Carlos Santana – Reader ‘MarisFan61’ wrote: "You’ve talked about Carlos Santana. He’s got a shot to be one of the greatest surprise MVP’s ever, doesn’t he?"
Well...yes and no. If Carlos Santana wins the American League MVP award this year, a lot of people will be very surprised. Most people would be surprised.
But...he was an excellent player last year: in the 46 games he played before the injury, Santana had a .401 on-base percentage and tallied a 2.2 WAR. He played 57 games in Triple-A before he reached the majors, and he hit a ton there. Santana is a good bet to be the best catcher in the American League this season. With Mauer injured, Santana might be the favorite.
So you have a man who is the best player in the league at his position…generally, that guy is in the MVP conversation. The biggest challenge to Santana as an MVP candidate wasn’t his talent, but his team. It’s hard to win an MVP on a losing team.
But…the Indians aren’t losing. They have the best record in the American League. If they hold on to first place or stay in contention, the writers and voters will make a case that someone on the Indians - Choo or Santana or Cabrera or Sizemore – deserves to be the MVP.
I’m not arguing anything…just thinking this through a bit. Looking at it a different way: say you had to put ten bucks on someone to win the MVP award. Say you were choosing between Carlos Santana and Mark Teixeira. Which is the smarter bet?
Teixeira seems like the smarter bet: he has a long track record of success, and he plays on a winning team. But I think the smart money is actually on Santana. If the Indians contend, they will do so in part because Santana has had a good season. And if Santana has a good season, he will get strong support from the MVP voters.
Mark Teixeira will almost certainly have a better year than Santana…but Teixeira is not likely to be the best player on his team. Even if he is the best player on the Yankees; it’s unlikely that he’ll be much better than A-Rod or Cano. He’ll almost certainly get votes, but I wouldn’t bet on him ever winning the MVP award.
Santana is hitting around .200 right now, so we’re getting ahead of ourselves talking about him as the American League MVP. But…he’s a better candidate to win the MVP than most people assume he is. When you factor all of the elements; teammates, the likelihood of winning, the ‘unknown’ factor…you come to the conclusion that Santana is a better bet than Teixeira.
Jose Bautista – Who is like Jose Bautista? Which player in history, I mean?
Players tend to peak as hitters between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-eight….during those four years, Jose Bautista played 500 games, hitting 59 homeruns and posting a batting line of .242/.334/.412. It was pretty clear what kind of player he was.
Then he hit fifty-four homeruns last year. It was an uptick that calls to mind Brady Anderson’s bizarre 1996 season. Or Luis Gonzalez’s 2001 season.
But…Bautista seems to be getting better. I’ve been watching a lot of his at-bats this year: in the at-bats I’ve watched, he’s almost never offering at bad pitches. We use the term ‘locked-in’ to describe a player on a hot streak: Bautista seems very locked in at the moment. He has twenty-three walks in twenty games this year, to go along with his eight homeruns. His batting average last year was .260. He’s improved that by one hundred points in the early goings.
Brady Anderson came back to earth in 1997 (from 50 homers to 18). . Luis Gonzalez came back to earth in 2002 (from 57 homers to 28). Jose Bautista does not look like he’s coming back down. He looks like he’s getting better.
So we need a new historical precedent: who is like Bautista?
I’m sure I’m missing someone very obvious, but…the best I could come up with is Sammy Sosa. Like Bautista, Sosa jumped suddenly, going from 36 homers to 66. Like Bautista, Sosa’s batting average jumped from the mid-.200’s to .308. Like Bautista, Sosa was twenty-nine years old…a bit past a player’s expected prime.
But…Sosa isn’t a great comparable: Sosa had proven himself a homerun hitter: he had notched 36, 40 and 36 homeruns in the years prior to his MVP season. Sosa was a good player who became great. I don’t know that Bautista would’ve been considered a ‘good’ player prior to last year.
So I’m asking: what player in history has had the closest career arc to Bautista?
Jered Weaver – Getting his own article. That one spiraled away.
Grady Sizemore – During his first ten games back, Sizemore has hit eight doubles and four homeruns, along with making a few excellent catches in centerfield.
It is too early to say definitively that Sizemore is back, but you can’t ignore the early goings…what is interesting to me is how many people assumed he wouldn’t come back. I didn’t think he’d come back…I didn’t think that he’d return to being an All-Star level player. But…he’s been playing great.
