As I pointed out a couple weeks ago, Cristian Guzman's fielding at shortstop hasn't really been any worse this year than it's been in the past. And, in fact, it's never been that bad. He's never been that good either, but he's been consistently a touch below average pretty much since the day Jim Bowden overpaid for him back in November 2004.
In addition to the stats presented in the post linked above, consider these numbers by year for Guzman since he came to DC:
UZR/150 ('05, '07-'09): -2.7, -5.9. -3.7, -2.1
Rate2 ('05, '07-'09): 84, 91, 101, 88
Plus/Minus (I only have the '05 and '08 Fielding Bibles handy): -6, +15
Whichever advanced fielding metric you look at, there's no real declining trend. So like I said before, my feeling is that the talk of a position change simply reflects a change in priorities in the front office.
Especially in the middle infield, Mike Rizzo doesn't want adequate or average defense. He wants superior defense. He wants a middle infield that will do what Nyjer Morgan did for the outfield. He's never going to get that from Guzman at shortstop. Might he get it from him at second base?
It's a good bet that any player moving from shortstop to second will play better defense. Second base is easier to play, a step easier on the Bill James defensive spectrum. Of course, he'll have to learn a new position, but all things equal, the plays are easier to make, and Guzman's defense should be better there.
How much better? To get a solid estimate, I pulled the UZR numbers for the 70 players played at least 80 innings at both shortstop and second base in the same season since 2002, the first year that UZR is available.
In just under 25,138 innings at second, these 70 players were a total 72.6 runs above average. In 27,217 innings at short, they were a total 8.3 runs below average. That probably sounds like a bigger difference than it is, since players don't play 27,000 innings per year. But in the 1350 innings a full-time player will log over 150 games or so, that's still a 4.31 run difference, a little less than half a win's worth.
Certainly not every player improved by the same amount. Maybe a third of them played better at short than second. And Guzman will be a year older. Still, it's reasonable to assume that the move from short to second is worth a little more than four runs, all things equal. If Guzman is a two to four runs below average second basemen, he won't become a top-tier second baseman, but he could improve to average or slightly above.
If you're interested, here's the full list of 70 players and their numbers (forgive the awkward formatting--lately I can't get blogger to agree with Excel very well):
This time of year, fan of bad teams (not to mention the completely heinous), sometimes try to stay interested via schadenfreude. You want to play the spoiler, make someone else feel a bit of the pain you've been suffering all year.
It's not the most attractive impulse in humanity, but when you've been getting your head beaten in all year, it can make you feel a little better to take out some revenge on your tormentors. It's especially satisfying if you can win games that your rivals need.
The Nationals seem to have sunk into a different psychological tendency: Stockholm Syndrome. Because I'll be darned if they aren't trying to help the other guys win. The Nationals are the anti-spoilers of Major League Baseball, the team every contender desperately wants to play. If you're sinking out of the race, Nationals Park is where you go to get well.
Here are the Nationals records against the contenders since they took two of three from the Braves July 4 weekend:
Atlanta: 0-5
Philly: 1-5
Colorado: 0-6
Los Angeles: 1-2
St. Louis: 0-4
That's a combined 2-22 against contenders down the stretch. Seriously. Think about that. And the two wins they have were the Chad Billingsley near-no-hitter and that awful game against the Phillies when they were up 8-2 going into the ninth and barely held on to win 8-7. They could easily be 0-24 in these games.
(I was at both of those wins, by the way. Enough about me being the bad luck charm!)
Why is San Francisco fading? They haven't seen the Nationals since the first week of June! If Colorado gets bounced from the playoffs over the final week while Atlanta plays seven of their last ten against the Scats, Rockies fans will have a reason to gripe. This weekend I really started to wonder if the fix was in. On Friday, Pete Orr, Willie Harris, Justin Maxwell, and Josh Willingham combined to hand the Braves three runs in the first inning. Saturday, Elijah Dukes and Orr again committed two errors in the first three innings which, combined with two walks by Garrett Mock gifted Atlanta a four-spot. Dukes added another error later for good measure.
But, alas, I don't actually think the Nationals are tanking. They're doing their best. Nothing shows how far the Nationals are from contending than the way they've been abused by the better teams in the NL this year.
Dave Nichols from Nationals News Network this week locked up the championship of the first-ever Natmosphere fantasy baseball league.
In a final-round playoff match-up with my badly fading squad, Dave cleaned up nine categories to five. Here are the results of the championship match-up. First the hitting categories, which Dave swept:
And then the pitchers:
Congratulations to Dave, and thanks to everyone else who played for a fun summer!
One of the things I hope the next manager keeps doing just like Jim Riggleman is his willingness to use his ace reliever in multi-inning situations.
Last night against the Dodgers, for the seventh time this year, MacDougal was called upon to protect a lead or tie for more than one inning. He blew it, as he did in his one other blown save chance back on July 26, but Riggleman has the right idea using his designated ace reliever to do more than just get three outs in the ninth inning.
One could gripe that MacDougal, he of the 13.6% strikeout rate (NL average is 18.2%), 15.1% walk rate (NL average is 9.1%), and 4.76 xFIP, doesn't merit such usage. But given the alternatives available, that wouldn't be totally fair. Lucky or not, MacDougal's been the closest thing the Nationals have had to a guy who can come in and get outs in key situations with some regularity, and Riggleman's been getting as much as possible from him.
Manny Acta, on the other hand, used his closers for more than three outs just five times in two-plus years. Chad Cordero never did it, and Jon Rauch just once.
