The Most Surprising Numbers of 2010
by 0157H7 on Sep 20, 2010 8:00 AM EDT
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PrintWith a lucky 13 games left, the number burned into many fans' heads is 6.5 - the number of games separating Boston and Tampa Bay. But that's hardly the only number that jumps out at you as we near the end of this tumultuous season.
2 - The number of games Jon Lester has to win to become a 20-game winner for the first time. The young lefty is having a phenomenal season. He's accumulated 212 strikeouts, which is good for 3rd in the league behind Felix Hernandez (222) and Jered Weaver (218). His ERA, at 3.06, is 7th in the league.
.778 / .792 - These are the OPS of Darnell MacDonald and J.D. Drew, respectively (before Sunday's game*). Only 14 points in the category separate the two guys. Granted, this is a down year for Drew and a career one for MacDonald, but you have to wonder if MacDonald thinks the perpetually injured guy 3 years his senior deserves to be paid $13 million more.
2.48, 2nd - Clay Buchholz's ERA, second only to King Felix. His FIP (3.71) and xFIP (4.22) are both higher, which doesn't bode so well for next season, but Clay has still been dazzlingly successful.
28 / 30 - At the start of the season, I don't think anyone would have guessed the Sox would have two guys at or near 30 homers, neither named Kevin Youkilis. Beltre's shown his best power, since his 2004 48-homer season. Meanwhile, Ortiz has put a horrid April long behind him, and silenced all the haters who were plunging knives into his back two days into the season ("OMG, HE'S 0/7 DFA HIM NOW!!"). The Sox are second only to Toronto in long-balls, thanks to a few career years, as well as power up and down the lineup (8 players with double-digit home run totals).
.329 / 3rd - Beltre's batting average has stayed consistently high throughout the season. Overall his bat has been a revelation, and though he doesn't walk as much as some of our guys (Ortiz has 76 - twice as many as Beltre's 38), the unexpected power and average are real pluses. Beltre's .945 OPS is highest on the team after the DLed Youkilis.
.848 - Jed Lowrie's OPS this season. If he can keep up this pace, I say give him the starting SS job next year. Scutaro's played utility for Oakland, and he can do so again, especially if he isn't fully recovered. Scoots' OPS is only around .718.
$162,747,333 - Red Sox payroll on opening day (this is an AP figure, Cot's gives $168 million). Spending this much and not making the playoffs is a failure of Yankeesque proportions. That figure averages $5.6 million per player (source), but it's not like we see a lot of it. Between guys on the DL, guys not performing (looking at you, Lackey and Beckett), money to departed heroes (namely Julio Lugo) and the ton of AAA and AA players we're sending out, there's not a lot of salary on the field.
18 - Games in which Jacoby Ellsbury played. Along with Mike Cameron's 48 games, 2/3 of our starting outfield has only logged a little over a third of a season.
2, 4 - Ryan Kalish has hit 4 homers this season, but two of them were grandslams. Talk about good timing.
162* -The number of games this year that Boston will play in all of 2010, barring both a miraculous winning streak and a total collapse by New York or Tampa.
*Since I worked in part from Baseball-Reference, which doesn't update until the next day, some of these numbers increased or changed slightly with the Sunday night game.
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Still so little faith in Papi.
Galactus does as he pleases. Because Galactus is drunk.
@#$%ing Twit: @blogtard
I voted for him.
VMart is good for a catcher, but not Ortizian when compared. Beltre hasn’t done it twice back to back. If he repeated this season next year and I was given the same poll I’d think about it.
Kiss my ass Bill Hall.
"We are not normal, We are Legends. People will tell their kids about us." - Deon Butler before Ohio State Game 2008.
I think you're thinking of an NFL roster...
…oh, wait…
Wait 'til next/this year?
"Laser show. So relax."
by nuthinboutnuthin on Sep 20, 2010 11:47 AM EDT up reply actions
Bill Hall is the most likely to succeed at being offensive.
"You know you're having a bad day when the fifth inning rolls around and they drag the warning track." - Mike Flanagan, Baltimore Orioles pitcher, 1992.
"the perpetually injured guy" ???
That statement does not stand up to the facts.
Especially this year, given that Drew is the only one of our original four opening-day outfielders still with the team.
Go tally up the number of games Drew has played over the last few years and compare to his teammates.
Agreed
I think alot of Drew’s mediocrity this year was due to him playing through injury too.
possibly - although his defense was excellent
UZR shows that only Beltre was more valuable defensively for us than Drew this year.