I think it’s the two years that made us forget all about him: coming into 2009, I don’t know that there was another player with more positive indicators than Sizemore. He had established himself as an excellent defensive player. He had improved his base running: he was 38-for-43 in steal attempts in 2008. He had cut down on his strikeouts and had increased his walks. He had played something like 161, 162, and 161 games in the previous three seasons. He was twenty-six years old: more than a few people thought he’d win the MVP.
Well, he’s twenty-eight now…we can look at his two lost seasons as having some predictive value, or we can discount them because Sizemore was injured. I think the majority of us assumed that Sizemore’s lousy 2009 and 2010 seasons were predictive…certainly, I thought that Sizemore had lost the Hall-of-Fame trajectory that he was on. But there’s plenty of time left: he looks like he’s coming back.
Asdrubal Cabrera – Sorry to talk so much about the Indians…but they’re the story of the month, right? They have the best record in the American League right now...they’re firing on all cylinders. They’re not just winning: they’re winning in exciting, dramatic ways. Just this week, the Tribe won consecutive games with a walk-off grand slam, and an extra-innings walk-off single.
To Asdrubal: Cabrera has five homeruns on the year, which is one away from his career best of six. His homerun ratio on the early season is about five times his career rate.
The question is: should we be surprised by this?
During his last regular season, 2009, Cabrera hit six homeruns. He also hit forty-two doubles and four triples. He was twenty-three years old then. That’s fifty-two extra base hits…what players in history have had similar seasons at age twenty-three, and did their power increase?
Asdrubal hit .308 with 42 doubles, 4 triples, and 6 homeruns. Rafael Palmeiro, at the same age, hit 41 doubles, 5 triples, and 8 homeruns…essentially identical to Asdrubal. I suppose that most of you know how that worked out.
Warren Cromartie has a similar season: 41 doubles, 7 triples, 5 homeruns…his career high in homeruns was 14. The immortal Don Kolloway posted a 40-4-3 line in 1942…he did not improve on that performance.
Roberto Alomar posted a 41-11-9 line at age twenty-three…that’s a little bit better than Asdrubal posted, but it’s not too far off. Both are middle infielders.
Buddy Lewis posted a 38-10-6 line in 1940…we’re going off-topic here, but if you’re ever bored, have a look at Buddy Lewis’s career numbers. He broke into the majors at 18, and was the regular third baseman for the Washington Senators by age 19…he hit .291 with a little bit of pop. He followed that with batting averages of .314, .297, .319, .317, and .297.
Through age twenty-four, Lewis had a lifetime batting average of .304, with 1112 career hits. Just to put that last number in perspective: that’s twice the number of hits that Pete Rose had at that age (518). Ty Cobb had 1207 hits at that age, which is the most anyone collected…Buddy Lewis is second on the list, right behind Ty Cobb.
You know what happened: the war came along. Lewis joined the Air Force, flying in more than 300 missions. He came back in 1945 and hit .333 over a third of a season, and then .292 a year later. He made the All-Star team in 1947, while posting the worst batting average of his career. He missed the 1948 season and struggled for a half of 1949 before calling it a career.
There is a good chance that Buddy Lewis would have collected 3000 hits in the major leagues. If we give him 150 hits a year during the three-and-a-half seasons he missed because of the war, that gets him over 2000 hits at the age of 30…2000 hits, and a batting average over .300….he would’ve lost Cobb, but he’d be on target for 3000. Not that 3000 hits was a marker of any particular note in 1945.
Mr. Lewis passed away this year….he died in February, at the age of ninety-four. He lived the majority of his life in Gaston County, in the south west part of North Carolina. Gaston Country is about 120 miles northeast of Royston, Georgia, where Ty Cobb hailed from.
Vlad Guerrero – Vlad has now crossed 100 plate appearances without drawing a walk. It’s fun when the broadcasts show his batting average and on-base percentage as being exactly the same.
Curtis Granderson – Four of the Yankee regulars are struggling right now. Derek Jeter has two extra base hits on the season, Brett Gardner is hitting .169. Nick Swisher has an OPS of .654, and Jorge Posada is sporting a .130 batting average. And…the Yankees are blowing away the rest of the league in runs per game.
