and absolutely no clue where it's going.
38 comments
|
0 recs |
Do you like this story?
Comments
If you could prove that LaRoche’s pattern isn’t extreme random chance, then he still has the worst of all patterns. If he OPS’s evenly all year, then you can pick his rest days to avoid unfavorable matchups, or to gain favorable ones for his backup. If his OPS is heavy on the first half, you can rest him more so he doesn’t fade, or just bench him when he stops hitting. The theory of “the second half hitter,” though, is that he requires 250 crummy at-bats to time his swing, so you can’t maneuver your roster around them.
LaRoche’s pattern, though, is not just a first half/second half thing. He hits .300 in Florida, collapses in April, advances in May, falls back in June, and explodes in July. April and June happen to be the months when he goes fulltime against NL and AL pitchers, respectively. I won’t speculate on causes, but they have these pitching simulators now, and he should probably be working with one all winter.
by Arnold Rothstein on Dec 14, 2008 3:14 PM EST reply actions
Extreme random chance
That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it.
It’s like an infinite number of monkeys typing King Lear. If you looked at enough hitters, sooner or later you’d find one with a bizarre aversion to hitting in the early season. It just happens to be LaRoche. Sooner or later he’s going to post a 1.500 OPS in April and then hit nothing the rest of the year.
A cynic might think he'll OPS .950+ all year next year
It’s a contract year. Just because he seems like an empty headed doofus sometimes doesn’t mean he doesn’t realize he can make 10’s of millions playing well in 2009. I’m not saying I think that, but I wouldn’t blame someone for doing so.
I’m kind of hoping that the two brothers are pushing each other this offseason. No reason they would just start doing that, but for the next couple of months there’s that thought that they’ll come in sharp as can be, and combine for 60 homers.
by Arnold Rothstein on Dec 14, 2008 11:16 PM EST up reply actions
That's a good point...
maybe Mario and Luigi would have a positive impact on each other. I guess they couldn’t be much worse.
by Ketcham Bruce on Dec 15, 2008 11:24 AM EST up reply actions
As someone on primer mentioned
the Orioles never tried Cabrera in the bullpen. I’m not sure people with his track record (great stuff, no control) have a history of success with bullpen conversions. But hey, this is a year (as the last fifteen have been) for the Pirates to take a flier on high upside guys.
Buccos interested in Wigginton, again.
Reds, Giants, Indians and Twins are too.
Via mlbtraderumors.com:
http://blogs2.startribune.com/blogs/neal/2008/12/14/pursuing-wigginton-makes-sense/
Where would he play? RF?
Yeah, RF would make sense.
We need an OF, and his bat’s passable there. Depends how much money he wants, I guess.
Vlad!
We’re getting the band back together… are you still interested in managing the “Ninja Black Sox”?
Can you get back on the board?
I know you had some problems earlier…
If not – how will you communicate w/the rest of the league?
nice team name vlad
baseball stars was the best NES baseball game and that was always my team. hanzo!
I don't understand what's hard to understand
Laroche OPS’d .841 in 136 game, and that’s pure and true. But if he’s a stiff for 80 games and a star for 56, then he’s a drag on winning. I don’t know whether he really is or isn’t, and it probably doesn’t matter a great deal, but it could easily matter.
Your theory lacks merit
If you think that having an OPS of .841 on the year is good, but doing so by being “a stiff for 80 games and a star for 56” causes that .841 OPS to be a drag on winning, then your theory presupposes that the earlier games are more important than the later games. I don’t buy it: every game is worth one win or one loss. The number of games LaRoche helps the team win still count in the standings no matter when they occur.
Formerly known as Econolodge
I didn't say anything about early or late
Nothing at all. My point, which is blindingly meritorious, is that short peaks and long valleys are worse than rolling hills, all other things being equal.
I'm not sure that's true.
At a minimum, I’d like to see some evidence of it.
For that matter, I think we need to separate the issue of clustering positive performances into a relatively small number of games from the issue of there being more positive and less positive distributions in-season of those small number of positive games. Those are two very different issues.
