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Baseball Primer Newsblog— The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Anyone catch Ibanez’s laughable dive attempt today?
In his last three seasons with the Mariners, the 36-year-old Ibanez was remarkably consistent as a hitter. Suddenly this year he’s on pace for career highs in home runs, runs scored, runs batted in, slugging percentage and on-base percentage. And he’s gone from a below-average fielder to the best leftfielder in baseball, according to an advanced measure called ultimate zone rating. Overall, he’s one of just seven players in baseball to have been worth two wins or more for their teams.
But Bill Baer was a skeptic of the signing before the season, and he’s not going to let a month and a half change his mind. “We need to wait for a decent sample size before we can draw any legitimate conclusions,” Baer writes on Baseball Daily Digest.
How much should we revise our prior opinion of a player based on a particularly strong or weak start? FanGraphs has attempted to quantify that by providing in-season updates to preseason projections of player stats. The ZiPS projection system expects Ibanez to finish with an on-base percentage of .363 and a slugging percentage of .533 — closer to his recent Mariners history than to his hot start this season.
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Ibanez is weird. I think he had some injury issues in Seattle and had to DH? Just the start of the season, but boy, he and Utley are keeping the Phillies in the race to date. Though if they don't find more arms, they might be in trouble.
Last year the Phillies hit 109 home runs at home, and 105 on the road. Phillies pitchers gave up 80 home runs at home, and 80 on the road.
This year they're batting
.244/.335/.441 at home (27 homers in 19 games), and
.271/.344/.460 on the road (17 homers in 12 games).
Thanks. :)
Yeah, I became a snark convert... much to everyone's detriment.
Two of the 5 would have probably been catchable, and the other three look to have gotten to the fence too quickly to be caught, so if that is the case, then the smaller LF at Citizens Bank Park has saved Ibanez from 3 fly balls landing uncaught in his zone.
I don't know how to figure out what effect that would have on his range stats, but as of right now, Ibanez has 58 putouts and 51 expected outs. How would adding 3 hits to his zone change his numbers?
On the flipside, the smaller park certainly would seem likely to help his home run numbers (8 of his 10 have come at home), but actually his HR profile looks pretty solid, only two of those 8 were close (<10 feet over the fence), the rest have been struck with plenty of margin...
However, I will say that, having been at CBP numerous times, the distance from home plate to the left field foul pole definitely isn't 329 feet as advertised. I would be surprised if it was 320.
Yup, LAW's chum now writes for the WSJ.
Doesn't that sound like the lead-in to a steroids accusation?
I maintain that the National League is easier to hit in. More fastballs. The effect is most pronounced when a hitter first goes from the NL to the AL, but it can work the other way, a with Raul.
Pitchers who haven't seen him may challenge him more and/or take time to find his holes.
As for his fielding, I used to think that the critics in Seattle were too harsh on Ibanez, but then I saw a series of video clips last year (on Lookout Landing, IIRC) that showed his ineptness.
Yeah, Jason Bay is just getting his ass killed.
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