And those two guys were way above the rest of the team in defensive value. So if Dew was injured, it sure didn’t show up on the field.
I think offensively that Francona may have inadvertantly screwed up Drew by avoiding using him against lefties. I think that messed him up and kept him from getting in a rhythm. Going into this season Drew has always been solid against lefties so I don’t understand why Francona did that.
he's been rested against lefties a lot because he IS perpetually injured
it doesn’t mean he’s a bad player and it’s not that he always misses games because of it but he has soreness and aches and pain that give him troubles all the time, so he gets rested so they don’t get worse. Over his career, he’s frequently had issues which keep him out of the lineup and I tend to think that him avoiding longer term injuries means that he’s been used effectively.
It's a decent strategy when you've got a 4th OF who can platoon with him against lefties.
But that strategy sort of got screwed up with broken ribs and the like…
USG
by Ben Buchanan on Sep 20, 2010 4:07 PM EDT up reply actions
"frequently had issues which keep him out of the lineup"
define ‘frequently’
You can’t skip lightly past the fact that he’s been in the lineup more than the vast majority of MLB players.
On any MLB roster, you typically will have only 2 or 3 players who will have played more games per season than Drew has over the last few years – and most of those guys are first basemen or DHs. Very few outfields have played more games than Drew during that span.
Its all perception. All players take days off – and usually because of aches and pains and needing a break. But the press jumps all over any day that Drew takes a day off as if it is somehow different with him.
Assuming he’ll play in at least 8 of the remaining 13, he’ll play over 137 games for the 4th time in the last 5 years.
If it weren’t for the uncharacteristic platooning against lefties, Drew likely could have played close to 145 games this season.
He only got about 142 ABs all season against lefties. Given that his career OPS v LHP is .782, I just don’t think his .613 this year is anything but SSS and bad luck. His BAbip this year against lefties was a miserable .260, compared to his career BAbip againt LHP of .314.
over his career, he's always had little things that keep him from playing
believe me, I’m a huge Drew fan and I’ll defend him but frankly, I just don’t see him getting the bad rap in the media that you do. He does typically take more days off than most outfielders, there’s not really any truth behind what you’re saying there. This year, he’s 54th among outfielders in games played; last year he was 48th.
It doesn’t mean he’s a bad player. I fully support him and think he’s one of the greatest outfielders out there. He’s just hurt a lot.
Last year there were 121players in MLB that played 137 games or more (including Drew).
That’s an average of 4 players per team that played that many games. There were 116 who played 138 or more – so an average of 3.87 per team who played more games than Drew. Removing 1B & DH and you get only 95 players, or basically 3 per team. So for last year I was off by ~1 player in my off-the-cuff comment.
In 2008 was his one ‘down’ year in a Red Sox uniform where he did miss significant time, only 109 games.
In 2007 he played in 140 games. Only 112 players played more games and only 93 not playing predominately 1B / DH.
In 2006 he played in 144 games. Only 94 players overall played in more games and only 81 non-1B/DH types.
On a 25 man roster, you typically have 15 non-pitchers (not counting expanded rosters). So Drew is basically playing more games each year than most position players regulars.
When you say that he was 48th among OF last year – yeah, that means that on a typical club, less than 2 outfielders managed to play 137 games. Just one guy and 2/3 of another. Drew WAS that one outfielder on THIS club.
And he’ll again post the most games in the OF for THIS year’s Red Sox.
Including this year, in 5 of the last 7 years, Drew will have played well over 130 games. And even in one of his two injured years, he still posted 109 games.
Add up the number of games played by players across that span and you’ll see that Drew’s 880 games played ranks 67th out of all of baseball and 54th if you exclude 1B/DH.
I’m thinking that there IS a bit of truth to what I am saying.
but there's more to it than that
most significantly, when rookies come up partway through the year, they not only can’t get to that level of games played, but they cut down the playing time of others (for non-injury reasons).
He misses more games than is typical for injury. When, yes, less than two outfielders per club played that many games, you ignore the fact that the Red Sox, as a playoff team, got more playing time for their regulars than a non-playoff team; at the end of the year, a lot of players on non-contending teams lose time to rookies so they can be evaluated at the big league level, but this isn’t really due to injury.
of course there is more to it
But your argument sounds very much like rationalization.
Time off is time off.
He is paid for the value provided when on the field.
I can throw your own rationalization right back by pointing out that officially many of his days off this year were for platoon reasons and weren’t “really due to injury”.