It's not like I want to go to the mat with this
I just find it like Pythagorean — it’s useful, but not refined enough. A team that scores 50 runs over a 10 game stretch averages 5 runs a game. But that can be somewhat misleading if they scored 25 of them in two games. By the end of the season the sharp peaks have been filed down and a true level is usually found. It’s just that I haven’t found evidence that “it all evens out.”
To Clarify
Is the claim that, as long as you end up at .850 OPS, it doesn’t matter how you get there, or that, as long as LaRoche is playing half-seasons, it doesn’t matter which half he’s good in?
I guess I don’t buy either argument, but I’m curious which one you think is true – or maybe it’s both.
For the first claim, it can’t be true. Imagine an extreme case (even more than AdLaR’s): a guy who literally hits a homerun in every single at bat for a month, and then doesn’t get another hit on the year. That would give you something like a .850 OPS for the year, but couldn’t possibly help your team win more than, say, 15 extra games over a month, and would cost them at least a game or two each month the rest of the season, making for a WARP of 5-10 (at best), which would be a shitty total for an .850 OPS guy. The problem is that, during the down months, you’re a drag on your team, negating a lot of the benefits you bring while hot.
Which leads to the second claim. If AdLaR were hot for the first 3 months, then you basically play anyone else at first during the second half – his VORP is quite negative when he’s slumping, so all you need is a RP-quality 1B to play the second half, and you get all the benefit of a 1.000 OPS guy for 3 months without the downside of a .700 OPS guy for the other three.
But AdLaR doesn’t work that way – he evidently needs to spend 3 months looking like Abraham Nunez in order to turn into Pujols in the second half.
As for whether or not the games are meaningful, what happens in the first half determines what happens at the trade deadline. Last year was mostly a story about a failed pitching staff, but imagine if AdLaR had hit .850 (or, if he’s still going to be a half-hitter, 1.000) for the first 3 months. That (likely) puts the Bucs above .500 in July, maybe even in real contention. Instead of selling, they can buy. Hell, maybe they can sell off AdLaR to some sucker team. But even if they keep him, and he bats .700 the rest of the way (because we don’t have an RP 1B on hand), if we add a starter and keep the best offense in baseball together, we really could be playing meaningful games into September.
A home run on every AB for a month?
If he’s not walking at all, he’s probably around 100 AB per month, and 550 for the year. That’s a .181 BA, a .181 OBP, and a .727 SLG, totalling up to a .908 OPS (approximately).
That said, a guy with that profile would have significantly less run value than his OPS would indicate, since a point of OBP is actually worth a little more than a point of SLG. OPS works as a convention because the resulting error is small for the 95% of players with a fairly typical spread, and when you apply it to guys at the margins, it breaks somewhat. To properly assess his season relative to his peers, you’d need to use a weighted multiplier to account for the extra value of OBP.
Not sure what that example has to do with LaRoche, since the error from that type of production that I describe above is going to swamp any issue related to in-season distribution of offense. (You would need to be comparing a 1B who hits 100 HR in a month and then does nothing vs. a 1B who hits 20 HR in each of five months and nothing else, or something along those lines.) Your main contention seems to be that a clustered performance is less valuable to a team than a non-clustered one, and I’d like to see a defense of that proposition being true, because it’s very counterintuitive. A typical first baseman with an .850-ish OPS will have approximately the same number of good games and bad games as LaRoche, except that his distribution of those good and bad games throughout the schedule is random. But they’re both still playing in the same number of games, and they’re both still providing the same set of boosts in those games – only the order of the performances is different. And since his performance isn’t really linked to those of his teammates, which are distributed more-or-less randomly, it doesn’t matter in which games he plays well and in which games he plays poorly, in terms of overall expected outcomes for the team..
For LaRoche’s weird split to have an actual negative effect on a team, you need to go into external factors, like a team not recognizing his problem and benching him in June, thus depriving themselves of the typical benefit from his hot second half, or a team employing an old and declining LaRoche not realizing that he’s finished because they mistake his struggles for a typical start-of-the-season slump.
Distribution
Your main contention seems to be that a clustered performance is less valuable to a team than a non-clustered one, and I’d like to see a defense of that proposition being true, because it’s very counterintuitive. A typical first baseman with an .850-ish OPS will have approximately the same number of good games and bad games as LaRoche, except that his distribution of those good and bad games throughout the schedule is random.
