Over at Fangraphs, Eno Sarris takes a stab at projecting what Yu Darvish will produce in terms of dollar value over the length of his first Major League contract. It is, as Eno admits, “dirty math… full of conjecture,” but it’s a good read nonetheless. Pretty psyched to see how Darvish performs stateside, assuming he does wind up here.
No one has ever accused TedQuarters of ignoring roster minutiae. The Mets signed left-handed pitcher Chuck James to a Minor League deal today and invited him to Major League Spring Training.
You may remember James from his time as a wholly unmemorable Braves starter in 2006 and 2007, before he tore his labrum and rotator cuff in 2008, missed the entire 2009 season recovering from surgery and wound up in the Nationals’ system in 2010.
James pitched out of the bullpen for the Twins’ Triple-A club in Rochester in 2011 and did a fine a job of it, posting a 2.30 ERA and striking out more than a batter per inning. He struggled in his 10 1/3-inning stint with the big-league Twins, but James pitched effectively against both lefty and righty hitters in the Minors, like an elusive “crossover” guy. And he pitched 62 2/3 innings in only 38 appearances, meaning — based on division alone — he’s apt to throw more than one inning at a time.
I’d say it’s better than even money James winds up in the Mets’ Major League bullpen next year, if not to start the season then at some point not long thereafter.
But wait, there’s more! If the Mets need to save money as badly as we all think they need to save money, they can call on James for double-duty. As recently as January, 2007 — after his successful first big-league season in 2006 — James worked as a glass installer for his local Lowe’s. Maybe that’ll prove useful, what with the Citi Field wall reconstruction and all.
Also, James was once bitten by a poisonous copperhead but elected not to seek treatment. “I decided I wasn’t going to die, so I didn’t do anything,” he said, apparently not realizing at the time he was lobbing a wide-open alley-oop pass for jokes about the Mets’ medical staff years later.
Yeah so maybe I spent some of this afternoon trying to track Rey Ordonez.
Turns out Rey Ordonez’s son Rey Jr. is committed to FIU to play baseball and is expected to be drafted in June. Here he is being interviewed in April by Rene Pedrosa of La Ley:
Here’s a band called The Isotopes playing a song about Rey Ordonez:
Here’s Rey Ordonez on a leather couch being interviewed in Spanish by three beautiful women. Anyone who speaks more Spanish than I do can feel free to chime in with what’s going on here:
Don’t ask me why I started going through the league splits year-by-year on baseball-reference.com to see which innings produce the highest offensive totals. Truth be told I can’t even remember. But it turns out the innings in which hitters generally produce the best OPSes are the first, fourth, and sixth.
The order changes every year, but those are almost always the top three, which makes a lot of sense: A team’s best hitters usually hit in the first inning. They’ll often come up again (with a better sense of what the pitcher is throwing) in the fourth, and the sixth must be the perfect window in which the best hitters most frequently face tiring starting pitchers.
Every year, hitters in the ninth inning produce the lowest OPS. Often it’s about 30 points lower than the next lowest inning. Presumably this is because Proven Closers come in and Shorten The Game. In 2011, Major Leaguers in total posted a .728 OPS, but only a .665 mark in the ninth inning.
Anyway, that’s all trivia. I bring it up because of this, which is also trivia: Carlos Beltran — he of the .857 career OPS — has a .941 career OPS in the ninth inning.
I don’t really know what that means and I suspect it means very little beyond what we already know about Carlos Beltran being awesome. But neither Derek Jeter nor David Ortiz nor Macier Izturis nor Albert Pujols nor Dustin Pedroia nor Chipper Jones nor Reggie Jackson nor Edgar Renteria nor most other reputedly clutch guys Twitter and I could come up have ninth-inning OPSes that match their career lines. Most don’t even come close.
Obviously there are a bunch of others out there, and obviously there’s a whole long conversation about clutchness that I’m not eager to revisit here — again, this is all trivia — but the only two other guys I found with ninth-inning OPSes better than their career marks are Evan Longoria and Tony Gwynn. And neither’s ninth-inning uptick is as severe as Beltran’s.
Supposedly the Rockies are making a move for our man. That’d be fine by me. I’m still sort of maintaining the vague hope that Sandy Alderson can pull off a Christmas miracle and Vernon-Wells Jason Bay on someone then sign Beltran with the freed up cash, but I probably need to confront the very real possibility that it’s not happening.
Longtime Ruben Tejada skeptic and fellow good-haired sandwich enthusiast Eno Sarris seems a lot more bullish on the young middle infielder these days. The list of similar 22-and-under middle infielders with big-league success seems especially notable. Good reading all around.
Yankee star Derek Jeter, one of New York’s most eligible hunks since his split with longtime gal pal Minka Kelly, is bedding a bevy of beauties in his Trump World Tower bachelor pad — and then coldly sending them home alone with gift baskets of autographed memorabilia.
The Yank captain’s wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am kiss-offs came to light when he mistakenly pulled the stunt twice on the same woman — forgetting she had been an earlier conquest, a pal told The Post.
“Derek has girls stay with him at his apartment in New York, and then he gets them a car to take them home the next day. Waiting in his car is a gift basket containing signed Jeter memorabilia, usually a signed baseball,” the friend dished.
– Emily Smith and Tara Palmeri, N.Y. Post.
Yikes. I know it’s from the Post, but I want to believe it anyway. I’m beginning to suspect this Jeter fellow has a pretty healthy ego. I mean, have you seen his license plate?