Granderson is leading the team in homeruns, with seven. Four of his teammates – Cano, Teixeira, Posada, and the rejuvenated Russell Martin, have six apiece. A-Rod has five. I wonder if this is a source of good-natured competition within the clubhouse…it will be interesting to see how long Granderson can stay ahead of the pack.
Jorge Posada – Jorge Posada has nine hits this year…and six homeruns. His batting average is .130, but you can’t fault the power. It’s been a weird start for Posada.
Rick Dempsey – Rick Dempsey was a catcher for the Orioles from 1977 to 1986. During Thursday’s Red Sox/Orioles game, he joined Don Orsillo in the Red Sox booth to provide some color commentary in place of Jerry Remy.
I don’t know if Dempsey works for the Orioles, but it was obvious, during the broadcast, that he was a fan of the team. This is not to say that Dempsey was a homer, because he wasn’t. He didn’t speak platitudes about how great the Orioles were, and he didn’t cheer the team’s successes. He was knowledgeable: he knew a lot about the players, and his comments added a nice depth to the broadcast.
Dempsey’s presence also added an interesting tension to the broadcast. Usually, baseball broadcasts are anything but tense...that seems exactly opposite to how we experience sports: we understand sports as possessing an inherent tension, but baseball broadcasts are almost always devoid of that tension. Having someone from the opposite side participating in the broadcast was interesting. I liked it.
Francisco Liriano – In one of my articles last month, I described the Twins as a ‘house on stilts,’ suggesting that the team’s fate was unusually dependant on Liriano and Mauer replicating their success from 2010.
I’m not at all happy about all of this: Mauer and Liriano are two of my favorite players in baseball, and their separate struggles in the early goings have been one of the least pleasant subplots of this 2011 season.
There is talk of moving Liriano out of his starter’s spot…this is not the first time that the Twins have considered it, and while I freely admit that I know far less about the Twins than that organization does, this is the kind of decision that utterly baffles me.
For one thing, Liriano has a long history of being a very good pitcher…just how long a track record does the Twins management need before they cut a pitcher some slack. Most very good pitchers will have a stretch like Liriano is having…we’re not out of April, so it seems a little hasty to move your best starter to the bullpen.
And: Liriano is an obvious trading chip…the Twins were considering moving him prior to the season starting, and the Yankees would almost certainly be interested. Doesn’t Liriano have more value if he’s starting games? If he gets demoted to the pen, doesn’t that reduce what the Twins will get back if they shop him around?
I like the Twins, and certainly they could get back in the race. But if the team moves Liriano to the bullpen this month, I’ll like their chances a lot less.
Jason Heyward – I don’t know that I’ve watched a Heyward at-bat when he hasn’t homered. I mean that seriously: I think that I’ve watched ten or eleven of Heyward’s at-bats…this is when I’m scrolling around to the different games on the MLB website…and it seems that every time I catch Heyward, he’s hitting the ball out of the park.
Tim Hudson – While we’re on the Braves: is Tim Hudson a Hall-of-Famer?
His career W-L record is 168-89…that is a very good winning percentage, .654. That’s the second-best winning percentage among active players, behind some guy named Harry Leroy.
Hudson’s career record is very similar to Sandy Koufax’s:
Hudson: 168-89, 3.42 ERA, 2329 IP, 127 ERA+
Koufax: 165-87, 2.76 ERA, 2324 IP, 131 ERA+
Hudson is similar to Koufax and Ron Guidry:
Guidry: 170-91, 4.18 ERA, 2392 IP, 119 ERA+
Of course, season-by-season, Hudson has never had the big years that Koufax enjoyed…the three have similar career numbers, but Koufax has a significantly bigger peak. Still, Hudson has had an excellent major league career…he isn’t talked about too much as a candidate for the Hall, but he certainly is a candidate.
Lance Berkman – Speaking of comeback players….Berkman is hitting .402 right now, with eight homeruns and an OPS of 1.234, all while playing a position (right field) that he hasn’t played in six years.
I wonder if the two are related…the new position, the better hitting. Certainly, this happens all the time in life: we assume that when we ask someone who is struggling to do more, they will struggle more. But…people very often rise to additional challenges. If you have a kid who is struggling to read Harry Potter, you would not think to give him Blood Meridian. The tendency would be to give him something easier. And probably nine times out of ten, that’s what you should do. Ten times out of ten, that’s what teachers do do...someone is struggling, you give them something easier.