Manny's more the rule than the exception. Across the league, managers continue to hew to a pattern of closer usage driven more by convention and the flawed "save" stat than what will actually help them win more games. Since the year 2000, there have been just 1,501 saves of more than one inning in all of MLB (that's excluding the 3+ inning save variety, which are almost exclusively blow-out mop-up innings).
Meanwhile there have been 9,594 saves of one inning or less. Just 13.5% of the time are managers asking their very best, most well-paid relievers to get more than three outs to win a game.
I'm certainly a proponent of monitoring innings and pitch counts, because there's a lot of at least circumstantial evidence that certain usage patterns significantly increase the risk of injury, especially for young pitchers. But I haven't seen anyone present evidence that closers need to be kept to three outs or less 87% of the time to be kept healthy.
So a hat-tip to Jim Riggleman. In this case, he's getting it right.
As always this time of year, we Scats fans tend to focus on the young players and not care so much about the scoreboard. The Bryce Harper watch is long finished. Everyone's watching Dunn lumber towards 40. But here are some other subplots you might not be aware of in these final few laps on this death march:
Cristian Guzman v. Bengie Molina: currently, they are tied for last among qualified hitters with 16 walks each. The tiebreaker goes to Molina, since three of his are intentional, but Guzman still has a shot to be the least patient hitter in baseball.
John Lannan v. Jordan Zimmermann: Will Lannan catch Jordan Zimmermann in strikeouts? Young Hova finished his year at 92 Ks in 91.2 innings. Lannan is second on the team with 79 in 192.3.
Nationals offense v. average: The Scats' bats are the strength of the team, by far, but they're not quite good as good as average. Through Tuesday, the average National League offense 4.44 runs a game, and the Nationals are at 4.41.
John Lannan v. Trevor Cahill: Who will end the season with the worst K:BB ratio among qualified MLB starting pitchers? Right now, Lannan is the caboose at 1.25, with Cahill just ahead at 1.27.
All-time 9.50+ ERA champs: The Nationals currently have five pitchers (Ledezma, Estrada, Garate, Segovia, Kensing) who have or finished their time in DC with ERAs over 9.50. That ties them for ninth for the most ever since 1901. (Four of them pitched last night. Have four pitchers with an ERA over 9.50 ever appeared in the same game?) If someone else blows up (Saul?), we would join just five teams with six. (What's the significance of 9.50? It's a little below Wil Ledezma's final ERA. Yeah, I'm cherry-picking, but Boz does it constantly, and he has a Pulitzer or something.)
Riggleman/Acta v. Frank Robinson: This year, the Nationals have a 65% success rate stealing. In 2006, Frank's Scats were successful stealing just 66% of the time (though that team was caught a stunning 62 times... but Soriano was a 40/40 man!!). Can the Scats of 2009 beat Frank's abysmal success rate in '06? Maybe. They'll never catch Frank's unbelievable 50% success rate from 2005 though. Ah, those were the days...
With the Strasburg signing and Rizzo's hire as permanent GM, Nationals fan optimism has never been higher. Hey, they even had a little stretch of modestly good baseball in there. Well, we shall see how people are feeling now... A new poll is up on the top right corner above the MASN ad, and it will be up until mid-October.
"I'm pretty sure it's safe this time of the month."
"Afghanistan is no match for a superpower."
"I didn't want to take Pete Orr's bat out of the lineup."
OK, before we get to the whole issue of how Ian Desmond, who never played the outfield at any professional level ever, had no business being in right field in the first place, let's go to the top of the seventh.
The Scats were down 1-0. Tim Redding--he of the 5.52 ERA at the start of the day--had allowed just two hits over six. (Both pitchers benefited greatly from Mark Wegner's enormous "let's get this over with" strike zone.) But it was Redding's third time through the order. He had walked the completely punchless John Lannan the prior inning. And due up were Cristian Guzman, Ryan Zimmerman, Adam Dunn, and, if anyone got on, Josh Willingham. This was the inning to take the lead and win the game.
Guzman led off with a swinging bunt for an infield hit. Zimmerman came to the plate, carrying with him 30 dingers, 96 RBI, and a .374 wOBA.
And Fizzleman called a hit-and-run. Sigh. He basically sacrifices his best hitter and opens first base with Dunn coming up. Just a terrible, terrible decision. Redding threw a slider way down out of the zone, and Zimm did well just to put a bat on this ball:
It would have been a double-play if Redding hadn't bobbled it, and Zimmerman let Riggleman know about it when he got to the dugout. Ever remember Zimmerman arguing with a manager, even a little? Me neither.
After a wild pitch, Dunn got a base hit to drive in Guzman (who would have scored even without sacrificing Zimmerman). Then, Willingham, really the last good hitter left in the line-up, came to the plate, and Riggleman called a hit-and-run again! With Adam Dunn running!! Can you imagine what kind of ball Willingham would have to hit to score Dunn from first?
Willingham thankfully fouled it off. Riggleman sent Dunn again on what turned out to be ball four, but with the weak bottom of the Nationals order coming up the threat was pretty much over. Orr struck out on three pitches, and Desmond popped out to end the inning. So that brings us to the bottom of the inning. Late and close, it was way past time to end the little Ian Desmond outfield experiment and get a real defense out there. Elijah Dukes, after all, was on the bench, as were Justin Maxwell, Jorge Padilla, and Mike Morse. There were plenty of options.
Instead, Fizzleman said, "I hesitated to take the left-handed bat out of the lineup, Orr, if we were still tied."
Sometimes I just feel silly presenting statistical evidence to make a point. Is it really necessary to prove that Pete Orr's isn't a very good hitter?
