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Transaction Oracle
— A Timely Look at Transactions as They Happen
— A Timely Look at Transactions as They Happen
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Red Sox - Signed Lowell
Boston Red Sox - Signed 3B Mike Lowell to a 3-year contract worth $37.5 million.Lowell's not really young enough or good enough for this to work out fabulously, but the Red Sox are rich enough that this won't be a disaster for the team. While his 2007 season was excellent and he was instrumental in winning the World Series, Lowell had a BABIP some 50 points above his career average and 38 points above his career best .304.
Now the projection, geez. That's about as big a departure from established level of play as I think I've ever seen from ZiPS with a player not a million years old or moving to a drastically different park (I have his 4-year weighted adjusted to Boston numbers as 288/351/470). ZiPS sees Mike Lowell in a group with an amazing number of third basemen that crashed the next year or two. I'll just say "What the hell?" and move on.
2008 ZiPS Projection - Mike Lowell
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AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI BB SO SB BA OBP SLG
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Projection 552 70 150 40 1 15 87 50 63 1 .272 .333 .429
2009? 511 64 138 35 1 13 80 48 61 1 .270 .334 .419
2010? 476 58 127 33 0 10 72 44 59 1 .267 .330 .399
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Opt. (15%) 586 87 175 45 2 19 99 60 59 2 .299 .365 .480
Pes. (15%) 388 43 98 23 0 9 50 32 52 0 .253 .309 .381
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Top Comps: Tim Wallach, Buddy Bell
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Ah, to heck with it. What does ZIPS know anyways? ZIPS thought Drew was going to have a big dropoff in 2007.
I use pretty large groupings, it's just that the large group didn't fare very well!
I would pick Buddy Bell, Tim Wallach, Terry Pendleton, Scott Rolen, Troy Glaus, Graig Nettles.
Okay. I looked. Based on those guys, it seems like 2 of the 3 years could be quite a bit of a dropoff.
But how good were they at 32 and 33? 34 is not some magical number. Pretty good (not great) players tend to start falling off bigtime in their mid-30s. But I would think that guys who have two of their best years at 32 and 33 are a lot more likely to hold on to their goodness than guys who had their best seasons at age 26-29 and have already dropped quite a bit by 33.
--Ron Cey, like Lowell, was consistently good for many years and had a very good year at age 33. He returned to being good for 34-36.
--Doug Decinces was starting to fade by 33, but still put up a good age 34 and 35 before dropping to a 95 OPS+ age 36.
--Todd Zeile was pretty good at 33, stayed good at 34, then dropped to blah for 35 and 36 (similar to the projection above).
I don't know how hard it is to judge them. Impossible to judge their age 34 year.
Just guessing though, their 34-36 seasons won't be worth a whole lot. Probably one good season for Glaus, none for Rolen unless he can get healthy.
http://mlb.mlb.com/stats/individual_player_hitting_chart.jsp?c_id=mlb&playerID=136780&statType=1
Hopefully that link works. If not, it shows that 28 of his 30 XBH in 2007 IN FENWAY were to left field. That seems remarkable. Browsing his hit chart for other AL parks shows a similar pattern.
I would guess that a player who:
- is a dominant pull-hitter &
- is right handed &
- has some power &
- plays in Fenway park ...
... could exhibit an ability to out-perform his expected hit rate. Maybe he won't regress to a normal hit rate now that he's staying in Fenway.
if pressed to choose, i'd take the over on this number, but i have faith in zips. it can churn out some strange looking numbers for individuals, but it seems to do pretty d@mn well overall.
i'd say rolen was "good, not great" as a 3b when you consider offense only (outside of 2004). add in defense and he became "great." "great" hitting third basemen are a small group: eddie matthews, chipper jones, mike schmidt, george brett, wade boggs, maybe ron santo in his 23-27 years, and now alex rodriguez, miguel cabrera, and david wright.
rolen's back troubles should absolutely be taken into account when thinking about whether lowell's comparable group ran into trouble in their mid 30s. declining performance is caused by both injuries and skill erosion, which are inextricably linked. lowell's expected declining performance incorporates both the chances that he will not hit (as happened in 2005) because his bat slows down and the chances that some injury saps his ability to perform.
But if they're already toast by their early 30s, they're not good comps for Lowell at all. He's still good at 33.
It turned out as a broken hand. Still not a perfect method of course.
Really, it's like ZIPS is reading my mind. First Cabrera, now this. Granted, in whatever Lowell thread that was, I didn't project him this badly but figured his career averages minus aging ... and an OPS+ in the 100-105 range. ZIPS is a little lighter on the SLG.
Those numbers really don't look that out of line to me. A 3% drop compared to his career BA ... and interestingly enough, 273 was his career BA through age 32 ... and a HR prediction that's just about in line with a Marcel with an age adjustment.
Expanding that "career year" logic, before this year, his career marks were 273/339/463. Granted that was mostly in a pitcher's park. So having this projection two years later is, if anything, "optimistic." So seems like ZIPS is letting his comps and career through age 32 outweigh his career year. Seems reasonable -- maybe not correct, but reasonable.
Put most simply, ZIPS is saying he'll return to the same player he was through age 32 with less HR power.
Maybe (and reasonable), but Lowell wasn't particularly good at 32. That was an OPS+ of 104 and with a drop in HRs despite moving to an HR hitters park. And this year he had 1 more HR but 10 fewer doubles -- his higher numbers are all singles (BABIP). (Note, unless he's drilling a lot of singles off the Green Monster, there's no reason to think the park is helping him hit singles is there?)
Drop his BA 40-50 points from this year and he looks a lot more like Lowell through age 32 and like the ZIPS projection.
Or maybe Dan forget to add the 2007 data. :-)
Last I saw, Fenway suppressed HRs tremendously - one of the worst HR parks in MLB.
ZiPS doesn't include Ron Cey or Doug DeCinces in the group - everything's park and league neutralized some Cey comes out a little too good and DeCinces not quite the right shape.
Yup. In fact, it's the worst AL park the last 3 years, but still a net hitter's park of 108 thanks to the best park for singles and doubles in the league. I get a 2B factor of 134 for Boston weighted the last 3 years, which is like 18 points more than the next park.
This is actually the first time ZiPS hasn't been bully on Lowell - ZiPS loved Lowell going into Fenway and I was damn worried about it projecting a guy who hit 236/298/360 leading the AL in doubles with 49.
Last year, instead of maintaining his HR / Contact and having a BABIP collapse in the second half, he had a 43% drop in the former and a 27% boost in the latter, to .380. His OPS actually went up to 886, the best figure in his career from game 90 on. If you watched the games, you saw him using the whole field more. And if you were reading the papers all year, you read that he was doing extra work in the weight room to try and fend off the second-half blues.
Make of all this what you will.
That makes Ortiz's HR surge in 2006 even more impressive.
I suck at google.
I've been poking around trying to find good ones by handedness or field and all I've dug up so far is this one at HT ... and it gives Fenway a LF factor of 105 and LCF factor of 106. CF is a staggering 57! RCF and especially RF are well below-averge too, dragging its overall HR park factor quite low. But I'm reasonably certain Mr. Lowell is hitting most of his HR to LF/LCF.
However, it uses a "new method" for calculating the PFs anyway so who knows about those numbers
Still, in my years of watching baseball, while I've seen some 20-ft high line drives bonk off the Monster, I've seen a lot more deep but lazy fly balls to left end up in the net. But I will bow to the wisdom of the actual numbers if anyone can provide them.
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