Once there, though – we have to start reading into the grey areas. What time off was due to injury versus non-injury? What injury time off was due to ‘nagging aches’ versus ‘serious injury’? What was simply rest? What time off was disciplinary? Personal reasons? Blah blah.
You simply can’t know how often players and management have mixed up and convoluted those various ‘reasons’ for time off.
Showcasing rookies? So in this argument Drew gets penalized because he’s good enough that the RS don’t want to sit him during pennant races? How about we note the counter argument that because other players get sat by their teams for rookie call-ups they don’t have to explain their own wear & tear – and in fact are experiencing less wear and tear?
Round and round. The argument can go recursive as we rationalize again and again.
Doesn’t matter. Value is not extracted when the player is not on the field, no matter what the reason.
And when compared to his peers, Drew has been well above average at getting on the field. He’s no Cal Ripken, Jr. But not many players are.
I'm never saying he gets penalized because he's that good
I’m just saying that it’s not really a true comparison between them, when the group of all outfielders includes both him and say, Daniel Nava. Drew has minor injury problems frequently. He still plays a lot of games because he is very good at what he does. But he is injured a lot.
There is a reason that I don't talk about the players who played _less_.
In my comments above I mainly talk about how few players played more.
The comparison thus isn’t to the Daniel Nava’s.
Every team has its ‘regulars’ and the ability to stay a ‘regular’ requires both talent and health. The guys who have played more than Drew over the spans discussed have had to have the talent AND the durability to do so. And my point is very simple – the number who have played more than Drew is not a large number.
Wolfie – you and I agree on probably 99% of things on OTM so I am surprised to find myself in this debate. But in this discussion you (imho uncharacteristically for you) keep using relative phrases and terms like “frequently”, “a lot”, “more … than is typical” without any qualification.
Shouldn’t a comparative statement like “Drew is hurt ‘a lot’” be finished with " … compared to ‘xxxxxx’.", where ‘xxxxx’ is something quantifiable?
Or, one simply has to offer the simple qualifier of ’ …in my opinion.’, in which case we are all golden. :-)
I though we finally put that nonsense to bed?
I exercise strong self control. I never drink anything stronger than gin before breakfast
Jed :)
Dunno if I’d call the payroll a massive failure – there has to be a significant chunk of it that went to injured players, many of whom we wouldn’t have predicted to get injured.
Yeah, he addressed that in his comments
Between guys on the DL, guys not performing (looking at you, Lackey and Beckett), money to departed heroes (namely Julio Lugo) and the ton of AAA and AA players we’re sending out, there’s not a lot of salary on the field.
(emphasis added)
I understand that not all that money may be going to players that currently
play for the sox or were injured, and I understand that you can’t count on injuries like this. However, if the bottom line says 170 mil or whatever, then I’m going to hold the franchise accountable for 170 mil worth of performance. I know that not every signing is perfect and can work out, but Theo did spend that money is some form, which was meant to contribute to winning.
"Every night I go to bed thinking about when I’m going to play again. I dream about playing at Fenway."-Ryan Westmoreland
Twitter: @BoldandBrash
True, but I think of it this way...
It’s like putting a whole lot of money into this super-charged engine in your fancy sportscar, and then on your way home from the garage, you get T-boned going through an intersection. It’s not your engine’s fault, and it’s not really your fault for paying all that money to fix the engine. And even though you’re still going to have to total the car and lose a bunch of money, it’s not entirely your fault… I feel the same way about Theo – even if he didn’t do a perfect job with everything, it’s not his fault that our core players were hit by trucks (aka Beltre’s knee).
I know some people say that Theo shouldn’t have signed Cameron because he’s old, but 1) Cameron has never been injury-prone at all, and 2) it was not the loss of Cameron that really did us in this year. It was the loss of Ells and Youk and VMart and Pedey, all who were injured on freak plays/accidents. And yes, Theo could have done a better job with shoring up the bullpen, and yes, I’m still pretty freaked out by the thought of Lackey/Beckett for 4 more years, but my point is that I’m tired of the $170 million argument. I just don’t think it holds any water.
A good analogy.
Also, to the point of how much of the money was actually off the field vs. how much was just underperforming, again, I think it’s an unfair judgement. If a team has its positions mostly filled out at $150 million, and have another $20 million, then seeking to upgrade at one of the positions even if it does require overpaying is only bad economics if you’re the one paying the budget. From a fan and team-efficacy standpoint, we should be happy that the team is maxing its budget no matter what.
USG
by Ben Buchanan on Sep 21, 2010 12:38 PM EDT up reply actions
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