Look, I'm all for optimizing the hitter/pitcher match-ups, but here are Orr's career numbers against right-handed pitching: .271 / .295 / .354. Here are Dukes's career numbers against righties: .247 / .353 / .429. Heck, even right-handed Mike Morse (.274 / .341 / .347) is better against right-handed pitching than Orr.
Yeah, I know, the handful of you still paying attention will say Orr has 15 hits in 52 at bats since getting called up. Four of those hits even went for extra bases. But c'mon. This guy is a 30-year-old with 452 career at bats. He is who he is. He hit .245 / .305 / .367 in AAA this year. He wasn't even guaranteed to get another at bat in the game with only two innings to go anyway.
By all accounts, Pete Orr is a nice guy, and I don't have any problem with him making a living in AAA for some team that thinks it might need him as a spare part some time. But if you ever find yourself managing a Major League Baseball team, and you're considering the downside of taking Orr's bat out of the line-up, please, give yourself a hard slap in the face.
You know the rest. Wright hit a screaming liner right at Desmond. He took one step in, and that was that. Francoeur doubled home Wright, and later in the inning Francoeur scored on what should have been the third out of the inning. The Mets led 3-1 before Lannan could get the fifth out of the inning.
All of this is on top of the fundamental blunder, which was playing Desmond in right field in the first place? CitiField is a notoriously difficult right field, and the sun was tough for even experienced outfielders. Is this any way to help transition a young player to the big leagues? Really, this is setting him up for failure.
And just for the sake of thoroughness, in the eighth with one out Fizzleman pinch-ran for Josh Bard with Jorge Padilla. Bard was not the tying run, and they were going to need a hit to score him anyway. The upside of the situation just didn't justify burning one of his only two catchers and putting the team one hammy away from seeing Pete Orr catch.
I'm heading over to the Josh Willingham event at ESPN Zone. Post any questions you have for Willingham in the comments, and I promise I will ask them and report back.
Yeah, that's a terrible headline. It was either that or "Honey I Shrunk the Offense." I'm just not feeling the headline-writing.
Anyway, as of this minute, the Nationals have scored 649 runs in 146 games. The NL average is 648. If they don't score at least 4 tonight against Mike Pelfrey, they'll slip below average for the first time in months. Doesn't sound too tough, except that's more runs than they scored in the whole Philadelphia series.
Since Nyjer Morgan went down, they've scored 59 runs in 18 games, an average of 3.28. The biggest culprits over the last month:
Guzman: .200 BA, 3 BB, 3 XBH (more errors than BB or XBH)
Willingham: .157 BA, 6 XBH, 9 RBI, 27 K
Nieves: 0 XBH (the same number of balks and outfield assists)
Gonzalez: .203 BA, 1 BB (more GDP than walks)
Bard: .234 BA, 11 K 0 BB (the same number of walks as touchdown passes, slam dunks, and double salchows)
And just for good measure, we have the Dirty Bomber, Jorge Padilla, with his 1/13, 5 K, 0 BB.
BP reporter John Perrotto includes anonymous quotes from scouts in his weekly "On the Beat" article. This week's piece included these two Nationals-related items:
Dodgers infielder Ronnie Belliard: "It's amazing what a guy can do when he actually cares. He sleepwalked all season in Washington, then flipped the switch when he got to Los Angeles and in a pennant race." (Aren't you glad the Nationals are still paying his salary?)
Nationals shortstop Ian Desmond: "This kid can hit and really play some defense. If I'm the Nationals, he's my shortstop on Opening Day next year instead of Cristian Guzman." (Ah, but you're not the Nationals, are you, whoever you are?)
Sweet! The Nationals got James Burke!! I love that guy. Especially when an episode would start and you'd get a shot of the Sistine Chapel or Versailles or something, and then he'd just pop in from the side and say, "hello, I'm James Burke." That was fun-nee. I would have thought he'd be dead by now, but I guess not. I wonder if it's hard to catch with those Coke-bottle glasses.
In honor of the newest National, I bring you "The Trigger Effect." Why? Well, you see, watching James Burke is a lot like being a Nationals fan. You start watching, and you can't quite figure out what the hell is going on because it's such a jumbled mess. But you figure if you keep watching, sooner or later things will start to make a little sense. And the longer you watch, the more you feel like you have to keep watching, or else the whole thing was a waste of time. Next thing you know, you're looking at Livan Hernandez's second tour and, despite all logic, you're thinking, "Hey, this guy's pretty good. Maybe things are making sense after all." And that's when it all starts again.
Sources: Crow to sign with Royals The Kansas City Royals are on the verge of an agreement with their No. 1 draft pick, pitcher Aaron Crow, for a major league deal that will pay him between $3 million and $4.5 million, sources said.
Crow, a right-hander from the University of Missouri, was picked in the first round by the Washington Nationals in 2008, but did not reach an agreement. He re-entered the draft this year, and was selected 12th overall by the Royals.
Crow grew up in Kansas, about 60 miles west of Kansas City. For him, the fact that he could sign with the team closest to his hometown was a pivotal factor.
Crow will start playing in the instructional league.
It's been looking like Crow and his agents at the Hendricks Agency really botched things last year and that he was going to end up with less money and a lost year.
Olney's report suggests that might not be the case. There's a big gap between $3 million and $4.5 million, but if he gets something on the high end of that range and ends up close to home, he'll feel ok about the whole thing I bet.
As I've said before, whatever happens with Crow, it's not a win for the Nationals unless Drew Storen's turns out to be as good or better than Crow.
