Cardinals - Acquired Holliday
St. Louis Cardinals - Acquired OF Matt Holliday and $1.5 million from the Oakland Athletics for 3B Brett
Wallace, P Clayton Mortensen and OF Shane Peterson
I’ve said that in the last year or so, the A’s long-term plan has seemed a little muddled and some of the moves a little
random (and I like the Hairston trade less with the PTBNL being confirmed as Sean Gallagher in the meantime), but I love this
trade from the perspective of the A’s.
Wallace isn’t a slam-dunk, guaranteed middle-of-the-order hitter, but he’s still a very good hitting prospect. Wallace has
had ups and and downs in Memphis (a very poor first month with the team in May and a current slump) and he’s not ready right
at this minute to be a solid offensive player in the majors, but he’s an excellent player to have as top billing in return
for 2 months of Holliday.
Now, having said that Wallace is a great player to pick up, what makes this trade a really good one for the A’s is that the
2 “other” guys in the trade are legitimate prospects as well, not a couple of organizational player make-weights.
Mortensen a 24-year-old starter with an OK fastball, a good sinker. He could definitely stand to add some bulk as he looks a
little like the the tall, thin players that you could use in Ice Hockey for NES. Shane Peterson’s a little lower on the
totem pole and looks like a future 4th outfielder on a team that has a couple legitimate centerfielders.
None of this trio is really ready right now, but it’s a very nice package.
Holliday will help the Cardinals and one can hardly call this trade an unmitigated disaster with the team thick in the
divisional race and Colby Rasmus not heading west. However, I do think they’ll feel the costs of the trade down the road if
they don’t sign Holliday or do well with the draft pick compensation. Holliday’s not going to hit like Manny did last year
and the Dodgers gave up less for the Manchild.
2009 ZIPS Projection - Matt Holliday
——————————————————————————————————————
AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI BB SO SB BA OBP SLG
——————————————————————————————————————
Year-to-Date 346 52 99 23 1 11 54 46 58 12 .286 .377 .454
Rest-of-Year 248 41 73 15 1 10 41 28 48 7 .296 .374 .482
——————————————————————————————————————
Total 594 93 172 38 2 21 95 74 106 19 .290 .376 .466
2009 ZIPS Projection - Brett Wallace
——————————————————————————————————————
AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI BB SO SB BA OBP SLG
——————————————————————————————————————
Year-to-Date 358 31 94 12 0 6 25 23 74 0 .263 .321 .346
Rest-of-Year 225 27 59 11 0 6 25 14 40 1 .264 .323 .392
——————————————————————————————————————
2009 ZIPS Projection - Clayton Mortensen
——————————————————————————————————————
W L G GS IP H ER HR BB SO ERA
——————————————————————————————————————
Year-to-Date 6 7 18 17 102.0 108 57 10 33 61 5.03
Rest-of-Year 2 4 10 10 50.7 59 31 7 23 26 5.51
——————————————————————————————————————
Year-to-date totals include minor-league translations, if applicable.
Dan Szymborski
Posted: July 24, 2009 at 05:19 PM |
28 comment(s)
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1. Cabbage Posted: July 24, 2009 at 06:20 PM (#3265806)I've been waiting for their starting pitching to collapse all season, but it seems like ever few years, I wait for a Dave Duncan staff to collapse and it never does. Pinero is a classic "I have no business as a successful starter, but I'm going to drop my HR rate down to 1 every 40 IP or so for no good reason other than Dave Duncan's magic back rubs"-style pitcher.
One thing I do know for certain. 4 fat guys don’t work.
Duncan's "backrubs" amount to preaching sinker, sinker, sinker, two-seam fastball, which he calls "pitching to contact." The inevitable result, if the plan succeeds at all, is a drop in homer rates and a rise in ground balls.
I posted elsewhere that the trade, viewed in context, is essentially Chris Duncan, Brett Wallace and two other prospects for Holliday, Lugo, and some cash. The first key was that Duncan had to go if Holliday was coming in, because Chris would have no job. The second key is that the Cards have apparently decided that Wallace can only play first.
- Brock Hanke
Yeah. It's funny how quickly a strength can turn into a weakness. I never thought the Cards would give up Wallace, but like Brock said, they may only view him as a 1B. Or maybe they drafted him with the idea of trading him, like the Brewers with LaPorta.
Yeah but that's because the Pirates were involved. You don't have to give up much to get good players when they're around.
Like just about everything, you can't prove statistically that it doesn't exist with the coarse-grained tools that people typically try to use to measure it; there is just too much noise in the data.
-- MWE
Walking a guy will hurt more the better the next hitter is, pretty uncontroversial I would think.
The same is true of singles, doubles, and triples.
What? What is this nonsense? Four fat guys work just fine!
I think the question on protection is whether Pujols will hit better with Holliday behind him because pitchers will throw him more strikes, or nibble less. In this specific case, the Cardinals are probably more worried about having the pitcher throwing Albert any strikes at all than about having Pujols hit better when he gets the chance. In that sense, I would expect Holliday to offer some protection.
Managers seldom contemplate giving up an intentional triple.
I think the protection thing is backwards, and in particular "hit better" is quite murky. Thinking about things from a game theory perspective:
Suppose the current situation is:
Albert .330/.450/.700
STL#4 .300/.350/.450
Post-Holliday, maybe we have (numbers are just for the purposes of illustration):
Albert ????????????
