Adam LaRoche

by dtoddwin on Sep 1, 2009 6:51 PM EDT Comment 30 comments

Adam has been scorching down in Atlanta. He is slashing .365/.446/.646 for an OPS of 1.092 and OPS+ of 185 in 96 ABs and 112 PAs. He also has 8 HRs. As a frame of reference, that is basically the month Garrett Jones had in July if you remember how hot he was.

Here a Adam' combined season numbers vs. last year.

2008: .270/.341/.500 OPS .841 OPS+ 123. His counting stats were 32 2Bs, 25 HRs, 85 RBI, 54BBs, 122 SOs, 554 PAs

2009: .273/.353/.490 OPS .842 OPS+ 123. His counting stats are 30 2Bs, 21 HRs, 62 RBI, 56 BBs, 112 SOs, 499 PAs

Notice anything?

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You mean other than...

much lower RBI total…things are pretty much identical to last year??

Welcome to the Adam LaRoche 3rd annual salary drive.

by Thunder on Sep 1, 2009 6:59 PM EDT reply actions 0 recs

Yea-LaRoche is Returning to Form

Just all of the rest of his seasons; ice cold until July/August then red hot till the end of the season. Atlanta is getting just what they expected.

BTW-I’d rather have Jones!

by zogger on Sep 1, 2009 7:22 PM EDT reply actions 0 recs

Adam LaRoche

Is the Babe Ruth of Atlanta! It never ends.

by BadAndy on Sep 1, 2009 7:53 PM EDT via mobile reply actions 0 recs

Only what we’ve known all along: LaRoche heats up in the second half.

www.sixtyftsixin.com

by Nate Rose on Sep 2, 2009 1:07 AM EDT reply actions 0 recs

LaRoche’s pending free agency fascinates me. What does a team pay a guy who winds up with numbers that are right around league average for a starting first baseman, but gets there through such unconventional means?

by ElDuce on Sep 2, 2009 1:36 AM EDT reply actions 0 recs

I’m very curious to see where he ends up. Too lazy to research what teams might need a 1B, guess I’ll find out in the winter.

I made most of my life decisions at a Foghat concert... I stand by them.

by Chester J Lampwick on Sep 2, 2009 2:17 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

The same as you would any other 1B with those numbers.

All the games count the same, so it doesn’t matter in which games you produce, as long as you do.

by Vlad on Sep 2, 2009 9:43 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

Well, thats not EXACTLY true, Vlad. If you played on a team that doesn’t score many runs but doesn’t allow many either, evenly distributed hits will have a slightly higher marginal utility than hits that all pile up in the same game.

That said, the difference is extremely small and well out of proportion with the hate that Pirate fans carry towards to Big LaRoche who I happened to always like.

by MrPedriqueIfYoureNasty on Sep 2, 2009 11:14 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

The effect is negligable enough...

…that I feel reasonably secure in discounting it.

Particularly since you aren’t guaranteed evenly distributed hits with any non-LaRoche alternative, either.

by Vlad on Sep 2, 2009 11:25 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

Oh absolutely

At worst an extreme case like LaRoche probably loses a tiny fraction of OPS tops, something as innocent as wearing contact lenses probably has a larger effect in the long run.

Still, its something that a budget conscious team could factor in if they were trying to think well outside of the box…they just probably wouldn’t get anywhere with it.

by MrPedriqueIfYoureNasty on Sep 2, 2009 11:29 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

So ...

if your hitter goes .000/.000/.000 for five months and then .999/.999/3.995 for September, that works for you? You’d take that guy?

by bucdaddy on Sep 2, 2009 11:41 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

Wait, what?

How many times is this guy batting in September, to have a .999 BA? I guess it’s not impossible for a guy to have 1,000 AB in a month, but it certainly seems… unlikely.

But on the larger question: Yes, if a guy somehow packed an entire season’s worth of production into one month, and did nothing for the rest of the year, I’d be fine with that.

by Vlad on Sep 3, 2009 9:17 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

Because

he’d help you go like 28-2 in one month and 40-92 the rest of the time?

by bucdaddy on Sep 4, 2009 2:05 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

So what's the harm in that...

…compared to a guy who’d give you a nice steady 11-16 every month? You still finish in last either way.

by Vlad on Sep 4, 2009 9:04 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

Eh, good point

by bucdaddy on Sep 4, 2009 9:19 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

Let's look at this

AdLar consistently creates ~81 runs per year – a run every other game. But of course, he doesn’t create a run every other game: he creates a run per game for two months, and a run per 4 games the other 4 months. So let’s look at Pythagorean records.

A .500 team with 660 runs scored and allowed over the course of 6 months. Add La Roche* with that pattern. You get 4 months of 117/110 and 2 months of 137/110. That computes to 14.33 wins in the bad months and 16.4 in the good ones, for a season total of 90. Distribute those runs evenly, and you get 15.2 runs/month for 91 wins.

So it makes a difference, but a tiny one – 1 win over 162 games for a good team, which is obviously overshadowed by myriad other considerations. So Vlad is right that it’s not a big deal, but wrong that it makes no difference at all.