Update: Here's the scoop. Basically, he's getting about half a mil less than the Nationals' final offer, though it's a major league contract, which, well, you know that whole story. Anyway, it's structured in a way that makes it seem like he's getting $3 mil plus another $1.5 million in incentives, but really that's about what he'd get earning a minimum wage. I guess this is supposed to be face-saving, but it's not really. Aaron ate crow. Nationals fans can now feel good about someone else's pain, I guess, since there's nothing else for us to celebrate.
There's a funny thing about the team's plan to move Cristian Guzman to second base because of his declining range. His range isn't really declining.
Check it out. Here are some stats to chew on. Revised Zone Rating (RZR) and Out of Zone plays (OOZ) are John Dewan stats. RZR tells us the percentage of plays within the player's zone that are made. RZR is primarily a measure of how well a fielder does on the routine plays, but if a fielder has really bad range that'll show up. OOZ is the number of plays out of the zone made. Range Runs (RngR) is a Mitchel Lichtman stat that tells us the number of runs a fielder prevents compared to an average fielder, just based on range (excluding arm, errors, and double plays turned):
Year
Age
Inn
RZR
OOZ
RngR
2005
28
1161
0.806
47
-1
2007
29
376
0.786
11
0.2
2008
30
1174
0.838
50
-1.6
2009
31
946
0.785
41
1.6
If you aren't interested in the detaily mumbo-jumbo, just observe that his stats really haven't declined at all since he came to DC. Nor was he ever all that impressive to begin with, but he's basically the same below-average, basically adequate fielder that he's always been.
Guzzy's problem is that Rizzo doesn't want below-average adequate at shortstop. He want defensive whizzes who will help his army of groundball pitchers. If the infield is good enough, he thinks, maybe, just maybe, Trevor Holder won't be a total waste of time and money.
Yeah, it's possible that the Nationals see something that the stats don't. Guzman IS at the age that you start to think that his range might decline next year. But I've obsessed over Guzman's defense an awful lot over the last five years, and I don't see it. And like Rizzo says, you really feel confident when the stats confirm what your own eyes tell you.
Some of you are probably thinking, "what?? Guzman is terrible!! And you hate him!!!" Well, I don't think Guzman is terrible. He's just not nearly good enough to justify $32 million in six years and Brian Duensing. And I get annoyed at how his batting average gets too much attention (and OBP not enough) from some in the media. (And I find his approach at the plate aesthetically unpleasing, but that's just me.)
But I kind of doubt that the "Guzman is declining" line is the real story. The reality, I bet, is that last GM didn't care about fielding, and Rizzo does. But it's hard to say, "yeah, we negotiated a contract with you, and you've been exactly the guy we expected you to be, but we're just changing our minds. Now you need to play a different position.
Sure, they could say that. Meet the new boss. Not the same as the old boss. Tough luck, buddy. Wipe your tears with one of your $32 million undeserved bucks.
But most likely Guzman's gonna pout, thinking, "dang, I never would have resigned here if I knew you were going to make me play a new position." And if he's a malcontent, that's probably not good for the Nationals.
Personally, I think it would make the team (marginally) better to move him to second, so I'm ok with it. But I don't quite buy what they're selling, and I wonder how Guzman is reacting in the clubhouse. It might be better to just trade him this winter before he becomes the next Felipe Lopez.
Check out the latest chat between myself and Brian Oliver from Nationals Farm Authority. As always, feel free to comment on the podcast page or here or over at NFA, and be sure to subscribe to the podcast on I-Tunes or whatever podcatcher you use.
Correction: I erroneously referred to Gerald Laird as a member of the Texas Rangers, and of course he signed with the Tigers last year. As they say, good journalism requires a corrections page!
When MASN posted the line-ups for last Thursday night and Ian Desmond was listed as the starting SS, it was enough to get me back out to Nationals Park for the first time in a few weeks. As others have noted, he showed surprisingly impressive power with his double, two warning-track fly-outs, and especially this shot, hit almost to the last row of the Red Porch. Since then, Desmond has two more extra-base hits in a grand total of 9 plate appearances going into Sunday (I'm writing this during the Sunday game, and in two at bats so far he has a single and an ROE.)
On that Red Porch shot, Joe Blanton threw Desmond a cookie, no doubt. It's tough to hang a curveball better than this 74-mph meatball:
Still, scouts will tell you that a homer like that isn't a fluke. A lot of scouts will use a stop-watch to measure flyball hangtime, even on pop-ups, to measure a hitter's raw power. Even when they miss, powerful hitters put juice into the ball.
The Desmond homer was a bomb. Hit Tracker, which estimates the distance every homer would have traveled if you could eliminate the effects of wind, altitude, temperature, etc., says that Desmond's homer is the third longest homer hit by the Nationals in Nationals Park all year.
That homer doesn't tell us that Desmond is going to hit a lot of home runs. That requires strike zone command, pitch recognition, mechanical consistency, etc. But it shows that he has more raw power than the scouting reports had indicated.
Here are Desmond's ISO power numbers over his minor league career. ISO is slugging minus batting average, and it's a good measure of a hitter's true power:
Year
Age
Lev
ISO
2004
18
Rook/A-SS
0.075
2005
19
A/A+
0.105
2006
20
A+/AA
0.118
2007
21
A+
0.168
2008
22
AA/Rook
0.152
2009
23
AAA/AA
0.147
The first thing you notice is the how his power jumped in 2007. One theory is that he was repeating high-A ball, which gave him a leg-up. That's a valid point. On the other hand, you still expect power to develop through these years. He could be making less contact as he moves up, but when he connects, the power should be there. So it's a little odd that his ISO number dropped so much from '07 go '08, and even stranger that it slipped a bit again in '09.