STL#4 .300/.400/.500
So, what will Albert's line be? Clearly the pitchers have an algorithm which yields .330/.450/.700, so it can't be true that Albert will end up with an OBP > .450 and a SLG > .700 (let's assume for simplicity that these are the only numbers that matters.) In fact, it's really the pitcher's choice: he can take .330/.450/.700, but maybe Albert's OBP is more valuable in the Holliday world than in the before world. Maybe he decides to make Albert into a .340/.430/.750 hitter instead, which would have been more valuable to STL in the old world, but now with a better hitter coming up is less valuable to STL than .330/.450/.700. This seems to be (rationally) the actual effect of protection, if there is one.
The advantage here really comes from the fact that the presence of Holliday makes Albert's production (specifically non-homerun on-bases) more valuable, not that Holliday makes Albert produce more. In fact, the modification that the pitcher makes to Albert's outcome table is good for the pitcher (almost by definition), not good for the Cardinals.
(Similarly Albert's presence makes Holliday's production more valuable -- there's a nice synergy here, which is of course the point of putting your good hitters in a row.)
Now, possibly by RC or LW or whatever the .340/.430/.750 hitter generates more runs than the .330/.450/.700 hitter, but again, this is always a choice that the pitcher has to make. To put this argument another way, Albert tends to generate high leverage situations since people tend to be on base after he bats, and so upgrading the hitter after him is more important. (Similarly, situations before Holliday bats are higher-leverage because he is likely to do something good, so Holliday's acquisition increases the actual LI of Pujols' at-bats (this won't show up in Fangraphs etc., but it's true with context-dependent LI) -- and obviously increasing the effective LI of Pujols is a good thing.)
EDIT: This does not consider the choice Pujols makes. Actually, it seems that Pujols should be more willing to take a walk with a better hitter behind him, while the pitcher would be less willing to give one, and it may just even out to have Pujols be the same .330/.450/.700 hitter as always.
To put that bit more accurately ...
you can't prove that something doesn't exist with statistics. There's also really no such thing as "too much noise in the data."
Statistics is about measuring the size of the effect relative to the noise. If the size is small relative to the noise, then you won't find a statistically significant effect. That there's been no evidence for "protection" while there has been evidence for other things relative to the same noise is strong evidence that the size of the "protection" effect is smaller than those other things.
Somebody should just take some time to do some proper power analysis of these things. The "fog" is perfectly estimable.
Anyway, the best way to protect Pujols is to get guys on-base in front of him.
BTW, the opposite effect seems to apply to cocaine users who go through rehab ("seems to" means that the sample size of people whose rehabs were public is not large). Their averages and power drop a bit, but they make it all up in walks. I can only guess that rehab makes you a bit less wound up and a bit more patient. Check out Darrell Porter to see the effect.
Question for discussion: If you had Holliday and Pujols, which one would you hit third and which one cleanup? Pujols hits more homers, so having Holliday in front of him would help them become multi-run taters. Also, if Pujols hits cleanup, then if he comes up in the first inning, there has to be at least one runner on base. If the first three guys go out, he hits leadoff in the second. Few teams will intentionally walk even Pujols to start the second inning.
- Brock
I was wondering if batting your best hitter in the 3-spot was something that came to baseball out of cricket, or has persisted since the days when outs were harder to come by. Certainly, the third wicket in cricket looks to be the most important one, so the guy coming in at 3 in the batting order ought to be your best batsman.
Not to be obvious, but... when you say value, do you mean the value of their production in and or apart from the context of those appearances? Put a slightly different way, are you measuring in terms of marginal runs or wins?
Fra Paolo - The idea that your best hitter should bat third goes back so far into the 19th century (Cap Anson was aware of it in the 1880s) that it's pretty much impossible to think that it came from anywhere except cricket or rounders or town ball or one of the other progenitors of baseball. I know little about cricket, so it was news to me that the sport thinks that the third wicket is special. Thanks for the info. My guess as to why it's never gone by the wayside is that managers really like to score first, because it makes them feel that they're in control and managers love to be in control, and so they want their best hitters to be able to drive in runs in the first inning. That is, it's a byproduct of having three outs to an inning.
- Brock
Well, that and teams that score first usually win.
-- MWE
I would guess it's also true that:
1) The team that scores second (or third or fourth) usually wins, too.
2) The team that scores first is usually the better team.
Chris Perez and Jess Todd for three months of an injured Mark DeRosa. Of the Cards' top five prospects headed into 2009, two are on the bigs (Rasmus and Motte) and the other three shipped out of town (Perez, Wallace, and Todd) for rentals. I'm afraid to even ask who the PTBNL was in the Lugo deal at this point.
I'll actually be surprised if it isn't craig, given the lack of consideration he's been given this year by the team despite the huge hole at 3B.
I would guess it's also true that:
1) The team that scores second (or third or fourth) usually wins, too.
2) The team that scores first is usually the better team."
All of this is true. Pick an inning and a team that scores in that inning will usually win, just because most half-innings have no runs. But my experience in listening to managers talk about it is that they aren't focused on results-based stats like that, but on control. That's what they talk about. Or, at least, the ones I've listened to most (I live in St. Louis) talk about control rather than chance of winning. Control seems to be very very important to managers. Given their actual lack of control of most of what happens, I guess that makes sense. They want what is rare.
- Brock
Yes, this is why they bunt and IBB and switch relievers so damn much. 'Look at me!'
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