Start with identifying the scope of the problem. Let’s define “bad game,” for our purposes, as an 0fer without even a walk – a complete zero for the team. How does AdLaR compare with other 1Bs with comparable OPS? Last year, in the NL, you get Derek Lee, Adrian Gonzalez, and Prince Fielder in the same ballpark; Prince and AGon were pretty steady month to month, while Lee was streakier. They averaged 3.8, 5.5, and 4.3 0fers/month, all within relatively narrow ranges (2-6, 3-7, 2-7). AdLaR had both the highest average* (6.2) and the widest range (1-10). But, most notably, he only had 1 especially good month – July. Every other month he performed either like his peers (between 4 and 6) or like a bum (9 and 10 in June and April).
What’s the point of all this? LaRoche’s abysmal spring cost the Pirates 10+ 0fers beyond what a less streaky 1B might give them, while his torrid summer saved them about 4. He has more bad games than other 1Bs, and, while they cluster, they still occur all year long. But in the spring, the Pirates have no choice but to run him out there, and opposing pitchers can treat him like the bum that he is – a normal good hitter has 0fers at random, and pitchers have to treat him like Derek Lee or Prince Fielder. But LaRoche is so dependably bad (and being pushed around the batting order, trying to hide him) that he’s pitched to (and his teammates pitched around) as if he’s ANunez.
It’s not just how the numbers average out over the season – specific performances can matter, because games are discrete events. Averages are useful, certainly when looking at trends or in comparing players. But the utility of the average shouldn’t blind you to how it’s compiled. AdLar, by being predictably terrible for weeks and months at a time, gives opponents advantages that a player with randomly-distributed bad games doesn’t.
But you're ignoring half of the question.
Is a clustered performance intrinsically less valuable than a non-clustered one? And is that true for all teams, or just ones with a particular set of offensive characteristics for the team as a whole? After all, just to spitball for a second, a team that’s much worse than their opponent might prefer the player with the highest highs and the lowest lows, since they need to maximize the number of exceptional performance games in order to make up for the poor team-wide expected offensive return and have even a chance of winning a given game… For a really bad team (like us), the difference between an 0-fer and a 1-walk game isn’t really that big in team context in terms of expected win value. Of course, even if there is an effect of that kind, I’m not convinced that the magnitude would be enough to swing many actual games when it’s stacked up against the team’s larger performance.
I also think you’re stretching things a bit by comparing LaRoche to Nunez. Noonie’s a career .242/.313/.314 hitter, while LaRoche’s second-worst offensive month last year (August!) was good for a .682 OPS. Now, a .682 OPS isn’t good, but it’s not Nunez-level incompetence. It’s more of a Jack Wilson (career .687) month.
Just for fun, here’s LaRoche’s month-by-month performance, carved into roughly equal slices:
March/April: .505
May: .804
June: .708
July: 1.277
August: .682
Sept./Oct.: 1.065
By my count, that’s one sub-Noonie month (March/April), one better-than-superstar month (July), one Jack Wilson month (August), one prime-era Brian Giles month (Sept./Oct.), one Jose Bautista month (June), and one Xavier Nady month (May).
Is the claim that, as long as you end up at .850 OPS, it doesn’t matter how you get there, or that, as long as LaRoche is playing half-seasons, it doesn’t matter which half he’s good in?
I meant both, but in the context of the P-G’s specific claim, which was that LaRoche doesn’t hit in the Pirates’ “meaningful” games. As far as the Pirates’ ability to trade him is concerned, you’re right—it’d be better if he hit in the first half.
As for your other points about the trading deadline, I think they’d be well taken if the Pirates were better. LaRoche had a VORP of 27 last year. I don’t know how that breaks down by month, but let’s be really uncharitable and assume he was at -9 through June. That would mean he had a VORP of 36 the rest of the year, which is a difference of about 4.5 wins. The Pirates finished June at 38-44 in 2008, so add those 4.5 wins and you’re at, maybe, 44-38, which would’ve tied the Pirates for third place. And that’s if we’re being really uncharitable in judging what LaRoche’s first half is like.