That made me think about another thing that some may have forgotten about Desmond, which was the stress fracture of his hamate bone suffered sometime in 2008. The hamate is a key bone in your wrist, and hamate injuries are notorious for lingering and sapping power.
A stress fracture in particular can be a stealthy injury. Stress fractures are caused by repeated motion, not a single violent blow. Often, an athlete can compete with a stress fracture for a long time until the pain becomes too great. He probably has no idea when it first happened, and the only real treatment for a stress fracture is rest.
So you have to wonder, how much did the hamate affect him in 2008? And was he really 100% on opening day in 2009?
Short of going back in time and giving him weekly MRIs, we can't know the answers here. Even he probably doesn't know. But, if in fact Desmond has a big additional level of power in him, this could be part of the reason why. That, and the fact that hitters can frequently keep developing power through their age-28 season.
Desmond's approach at the plate is still the most important factor in whether he can be a success at the major-league level. His very early success is in no small part due to the fact that he has yet to swing at a pitch out of the strike zone (in 11 PAs though 2:14 pm Sunday).
But based on the little bit I've seen so far, I think his ceiling may be a good bit higher than I thought a week ago.
We complain when they get it wrong, so we should give props on great calls like this. With two outs, Ian Desmond took a heads-up, worthwhile risk. But we can see here that he was clearly out.
One other thing--this is exciting, aggressive but clean baseball. Some guys might have blind-sided the defenseless pitcher covering home plate, likely resulting in an injury for Joe Blanton and perhaps Desmond, but the hook slide gave Desmond a better chance to score and was a safer, cleaner way to play.
Ah, nevermind. Weather.com says tonight's probably going to be a rain-out.
Maybe Fizzleman wrote this line-up card just to get people off his back? Like he wishes he'd have rested Kerry Wood a bit, just to get people off his back (not that he was wrong about Wood's usage of course; screw the kids--you try to win the games!).
Jim Riggleman was asked a coupletimes today why he's not playing his young, improving players and benching the declining veterans. He didn't take too kindly to it, lecturing the assembled media that "When we play baseball, we're supposed to try to win."
I agree with that, though of course it's a false choice.
No one's advocating that the Nationals don't try to win. The point that I and other are making is that we should, whenever possible, invest playing time in improving young players so that the team can actually get better. We might win fewer games in the short term but we'll more games in the medium term and long term.
Of course, none of that has anything to do with Cristian Guzman and Ian Desmond. Guzman over the last 21 games going into tonight is hitting .183 / .212 / .268. He's on an extended skid and should sit regardless. And yeah, he's had a hot streak here or there, but since May 9, he's hitting .277 / .304 / .387. That's bad.
And he's a just plain rotten fielder.
So what exactly does "trying to win" have to do with playing Cristian Guzman?
Get off your high horse, Fizzleman. Bench Guzman. Play Desmond.
Yesterday, the Nationals called up Ian Desmond, possibly the only MLB-ready prospect among position players in the entire organization. With the 2009 season and Cristian Guzman's days as an adequate defensive shortstop both fading fast, the Nationals have an opportunity to at least start to find out whether Ian Desmond could be a solution at shortstop in 2010.
A successful Desmond audition would have important ramifications for the team as soon as this off-season. They could commit to shifting Guzman to second base, giving him all of spring training to adjust to the new position. They could find out that they don't need to spend on a middle-infielder like Orlando Hudson. They could try to move Guzman, freeing up the $8 million in bad contract still on the books and still go after a free agent.
It seems like Desmond has been around a long time, mainly because he was unfairly overhyped as far back as 2005 by the previous regime as the next Derek Jeter. Beyond a passing facial resemblance, it was a ridiculous comp, and the pressure seemed to weigh heavily on him. He was also pushed hard, playing at high-A Potomac at age 19 and AA at age 20, getting both promotions before he'd really mastered lower levels.
But he's still just 23 (24 this month), and the tools are there. He was named the best infield arm in the AAA International League in Baseball America. And while his error totals have been a concern (28 this year), scouts have consistently raved about his range and arm.
The bat has been the big question, as he's been consistently undone by a bad approach at the plate, chasing too many balls out of the zone. This year, the light seems to have gone on. In 205 plate appearances at Syracuse, his walk rate is 10.1%, up from 8.8% in AA last year, and his strikeout rate has fallen to 17.4% from 24.1%.
He doesn't have much pop, so those numbers still say he'll be a below-average hitter, but if the glove is there, he can be a 2.5-win player right now, maybe a cheap Jack Wilson with more upside.
So I was pretty excited to flip on the game yesterday and see the kid play, maybe even get a look at Guzman at second. Instead, it was Guzman at short and Riggleman's pet, Pete Orr, at second.
Here's what Riggleman said:
"I'll get him some games, but as long as Guzman is healthy he'll be playing. If his foot flares up on him that will be an opportunity to get Desmond in there, but we also have Gonzalez and Orr who will be playing up the middle. I love to see young players play, but I don't ever want to take away the opportunity from the veterans who have been here all year... and disregard their efforts all year by planting them on the bench. Like I said, the at bats might be inconsistent."
What's the point? Cristian Guzman shouldn't have a future at short, and Pete Orr has no future anywhere in MLB. And since when has Pete Orr been here all here? This is just a short-sighted, wasted opportunity, and shows the kind of dumb deference to declining veteran players that will keep bad teams from getting better.
No, I'm not changing the name of the blog, and I'm not starting a new petition or printing new t-shirts, but I have come to the conclusion that Jim Riggleman should not be retained as manager of the Washington Nationals.
