I don't buy the idea that Cruz is purely a product of his ballpark. His OPS+ is ballpark adjusted, and here are years 2008 - 2011: 168, 117, 146, 112. He may not be a star hitter (and perhaps the Rangers overpaid for him going forward), but he appears to be a pretty useful hitter for an outfield. I'm not sure what to make of the Cruz and Cespedes comparison, but the reasoning is obvious to me. Cespedes is a late peaking hitter? How do we know that, since he hasn't played U.S. professional ball yet? His hitting was very good in Cuba, and for all we know, he would have been called up at age 23 or 24 and produced well at the major league level if he had been playing in the U.S. minor leagues.

Ok, made me look it up.

Cruz has hit 306/367/576 at home, and 236/293/432 on the road. Using just the road stats though would be a terrible way to project him if he were to leave the Rangers, throwing out half the data. Never forget the lessons of the Galarraga.

#2 And a lot of other players who left the Rockies. Our understanding of how any given park change will affect a player is not that good, but I do know that overall stats (park adjusted) predicts future play much better than road stats alone, even when a player has huge home/road splits.

His OPS+ is ballpark adjusted, and here are years 2008 - 2011: 168, 117, 146, 112

That 2008 season was quite the small sample, no? Cruz also misses a ton of games. This having been said, I think a major difference is that Cespedes projects as a CF, no? Nelson Cruz the starting centerfielder is a pretty worthwhile player.

That 2008 season was quite the small sample, no?

True. I'm thinking that was a Sept. call up, but I'm not sure.

2008 was 133 PA.

When you put the words "Cruz" and "late bloomer" together, it's not Nelson that I think of. That combination causes me to think of Jose, Sr. (Which probably has nothing to do with Cespedes or this article.)

. A collateral irony is that the Rangers have just tied themselves to an odd contract with Cruz, one that seems likely to pay him the most when he might well be producing the least—the two-year, $15M deal pays out the lion’s share of dough in 2013

Yes, how dumb to backload a contract....

(or, in the case of Eno and Cluster, a broken head)

That album (After the Heat) is fantastic. "The Belldog" is probably Eno's best song..

Cruz has hit 306/367/576 at home, and 236/293/432 on the road

That's .941 vs .725, about a 30 % difference. Given Texas has a 109 park factor (giving road parks an average 99 factor) and 2% each way for standard home/road advantage, and you'd expect a 15% difference. One additional factor is that a disproportionate amount of his road parks are OAK/SEA, and then there is the little matter of statistical variance and sample size.

When you put the words "Cruz" and "late bloomer" together, it's not Nelson that I think of. That combination causes me to think of Jose, Sr.

Me, too.
You don't see many really good players peak at 35-36, but Jose Cruuuuuuuuuz Sr. was one of 'em.

That album (After the Heat) is fantastic. "The Belldog" is probably Eno's best song..

If you go to the trouble to reverse "Tzima N'arki", while the lyrics are forwards, the backbeat is still the same.

BOOM.

Backloading the contract is not a problem. If Cruz is a 2-3 WAR player in 2013 he's well worth it, and the Rangers already have a lot of surplus value in him over the last couple of years and he'll be underpaid in 2012. PLUS, they would have to give him raises in arbitration anyway, and since arb favors power hitters it doesn't seem like they're paying any more in 2013 than they might have anyway.

If you want to complain about Cruz, complain about his inability to stay healthy, not about his salary.

Well Don called the contract "odd", not "bad." But, alas, it's not "odd" either. It's buying out the last 2 years of arb and such contracts (almost) always mirror an actual arb process where he'd make more in his 3rd year of arb than in his 2nd -- presumably to keep service time comps in line. What's "odd" is Cruz hitting his last two arb years at 31 and 32.

Predictive or not, those are some stinky road numbers.

Uncle Sean seems to have added some fields to the "leaderboards" section of a player's card and I see that Cruz is 22nd among active players in assists as an RF. :-)

This is Brock Hanke here, with some more detail on what I call "cream-skimming." The idea is this: The great majority of players (injuries derail this) will have careers that look like a camel's hump. There will be weaker years when young, then the hump, which we call the prime or the peak, and then a decline slide. Now, consider your typical AAAA player, of which there are many. Will he ever have ML quality seasons? Sure. When? During the hump, meaning at his peak. A bright team can see that coming, bring him up or pick him up at, say, age 26 or so, play him for 3-4 seasons, and then let him go back to the minors or in trade, if they can find a team that will give them something for him. This is "cream skimming." It's a natural approach to a lot of players. And I imagine that some of the difference between good teams and worse ones is that the good ones realize this, and don't make the mistake of just letting the guy play and play into his 30s, because he wasn't THAT much worse than last year. And no, I don't think this is a genius discovery on my part. But I'm always surprised when a team doesn't get it, and keeps the lame duck way way beyond his expiration date.

16--Brock, I'll bet dollars to dust kitties that a study of salary and WAR show that some of the worst contracts are given to exactly those guys.

Problem is, a AAAAer, when he's good, just isn't going to be that good, nor is he likely to be consistent enough to be worth keeping around without applying the same kind of scrutiny to his performance you'd apply to anyone else, or without applying the same kind of scrutiny to his decline phase as you would to anyone else's. I do think keeping an eye on those guys is an excellent idea, but very much with the idea of filling a hole for a year rather than figuring you're going to cover yourself at a position for half a decade with someone who showed no signs of being able to play in the majors regularly during the first half of his 20s. I just don't think there's any strong pattern such that AAAAers at 26 who start performing well tend to be good bets through the next five years. The Mets could have filled their sucking hole at 2B during the last half of the last decade with a wise selection from the pool of keystone 2Bmen, but settling on any one of them would have meant shooting crap. Even with a comparative success like Jeff Keppinger you'll get seasons like his 2008, with an OPS+ of 71 in 502 PAs, though he did deliver 3 wins over 2287 PAs for the princely sum of $4.2 million. Is Keppinger the kind of player you're thinking of, or did I miss something in your argument?

But yeah, getting rid of these guys earlier rather than later is extremely prudent.