Amid widespread postseason reports of wholesale clubhouse wickedness — from intentionally muddling Ray Ramirez’s perfectly rendered team health reports to framing Charlie Samuels to spraying some of that sour-tasting dog-ass stuff on Mike Pelfrey’s hand to plotting arson on Lucas Duda’s locker — Ronny Paulino got cut last night.
For what it’s worth, I spent plenty of time around the clubhouse this year and never noticed anything vile out of Paulino. He seemed quiet, perhaps aloof — content to sit at his locker and entertain himself with whatever it is ballplayers do on their portable electronic devices (presumably the same thing I do: NBA Jam). I spotted him sharing important-seeming scouting-type stuff with Mike Nickeas a couple of times, and Paulino obliged whenever I asked him about catching various pitchers. (If I recall correctly, he did not participate in the team’s late-developing Hawaiian-shirt day, but don’t quote me on that.)
He didn’t really do much else for the Mets, though, so his loss is not really one worth lamenting. After an awesome start to the season, Paulino finished with a typical .268/.312/.351 line and did little of his trademark damage against left-handers, maintaining only a small-sample .752 OPS against southpaws — well below his career .860 mark in that split. And his defense didn’t look so hot either.
So for all those reasons, Sandy Alderson and the SABRos didn’t deem Paulino worth whatever he would have made in arbitration and cut him loose on the unsuspecting baseball world. He’ll undoubtedly turn up somewhere, and perhaps his knack for torching lefties will present itself in more opportunities and outweigh his poor defense and incendiary clubhouse presence.
Right now, the Mets have only Nickeas behind Josh Thole on the 40-man roster. Toby Hyde covered a lot of this yesterday: Nickeas looks to be a great defensive catcher, has a tremendous head of hair and is about the nicest guy you’ll ever meet in a big-league clubhouse, but he’s not much of a hitter. There’s some new evidence (of which yours truly has made Nickeas aware) suggesting that catcher defense can save a team a lot of runs over the course of a season.
Perhaps Alderson’s on board? Maybe the Mets have determined the runs they’ll save with Nickeas’ defense plus the roughly $1 million difference in payroll they’ll have to allocate elsewhere will amount to more than the difference between the runs produced by Paulino or an offensive-minded catcher of his ilk and a light-hitting defensive specialist like Nickeas? Does that make sense?
So I guess, as an equation, it would look like:
(Runs saved by Nickeas – Runs saved by Paulino) + $1 million > (Runs produced by Paulino – Runs produced by Nickeas)
Or maybe they’ve got something else up their sleeve. Or maybe they’re really just out of money.
The Mets also cut Whitestone native Mike Baxter last night, which raised at least a couple of eyebrows because it left only Kirk Nieuwenhuis and Fernando Martinez on the 40-man roster behind the starting outfielders. Baxter’s no All-Star, but he’s a lefty hitter and looked to be a decent defensive outfielder capable of backing up all three positions — probably a fine fifth outfielder.
After years of fretting over such moves I’ve learned it’s silly to waste too many words on them in December, but it’s a little funny that Baxter fell victim to the numbers crunch when he appears apt to fill a need for the club in 2012. Baxter’s 2010 line from Triple-A Portland translates to a perfectly decent .260/.327/.422 line in Flushing, which would make him A) a very good bench player and b) way better than Jason Bay.
Thus spake the New York Times, at least.
The way I see it, this is a lot like that time in college when I needed to convince my boss to give me an advance on my paycheck so I could cover my rent for the month and then had to drive up to Maryland to get it from him, only like 100,000 times that. And then I still wound up playing the trombone on the corner for a few hours to make some spending cash.
Seriously though I don’t really know what it means. I can’t even get American Express to increase my spending limit, and it’s way less than $40 million. Sure doesn’t sound good.
None of the cash influx is going to Ronny Paulino. More on that in a minute.
The Mets signed pitchers Jeremy Hefner and Garrett Olson and catcher Lucas May today. All three appear ticketed for Buffalo, but one note on May:
With Reno this season, the righty hitting May actually fared much better against right-handed pitchers than against lefties. But for much of May’s Minor League career, he has been pretty great against southpaws. Check it out, these are his year-by-year pre-2011 lines against left-handers:
2005 – Low-A (106 PAs): .176/.208/.324
2006 – Low-A (142 PAs): .275/.348/.486
2007 – High-A (158 PAs): .365/.394/.643
2008 – AA (121 PAs): .250/.306/.482
2009 – AA (76 PAs): .388/.461/.716
2010 – AAA (122 PAs): .339/.410/.642
The only thing I can find about May’s defense is this note in John Sickels’ Top 20 Dodgers prospects for 2010, which mentions that May’s defense is “still an issue.” And May converted to catcher before the 2007 season after playing shortstop and outfield in his first professional seasons. So he’s probably not Crash Davis back there, in terms of experience or staff-handling ability or whatever.
But if the Mets don’t want to tender a contract to Ronny Paulino for whatever reason, and they don’t want to enter 2012 carrying Mike Nickeas’ bat on the roster, maybe May sneaks his way onto the team? All the above listed samples are tiny, but it appears likely he’s capable of hitting lefties in a platoon role. And if his defense has improved with experience, maybe he’ll prove to be a cheaper version of what the Mets hoped for from Paulino.
Or, more likely, he’s the second coming of Dusty Ryan. But hey, I saw Dusty Ryan hit some pretty awesome home runs in Spring Training.
Tedquarters 