I have gripes about his over-managing in the running game and other relatively minor issues, but the big problem that could be deadly to the team and should be fatal to his prospects as manager is his dangerous abuse of young pitchers.
Let's review the track record. In Chicago, he had more or less two young pitchers who could be considered prospects, Geremi Gonzalez and Kerry Wood.
Riggleman, managing a last-place team going nowhere, whipped the 22-year-old Gonzalez for 206 total innings in 1997 (combined major and minor league IP), a 113-inning jump over the previous season. He broke down the next year, three surgeries followed, and he didn't pitch again in the majors until 2003, at a shadow his previous self.
A year later, Riggleman threw the 20-year-old Wood 166.2 innings, including pitch counts of 133, 129, 123 (twice), 122 (twice), and 121 (twice). It came in a pennant race, but regardless the team paid a steep price for a first-round Wild Card exit, as Wood had Tommy John and missed all of 1999.
This season, two young pitchers have gone down on Riggleman's watch, Jordan Zimmermann and Craig Stammen. Both pitchers pitched through pain before finally giving in to surgery.
Zimmermann only had one major-league start on Riggleman's watch. It's tough to blame him entirely (or even mostly), but we do know that Zimmermann had pain for a least a couple weeks prior to getting shut down, and Riggleman hasn't given us any indication that the team was or should have been more proactive.
Stammen on the other hand says he had elbow pain for months--months!--before finally getting shut down, and most of those risky innings did happen on Riggleman's watch.
While this track record raises flags, Riggleman's comments are giant blinking lights. His comments about pitching injuries are mostly a study in stubbornness.
A few weeks back, I asked him about Kerry Wood, and though he did say he would do things differently in hindsight, is reasoning basically broke down as: 1. I did the right thing; 2. My usage had nothing to do with Wood's injury; 3. I would have used him less just to protect myself from public criticism after the fact, even though it would have been the wrong thing to do.
Sunday, interim manager Jim Riggleman was asked about Stammen's arthroscopic surgery (it was successful!) when he added, unprompted, that the rookie this season "exhibited a toughness that you like to see in pitchers. You know, the attitude -- if something's wrong here, I'm still going to pitch."
Hmm, I thought.
So I followed up with this question.
Q: I'd imagine there's a fine balance where maybe a team wants its pitchers to tough it out, maybe you want to know every ache and pain. As a manager, what would you tell a young pitcher about when to speak up about arm pain?
RIGGLEMAN: That's a tough question. It's very pertinent. What I have tried to tell guys, the earliest in your career that you can figure out the difference between pain and injury, the better off you're going to be. Normal soreness that you get from pitching, you've got to [determine], Is this just something that is normal from pitching? It's an exhausting thing to your body to throw a baseball that violently for six to nine innings. So when you recover from that through the week, you've got to know what that feels like. You've got to know your body. And when you get to a point where something is more than normal soreness, you've got to speak up. Because that might be the indication of something that could blow up on you.
The problem is that the line between pain and injury often isn't that clear. Pitchers can "gut it out" through all kinds of bad injuries. That's how "cascading" injuries happen. Start with a lat strain, overcompensate with other muscles, and end up with a torn labrum. And "normal soreness" can feel an awful lot what you or I would consider a real injury.
Riggleman's lip service to wanting pitchers to "speak up" doesn't hold up when he puts the entire onus for monitoring the situation on the player. That's not encouraging communication--it's deferring responsibility.
And he simply can't expect players to speak up about pain at the same time that he's praising the toughness of an injured 25-year-old who pitched for months with "something wrong" before surgery.
If you talk to experts in this area, they'll tell you that pitching injury risk goes up not so much from pitching a lot, but from pitching tired. That's why pitch counts and innings counts matter. So when you're creating a clubhouse culture where caution equals lack of toughness or competitive fire, you're just asking for pitchers to keep quiet and hurt themselves.
But preparation also matters. Spending time in the weight room, building up leg strength, cardiovascular fitness... these things matter tremendously. Praise toughness and endurance in off-season workouts, not pitching through pain and getting yourself hurt.
The list of good young pitchers who have been cut down by overuse is almost endless: Steve McCatty, Mike Norris, Mark Fidrych, Mark Prior, Don Gullett, Gary Nolan... the list could go on for days. Because to make sure the Nationals do everything possible to keep Steven Strasburg (and Drew Storen, etc...), Riggleman needs to go.
The biggest question in my mind when the Nationals named Mike Rizzo general manager is whether he'd be allowed to really run his own show or whether it would continue as a front office by committee.
Today, we got our first indication that Rizzo's the man. Spin Bobby Williams (all this time I thought "Spin" was Bobby's nickname--who knew they were two different people?), Nationals scouting director since 2006 and one of several holdover members of the Cincinnati posse that came with Jim Bowden, was shown the door today.
I don't have a particularly well informed opinion of Williams. Certainly, the outcomes of the Nationals player development system haven't been good. The disappointments (Ross Detwiler, Jack McGeary, Josh Smoker) seem to far outnumber the nominal successes (Craig Stammen, Jordan Zimmermann).
But the important thing is that this is a sign that Mike Rizzo--unlike Jim Bowden, in fact--will be allowed to run his own show on the baseball operations side. It's a coherence and clarity of leadership that's been sorely missing.
Next on the Cincy mafia hit list: Bob Boone, Squire Galbreath, Darnell Coles, Tim Foli, Debbie Taylor, Ray Knight, and Rob Dibble.