So if you’re Huntington then, do you buy? Maybe, maybe not. You don’t have a lot of prospects to offer, and you know your first baseman is playing out of his mind and that if history repeats itself, he’ll collapse. If you buy now, you’re probably still not going to the playoffs, and you’re going to mess up the franchise’s future royally by dealing the few remaining prospects you have, not trading Nady (also playing out of his mind) for Tabata, etc. If the Pirates were better, the scenario you propose might be an important one, but I still don’t think they’re at the point where it is.
by Charlie Wilmoth on Dec 15, 2008 4:57 PM EST up reply actions
Point Taken
As for your other points about the trading deadline, I think they’d be well taken if the Pirates were better.
Well, yeah. It would have been hard for the Pirates to be buyers at the deadline – although not if AdLaR had come out of June with a 1.000 OPS! Hungry teams will take a chance on players having career years (Nady, as you mentioned). AdLaR is nigh-useless as a trade piece, partly because it’s hard to believe that he’ll do this same inconsistent thing so consistently – how confident can a GM feel that this guy with a .750 OPS is going to turn into a monster right… now! Conversely, if he’s having a huge year, and hasn’t tailed off (yet), it’s awfully tempting – maybe this is the year he doesn’t tail!
Anyway, IMO what the Pirates needed last year was just a #5 starter and, ideally, a #3 (I’ve looked into this in detail – it’s easy to identify 20+ games where even a #4 pitcher gives you a pretty good chance at winning). If you’re willing to pick up salary, a #5 is pretty easily had, and I wouldn’t have a problem getting rid of Nady for a #3/4 guy – I think the offense would have held up (as, indeed, it nearly did without both Bay and Nady), and suddenly our rotation looks major league.
I’m not saying it wins the division or even the wild card, but I think it gets us well above .500 and playing meaningful games in September. Arguably, that’s just repeating the Freak Show error, but I tend to think that the current “plan” will do no better than get us a sniff at .500 in 2010, and likely as not fail even at that, so I don’t see a lot of harm in enjoying at least one season this decade century.
If LaRoche had come out of June with a 1.000 OPS...
…and we’d switched over into buyer mode and done something stupid like trade McCutchen and Walker for Sabathia, I would’ve been furious.
Playing “meaningful games” is a fallacy. There’s nothing intrinsically more meaningful about being a few games over .500 vs. a few games below .500. If you’re in the playoffs, you’re in, and if you’re out of the playoffs, you’re out. And to be honest, I find the idea that games between non-contenders have no “meaning” to be kind of offensive anyway. That’s the sort of bullshit logic reporters have used for years to screw our guys on All-Star appearances and awards voting. Whenever I went to a game over the last sixteen years, it sure mattered to me whether we won or not on that day, even if we weren’t a contender.
I think that’s a great point, Vlad. It always used to make me mad when reporters would write treatises on the meaning of the word “value” to justify giving the MVP award to someone other than the best player. Really, A-Rod’s performances with the Rangers didn’t have “value”? Tell that to all the people who paid good money to sit in stifling Texas heat to watch him!
by Charlie Wilmoth on Dec 16, 2008 1:53 PM EST up reply actions
(I’m sure I’ve used the word “meaningful” in that “offensive” way, but when you’re right, you’re right.)
by Charlie Wilmoth on Dec 16, 2008 1:54 PM EST up reply actions
Furious
…and we’d switched over into buyer mode and done something stupid like trade McCutchen and Walker for Sabathia, I would’ve been furious.
And if we had made the wild card as a result? Gotten hot and won the Series? Still furious?
What’s the goal? Management (old and new) keeps saying that the goal is consistently competing for the playoffs. You know what? I’ll trade that fantasy for a Series win. If we have a fluke year and we get within reach of the brass ring, I want to grab for it, dammit. Does anyone here think that the Pirates’ endless series of plans has been better than the Marlins’ method (if you can call it that?)? Would 5 years of 2nd place finishes feel better than 4 years of last place and one ring?
The response to that is, “Well, the only way to win the Series is by building up.” Not really. Arizona literally mortgaged its future to reach the Series in 2001. By all means, build rationally, but if you get close, and the division is weak, screw the plan and go for it.