But…sometimes the reverse works. Sometimes increasing the challenge is a successful motivator. We’ll see how the rest of the year goes, but I think that being moved to right field is directly responsible for Berkman’s comeback.
Ichiro Suzuki – I started collecting baseball cards in 1988. I liked the Topps cards the best because they showed the league leaders in bold. If you tied for the league lead, you’re get bold italics.
I was thinking about that, and about Ichiro Suzuki, who has had his share of bolded and italicized numbers. It occurred to me that there are two kinds of hitters who get a lot of darkened numbers on the back of their Topps cards…side-dominant players, and middle-dominant players. Ichiro is a side-dominant players: the numbers on his career list that appear in bold are games, at-bats, and hits, which appear on the left side of a player’s career totals. He’s also led in steals and batting average, which appear on the far-right side.
Wade Boggs is another example: he leads in runs scored, hits, and batting average…I remember that his late-1980’s Topps cards were chock-full of bold numbers. Boggs led in walks, too…walks are towards the middle of the card, so he’s not as extreme as Ichiro.
Mike Schmidt was middle-dominant: homeruns, RBI’s, walks, strikeouts. Reggie Jackson was like that, to a lesser extent.
It’s a rare thing: it’s tough to lead the league in a category year after year: for every generation of ballplayers you get one or two who dominate a swath of statistical categories, and even those players vary in terms of how much they dominate a category.
All of which is to say that Ichiro’s a helluva player…the Mariners are having a bad year, but he’s doing the same thing he’s always done: dominating the side-categories.
Ryan Braun – The Brewers extended Braun through the year 2020, an extension that will pay him about $21 million dollars for his Age 32-36 seasons.
The timing of this was….strange. The Brewers already had Braun extended through 2015, so there was ample time to work out an extension. The extension carries Braun through his thirty-sixth birthday, which will be the bulk of his career.
Here’s a thought: doesn’t extending Braun through that age increase the odds that the Brewers will have to extend him again? He’s now the face of the franchise…assuming that he is still moderately productive when his new contract expires, won’t the Brewers almost have to keep him in Milwaukee?
I’m happy for him…obviously, he likes the city of Milwaukee, and the Brewers organization.
Sometimes I think about where I’d sign if I were a superstar free agent…Milwaukee would certainly be on my list, too…I think my short-list would be Boston, Denver, Toronto, Milwaukee, Chicago, Minnesota. San Francisco would be up there, but it’s terrifyingly cold in the summer time. Seattle has the rain problem. New York, I suppose, but only if I could play for the Mets.
CC Sabathia – He’s going to win the American League Cy Young. Just sayin’.
Adrian Gonzalez – If he’s going to win the Triple Crown, he’s dug himself a deep hole to start. At this writing, Jose Bautista is wayyyyy out ahead of him. But I remain optimistic. He's one of the best oposite-field hitters I've ever seen.
Pablo Sandoval – Another player whose injury has ruined what was shaping up to be a great story.
With Sandoval out, the Giants might challenge the Padres for the worst offense in the National League…they’re at 3.67 runs per game, while the Padres are at 3.00. Mauer-less Minnesota is the American League’s entrant into this competition, at 3.15 runs per game.
Alex Gordon – There are reasons to be pessimistic regarding Gordon’s hot April…he has just two homeruns, and he’s been unsustainably lucky on balls in play.
But…I’m choosing to be optimistic. Gordon’s done well enough that the Royals can’t ship him down when he has an inevitable streak of eight or nine bad games. He’s adjusted very well to left field, and there isn’t anyone better suited to hit ahead of Butler. This April has cemented the starting job for him: now we get to see if the talent that everyone saw four years ago is still there.
J.D. Drew – My brother hates J.D. Drew. This is not uncommon among Red Sox fans…I think that J.D. Drew is the least popular player on the Red Sox.