I’m not dicking around with replacement levels – we’ll just say that they score 660 runs from all other positions

by JRoth95 on Sep 7, 2009 10:42 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

The other difficulty, as I previously noted...

…is that there’s no guarantee that the non-LaRoche players will have a nice even monthly distribution of runs created, either. Even if you choose “non-streaky”, the odds are against you actually getting it.

Let’s pick a team at random here: the Cardinals. Their 8 guys listed as starters by B-R, with their best and worst months by OPS:
C: Molina – .902 (March/April), .560 (May)
1B: Pujols – 1.283 (June), .900 (July)
2B: Schumaker – .812 (May), .668 (June)
SS: Ryan – .829 (August), .645 (July)
3B: Thurston – .778 (March/April), .570 (June)
LF: Duncan – .938 (March/April), .608 (June)
CF: Rasmus – .869 (June), .662 (March/April)
RF: Ludwick – .966 (July), .611 (August)

Not a lot of consistency there. 3/4 of the lineup has a 200+ point difference in OPS between their best month and their worst, and the most “consistent” guy in the bunch is still at 144 points.

OK, so, sure. You’ve got a lot of month-to-month inconsistency for individual players. But it probably all evens out for the team as a whole, right?

Not so much. Cardinals – .819 (March/April), .688 (May). They scored 38 more runs in March/April than they did in May, even though May had four more games.

If you pay extra for consistency, most of the time you only get the illusion of it.

by Vlad on Sep 7, 2009 9:28 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

So their most extreme team month difference is .130 OPS, which is actually not much of a range.

But I take your point – there’s too much noise for AdLaR’s pattern to definitively cost his team a game. But a simple isolation model suggests that extreme inconsistency does, in fact, create fewer wins than extreme consistency. That’s at odds with your earlier stance that it doesn’t matter – at all – if a player is 0-for-108 games then 1.000/1.000/2.000 for 54 games.

I will readily admit that running one of those 10,000 season simulations might prove otherwise; but this is what a simpler model says.

by JRoth95 on Sep 8, 2009 12:22 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

Well, most extreme completed to date.

They’re way past the .819 this month, but I pulled it because it’s not done yet.

by Vlad on Sep 8, 2009 6:10 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

My guess is

Atlanta signs him this offseason. That way they can get closer to their goal of being the Pirates of the South.

by MarkInDallas on Sep 2, 2009 4:24 AM EDT reply actions 0 recs

Agreed

Atlanta hearts Mario

"Baseball is better than football. Think about it, eighty degrees, a cold beer and a short-sleeve shirt is better than 30 degrees, a hip flask and six layers of clothes under a lap blanket. Take your pick: suntan or frostbite. " - Thomas Boswell

by Ketcham Bruce on Sep 2, 2009 12:21 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

The gila monster and a heat lamp

I am sure that each contending team in the future will see the benefits of Mario during the 2nd half of the season. Therefore, I predict Mario gets traded each year for the rest of his career to a contending team (unless the folllowing advice is adhered to).

I think Mario’s problem is likened to a gila monster whose movements are slow and clumsy in the Spring and early summer and then once it warms up he becomes mobile and he heats up. Case solved-keep him under a heat lamp in the Spring and early Summer and he will hit.

by long4willie on Sep 2, 2009 6:03 PM EDT reply actions 0 recs

All due respect, dtoddwin,

but who give two craps about Adam LaRoche?

Free your ass and your mind will follow.

by cocktailsfor2 on Sep 2, 2009 6:27 PM EDT reply actions 0 recs

adam who?

I couldn’t agree more.

by changepirateskarma on Sep 2, 2009 10:26 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

No worries

I thought it was interesting. Just as it’s interesting how much Jack Wilson is a f*cking disaster in Seattle, Freddy “healthy as a horse” Sanchez can’t get on the field in SF and Nyjer had a good run in DC. Sorry to waste your bandwith with a couple paragraphs.

Most people want to look at performance to evaluate transactions. I know Adam isn’t on people’s radar. Thought it was mildly interesting.

by dtoddwin on Sep 3, 2009 12:04 AM EDT via mobile up reply actions 0 recs

I think it’s interesting, always good to hear about former Pirates players.

I made most of my life decisions at a Foghat concert... I stand by them.

by Chester J Lampwick on Sep 3, 2009 3:02 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

Yep.

I don’t stop liking guys just because they left the team, y’know?

by Vlad on Sep 3, 2009 3:38 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

I didn't really care

for AdLa as a Pirate, personally, and wasn’t trying to impugn dtoddwin.

In this case, IMO, the majority of the fanbase here on BD didn’t really care much for Mario, either. Also, it’s pretty easy to look up what he’s doing with ATL on a dozen other sites. I haven’t seen too many comparable posts about Jack, Freddy, Nate, Grabow et al for instance (though bucdaddy DID do a fanpost that NyjMo got hurt)…

Sorry if I got anyone’s knickers twisted.

Not my intention.

Free your ass and your mind will follow.

by cocktailsfor2 on Sep 3, 2009 6:49 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

Yes, it doesn’t matter if he plays w/ his brother or not, or on a real major league team, he’s the same. I just wish he could have at least LOOKED like he cared….

by mackint on Sep 3, 2009 10:52 AM EDT reply actions 0 recs