One of the great—well, OK, “fun”—things about early-season stats is that they contain extremes that don’t tend to hold up over the course of the entire year. As a consequence, they look odd, dramatic, out of place—and, let’s face it, who isn’t attracted to someone else’s sore thumb?
So today we’ve scoured the early stat splits to take a look at where MLB teams currently have gaping offensive sinkholes. In most cases, the dividing line here is at .500—no, not winning percentage; certainly not batting average, but a .500 OPS. That’s pretty anemic, even in a year where offense is still down a bit from the last several seasons.
SECOND BASEMAN
NL: PIT (.206/.265/.206/.471) [.708]
AL: DET (.127/.252/.238/.490) [.693]
Neil Walker, after two solid years as the Pirates’ second baseman, has (for the moment at least) hit a brick wall in terms of the power department (not a single extra-base hit thus far in 2012). Jim Leyland had been rotating three chimps (the unlikely law firm of Raeburn, Santiago, and Inge) at the keystone sack this year before giving Inge the boot, and it’s starting to look like a bad episode of Survivor (wait, isn’t that completely redundant?) in what’s left of the Motor City
RIGHT FIELD
NL: PIT (.194/.227/.236/.463) [.749]
AL: three way—KCR (.559), MIN (.558), DET (.557) [.724]
Sinkholes seem most prevalent in the midwest and west: here’s the divisional breakdown for what we might term “offensive anemia by defensive position”—AL: East—0, Central—3, West—5; NL: East—2, Central—4, West 2. If you give extra credit for the AL Central having three RF sinkholes, that would be the tie-breaker. In the Pirates’ case, Jose Tabata is one of those young players whose career is one of consistent regression.
It will be interesting to see how many of these guys will get replaced (and here’s where some down’n'dirty application of the “replacement player” idea can be turned ninety degrees from its usual meaning) and how many will be allowed to work their way back above we like to call the Gino Cimoli Line (Gino is one of those guys whose career works out to a perfect zero-sum using the Sean Smith version of WAR that you’ll find at Forman et fil…we use him to honor the tradition of allowing obscure players to rise out the sinkholes of their own making, to be “honored more by the breach than by the observance”). As we say 31.4% of the time at this particular juncture…stay tuned.
Repoz
Posted: April 27, 2012 at 03:39 PM |
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1. The elusive Robert Denby Posted: April 27, 2012 at 06:20 PM (#4118015)You have to add 300 points to that, for Frenchy's leadership and clubhouse presence.
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