Because my brother dislikes J.D. Drew, I’ve developed a soft spot for him. He is an extremely underappreciated player. During his time in Boston, only Youkilis, Pedroia, and Lester have done more to win baseball games than Drew. Cumulative WAR, 2007-2010:
|
Year
|
Youkilis
|
Pedroia
|
Lester
|
Drew
|
Beckett
|
Ortiz
|
Papelbon
|
|
2007
|
4.3
|
4.3
|
0.6
|
2.7
|
4.7
|
6.0
|
2.8
|
|
2008
|
6.0
|
5.2
|
5.6
|
2.7
|
3.3
|
1.1
|
2.0
|
|
2009
|
6.4
|
4.9
|
5.6
|
5.6
|
4.2
|
0.3
|
3.9
|
|
2010
|
4.3
|
3.8
|
5.0
|
2.5
|
-1.0
|
3.3
|
0.4
|
|
Totals
|
21.0
|
18.2
|
16.8
|
13.5
|
11.2
|
10.7
|
9.1
|
As a fan of the Red Sox, I’ll add that I love watching J.D. Drew. He’s a fine hitter: he is patient and he adjusts his approach at the plate depending on the situation. He is extraordinarily useful…for a few games this month he was the team’s leadoff hitter, because Ellsbury and Crawford were struggling. He seldom looks outmatched as a hitter...people throw the term ‘professional hitter’ around all the time: I think in Drew’s case it’s an apt term.
(This is an aside: J.D. Drew is astonishingly adept at avoiding the double play. He has come to the plate 1827 times with a runner on first base, and has hit into 82 double plays…about 4.5 percent of the time. Just putting that in perspective…Lou Brock (another left-handed hitter) came to the plate with a runner on first 2547 times in his career, and hit into 115 double plays…which is 4.5% of the time. Lou Brock,the man who holds the major league record for stolen bases by a left-handed hitter, hit into double plays with the same frequency as J.D. Drew does. Tim Raines hit into a double play in 6.1% of his plate appearances with a runner at first (142/2325). J.D. Drew is really, really good at avoiding double plays.)
Drew’s a fine defensive player…I don’t think he’s won a Gold Glove, but he plays the difficult right field in Fenway very effectively. His career WAR is 47.3, which ties him with Lance Berkman among active players. Berkman is the same age as Drew…about 99% of baseball fans would think that Berkman has had the better career, but he hasn’t.
My brother likes to chide me about J.D. Drew. Earlier this year, during a particularly vigorous exchange of e-mails, he wrote, "C’mon Dave. It’s not like he’s Dwight Evans."
My brother knows that Dwight Evans was my favorite player growing up…and my brother knows that any mention of Dwight Evans will draw a lengthy response. Well…I wrote that lengthy response, and one of the things I realized is that J.D. Drew is exactly like Dwight Evans. Just looking at their triple-slash lines:
Drew: .280/.387/.497
Dewey: .272/.370/.470
How much closer can two players be? Taking league contexts into account, they’re the same player. Per 162 games:
Drew: 100 runs, 29 doubles, 26 homeruns, 84 RBI, 90 walks, 127 OPS+
Dewey: 91 runs, 30 doubles, 24 homeruns, 86 RBI, 86 walks, 127 OPS+
Per 162 games, J.D. Drew is Dwight Evans. A left-handed-hitting Dwight Evans.
This might be the last year that Drew plays for the Red Sox, and it might be the last year he plays, period. He’s been a terrific player…one of the most underappreciated players of my lifetime. I’ll miss him.
Bud Norris – Bud Norris now had forty-three strikeouts in 35.2 innings pitched…
The Astros are in last place in the NL Central, which isn’t surprising. Let’s assume that they stay in last place…what chance is there that their rotation will be the best rotation for a last-place team in baseball history?
I don’t know who the best rotation on a worst team was, but the Astros have to be contenders for the title. Brett Myers is an excellent pitcher: nobody knows it, but he’s one of the twenty best starters in the league. Wandy Rodriguez had had three straight years with an ERA in the mid-3.00...he’s a very good pitcher. Bud Norris has always had high strikeout totals…at every level he’s averaged at least one strikeout per inning pitched. He misses bats…if he can cut down on the walks, he’ll be something. J.A. Happ has a 3.55 career earned run average in 317 major league innings…again, that’s very good. Their fifth starter is Nelson Figueroa, who probably won’t be starting the All-Star game…but the Astros have four very good pitchers starting their ballgames.
I’ll leave it to you guys to research: what is the best rotation for a worst-place team?
Dave Fleming is a writer living in Wellington, New Zealand. He welcomes comments, questions, and additional bandwidth so he can watch all of the 5:00 A.M. weekend games without racking up an insane internet bill.