To be clear, I don’t think that the 2008 team was really close enough to a Series to justify trading away what few prospects we have for one 3 month rental – I wouldn’t make the trade Vlad suggests. But the idea that this nebulous plan, relying entirely on a combination of great scouting and good luck* to be able to compete sometime in the future, is preferable to a one year shot is ridiculous. The goal isn’t to “be competetive.” The goal is to win it all.
- Whatever you say about Billy Beane, the bottom line is that he got lucky to have his 3 stud pitchers stay healthy the whole time he had them; since they’ve been gone, the As look a lot more like any other team
There's no way we would've made the Wild Card
And if the Brewers and the Mets and the Cardinals had all been killed in a plane crash, or something equally unlikely, the state of the rest of our rotation would’ve meat that we were dog meat in the playoffs. I’m all for grabbing the brass ring if it’s there, but any hope of contention last year was just fool’s gold. You can’t plan on getting all the breaks, which is what we would’ve needed.
The Marlins’ method works because they have a solid base of drafted talent in their system at all times, to provide part of the next generation of champs. Our Creech drafts mean that a Marlins-type cycle won’t be a reasonable option for us for at least several more years. Ergo, it’s not a good example.
Eh.
I’ve been to a few hundred games during the streak, and I don’t have a problem admitting that the ones that have occurred while the Pirates were in contention have been more exciting. Part of the excitement of the no-hitter (and yes, I was there) was that it was a “meaningful” game – it put us into first place. Shit, the Sunday game against TB a few years back, when we started the day at 31-31 was relatively exciting (well, until the starter, IIRC, blew up in the first 3 innings).
When the Bucs are 10-6 in April, each win could be a step towards a good season – 6 months of excitement. When they’re 68-90 in September, I have no particular illusion that a win will amount to anything more than ~21 hours of relative joy, until the next day.
The point isn’t that late-season games for a lousy team are meaningless – as with you, I’m still rooting hard – but that they’re less meaningful. How could they not be, unless you’re a nihilist about anything more than a pleasant day at the ballpark?
It's not the record that makes the contender.
If you were excited by that 31-31 team because you thought it was a contender, then you were just fooling yourself. It’s the quality of the team that matters.
Having a comfortable illusion about your chances is fine, but don’t ever let it get in the way of actual strategy.
Charlie's idea about James is a good one.
If he’d take a two-year deal, or a one-year deal with an option, he’d give us a nice rotation option for 2010.
Bringing Back Wigginton and Going After Tavares?
What possible reasons would the Pirates have for even considering either one of these moves?
If either of these moves happen, I would say that Team Coonington will be a strong candidate to receive the first Dave Littlefield Award For Excellence!
Wigginton could make sense.
IF he’s the right price, and IF we see him as a corner OF. We need one of those, and for all his defensive failings, he’s a serviceable bat.
If we see him as a corner OF...
does he see himself as one? I mean, the 30 games last year was a career high (I think I’m repeating myself though…)
Well, that's the question, isn't it?
I’d assume that’s one of the things they’ll talk about when they talk contract, if it even gets to that point.
The Adam LaRoche debate reminds me of this.
So you’re a smoker and you have convinced me of your right to damage your own body and potentially reduce your life span. In the end it balances out. The tax on your cigarettes helps the economy and everybody has to go someday.
Would you want any of your kids to smoke?
The bottom line – It’s ok, but it’s not right!
by RDV across the sea on Dec 15, 2008 2:20 PM EST reply actions
Comments For This Post Are Closed
Secondary Sidebar
User Tools
FanPosts
Community blog posts and discussion.
Recommended FanPosts
Recent FanPosts
Baseball Nation Recent Stories
In Association With
Big League Stew - MLB - Yahoo! Sports
- Five tips for Showtime’s second season of ‘The Franchise,’ featuring the Miami Marlins
- The 10 best things about being a Detroit Tigers fan
- Surprise! A’s finally end the Yoenis Cespedes derby with $36 million deal for Cuban star
- The time Whitney Houston sang to Jim Bowden
- Pitchers and catchers! Mariners get early start in Arizona
Certain photos copyright © 2012 by Associated Press or Getty Images. Any commercial use or distribution without the express written consent of Associated Press and Getty Images is strictly prohibited.