Since Jim Riggleman took over the Nationals, he has turned them into one of the more aggressive base-running teams in the league.
Compared to a league-average a bit under 0.85, the Nationals have attempted 0.96 per game, which would rank 9th in MLB for the season. Under Manny Acta, the team attempted just 0.62 stolen bases per game, which would rank 25th in the league.
Unfortunately, the aggressiveness isn't helping. To generate a net positive impact on scoring, the stolen base success rate needs to be around at least 73%. If you're lower than that, you'd basically be better off never attempting a steal at all. That's because the run value (the average runs added as a result of a particular event) of a stolen base is 0.175, while the run value of a caught stealing in -0.467.
The Nationals have attempted 46 stolen bases in Riggleman's 48 games, getting thrown out 18 times for a dismal 60.9% success rate, worse than any team in baseball this year except the Cubs and the notoriously overly aggressive Lou Piniella. Under Acta, the team had a still bad but less awful 66.7% success rate.
Perhaps more telling is that of the eight teams that have attempted steals more frequently than Riggleman's Nationals this year, the average success rate is 73.8%. Only the Rockies (64.7%) come close to Riggleman in terms of running so much, so unsuccessfully.
The net impact of all that running is -3.51 runs, enough to cost the team a full win. Ouch.
Of course, a lot of the difference in stolen base attempts comes from Nyjer Morgan. Without a major base-stealing threat like Morgan, Acta of course ran less.
Unfortunately, even Morgan hasn't helped all that much. Since Riggleman took over, Morgan's success rate is 72%, basically the exact breaking point between helping and hurting. All that flash and excitement, and he might as well be stealing as much as Dmitri Young. (Morgan was 6-0 stealing in his brief time with Acta.)
And what does it say about a manager that he gets significantly poorer performance in the running game while being given substantially better base-stealers?
Riggleman defenders can also point to Elijah Dukes, who has been an exceptionally bone-headed on the base paths this year, getting himself thrown out a whopping 10 times in 12 attempts this year. However, Dukes is responsible for only 3 caught stealings since Riggleman took over. Even if you take Dukes out of the equation totally the team would have a 65.1% success rate, still worse than all but four other teams in the league and bad enough to cost the team 2.1 net runs in 48 games.
And then there have been the suicide squeezes. Suicide squeezes are the kind of low-percentage, one-run strategy that should be avoided except in the rarest of close, late-game situations with poor hitters at the plate. As Riggleman himself said "It's kind of the luck of the draw. You hope you can get a pitch the guy can handle."
So it's not verboten, but you want to do it only when you're tied or down one very late and have few other good offensive options. And really it's never with less than two outs because you can score so many different ways in those situations.
Riggleman, in his 1-for-3 suicide attempts, has done it in these situations:
Sixth inning, one out, up four with Alberto Gonzalez hitting.
Second inning, one out up four runs with Nyjer Morgan hitting
Fourth inning, up two, again only one out with Wil Nieves batting.
Riggleman has avoided too much attention by calling this play in games with big leads, but as we've seen all year, the Nationals have the kind of bullpen that means no lead is every safe, and the team should almost always play for the big inning, not the one-run.
Riggleman's running is hurting the team right now, and especially now that Morgan is out and so much of his scoring is coming from the long-ball, he needs to take a lesson from Earl Weaver, shelve the small-ball, and embrace the three-run homer.
I was going to write basically this exact post, but Beyond the Boxscore beat me to it. The bottom line: after the Nationals' most recent skid, there's basically zero chance that the Nationals do not end up with the worst record in baseball in 2009. Bryce Harper, welcome to DC. Congratulations, ScatsTown. We've still got nowhere to go but up.
Now for the next question: can this team avoid three in a row? We'll see, but with young pitchers dropping like flies (or fading like like McCain in October), where does this team get substantial improvement? I guess we can hope for some random fluctuation. Can we get a Go Randomness! graphic on the big scoreboard?
Rookie starter Craig Stammen, a member of Washington's pitching rotation since May, has been scratched from his start on Friday because of elbow soreness. An MRI, scheduled for Thursday in Washington, D.C., will determine the severity of the injury.
"I don't really know what's going on," Stammen said of his elbow. "It's just painful. It doesn't feel good. It's kind of something that's built up over the course of the whole year. It's something I've pretty much dealt with over the course of the whole season. It's just kind of time to get it checked out right now."
Stammen, with a 4-7 record and a 5.11 ERA in 19 starts, admitted that he had been trying to "gut it out" and finish the season.
Benefit of the doubt, pitchers get hurt a lot... blah blah blah... WTF!?!?!?!?!
Stammen isn't the second coming of Tim Lincecum by any stretch of the imagination, but under no circumstances should any rookie 25-year-old pitching prospect of any grade be trying to "gut it out." You don't mess with elbows.
Why on Earth was he not sent for an MRI the day he complained of the soreness in the first place? Is the team being cheap? Did he hide it? These questions should be answered, especially when you have a manager, GM, and pitching coach all beating their chests every day about how old school they are.
I have questions, not answers, but Stammen's comment about trying to gut it out and the injury being there all year really, really worries me.
Elijah Dukes hasn't had nearly the season Nationals fans had hoped for this year. He hasn't even had a year that realists expected.
Last year, in his age-24 season, he hit .264 / .386 / .478, good for the fourth best wOBA among NL right-fielders with at least 330 PA. He also was a +11.2 UZR/150 right-fielder, which, combined with his bat made him a genuine all-star caliber performer, at least when he was healthy.
With is strike-zone command and raw power, the projection systems saw no reason for him to fall break-neck pace. PECOTA had him at .278 / .386 / .486.
This year, everything has gone backwards. Even with a recent uptick, he's hitting .250 / .319 / .412, which would be ok if he was a good-fielding shortstop or catcher, but it's totally inadequate in right.
His glove has also regressed. I give him a pass for his time in center, but even in right he's been a -7.3 UZR/150 fielder, as he's making more errors and his range has declined.
And then there's his base-running. He has a stunningly bad 17% success rate on steals (2 for 12). He's been picked off five times. He had the rare CS and PO two-fer in his boxscore last night. Based on Baseball Prospectus's EQBRR stat, Dukes has cost the Nationals a whopping 5.22 runs compared to an average base-runner, a huge number, especially given his relatively sparse playing time.
Chalk up the base-running to Dukes just being a knucklehead. Manny gave him a green light on the basepaths early on, with predictable results.
More worrisome is the decline of power and on-base percentage. A Dukes apologist might say that we simply missed his hottest hot streak of the season, since Dukes hit .279 / .388 / .529 in 80 PA in Syracuse. There's some truth to that, but it doesn't come close to telling the whole tale.
The big issue is that Dukes has just totally lost track of his strike-zone command, which previously had been one of his greatest strengths.
His walk rate has slipped all the way from 15.3% last year to 9.0% this year. He's swinging at 29.4% of pitches out of the zone, compared to 20.3% last year. That's a huge difference.
As a result, he's not getting in nearly as many hitter's counts. Last year, he was in a 3-0 count in 8% of his plate appearances; this year, just 3%. Last year, he saw a 2-0 pitch 15% of the time; this year, 12%. And last year he saw 3-1 13% of the time; this year, just 7%.
Surprisingly, despite all this hacking, his strikeout rate has gone down from 28.6% to 21.1%. Chalk that up to his natural talent. Even in a hole, he has enough plate coverage and bat control to make contact. But he's not able to drive the ball at all. His ISO power is down 50 points from .214 to .162, and his home run per fly ball rate is down from 18.8% to 8.5%.
I'm not convinced that the problem is that he's pulling the ball too much, as Boz said in his last chat. Go to his spray chart here, and you'll see he was pretty much a dead-pull hitter last year, and he's a dead-pull hitter this year. Then again, you'll see pretty similar patterns from guys like David Ortiz in his prime and Adam Dunn.
We don't want him to hit like a little bitch. We just want him to chase fewer pitcher's pitches, make pitchers come at him, and get back to those chest-thumping walk-off walks. His ground ball rates haven't really gone up, which you would expect if he is reaching out trying to pull breaking balls on the outside corner all the time.
So what's happening? Is he pressing because he saw his buddy Lastings get shipped down after a week of struggles? Does he miss Lenny Harris (ha!)? Did all the time playing out of position in center mess up his bat? Is he just a young player who lost track of his game and is having trouble finding his way back?
All the above is probably part of it, but the solution is simple. Rather than trying to slap more balls the other way, he needs to work more hitters counts, take more walks, and when he gets a pitch to hit, deposit it in the Red Loft.
One idea that should be totally off the table is to simply non-tender him and let him leave for nothing, as Boz suggested. To let a pre-arbitration player with so much talent go for nothing is completely nutso.
10. It's Dibble-licious! 9. With the channels changing around all the time, I never accidentally throw away the TV guide on Sunday. 8. I swing and swing and swing. I throw and throw and throw. 7. Their RSS feed works (unlike a certain daily newspaper I know). 6. Change-O-Rama glasses. 5. I haven't seen Scott Olsen on there in months. 4. Washington Sports Club carries it. 3. They got all us bloggers totally hammered in a skybox earlier this year. 2. How far IS that one gonna go? 1. It's Mr. Angelos's Spectacular Network!
Brian Oliver and I did our latest Natmosphere in your Ear, discussing the Belliard trade, Justin Maxwell, Livan Hernandez, and the "Bryce Harper Sweepstakes."
Last season around this time, some local sportswriters were waxing eloquent about how perfectly balanced and "fair" (some might have said vanilla) Nationals Park is. The stadium was playing neither as a hitter's park nor as a pitcher's park but a pretty much down-the-middle even ballpark favoring neither.
But it takes at least two or better yet three seasons of play to get a large enough sample size to identify a park as favoring hitters or pitchers. And this year Nationals Park is acting like one of the league's most pitcher-friendly parks.
ESPN.com posts park factors for a series of stats--overall scoring, home runs, hits, etc. Park factor is a pretty simple stat. You take the number of runs (or HR or whatever) that a team has scored at home, divide that by the what they've done on the road (weighted by games played), and voila, you have PF.
The overall runs scored PF at Nationals Park this year is .915, 24th in the league, more pitcher-friendly than famed pitchers' parks CitiField, Comerica, or the Oakland Coliseum. RFK's single-year PFs were .874, .942, and .860 in '07, '06, and '05, respectively. Yes, that's right, Nationals Park in 2009 has been more of a pitcher's park than RFK was in 2006.
I don't actually think Nationals Park favors pitchers as much as it would seem so far this year. Again, 60 or so games just isn't enough of a sample size to draw firm conclusions. Personally, I thought if anything Nationals Park would emerge as more of a hitter's park this year, figuring that Adam Dunn might give them enough lefty thump to start to expose the short porch in left.
So we should give it another year, but it's worth noting that so far this year we're getting a really different picture than most anyone expected going into the season.
FJB is a Washington Nationals blog written with an emphasis on statistical analysis, an appreciation for defense and player development, and a strong conviction that a well-run team should win, no excuses.
