by Daniel Gettinger

Yesterday I received a text from a friend who wrote: “Inexcusable if the Pads non-tender Correia.”

That was the first time I had heard any discussion about non-tendering Correia, and frankly, I was a bit surprised.  However, my immediate reaction was not one of anger, but instead, as I usually do, I tried to defend the possible action.

I wrote back: “Well…some guys are getting more in arbitration now than on the market, so it might make sense…[plus] its Correia we’re talking about-at best he’s an average pitcher.”

That was yesterday.  Today, after further reflection, I see no reason for the Padres to not tender Kevin Correia a contract.

The team has four options: go to arbitration with Correia, agree to a contract with Correia, trade Correia, or let him leave for nothing.  Because Correia is a good bet to provide at least some value in excess of his contract in 2010, Correia is indeed tradeable, and the “let him leave for nothing” option is strictly dominated.

Last season, Correia threw nearly 200 innings, and had a 3.91 ERA and a 3.81 FIP.  Fangraphs valued him at 2.4 wins above replacement, and nearly $11M.  With incentives, Correia made about $1M.  No matter how you break it down, Correia was a valuable pitcher.

The problem of course is that Correia had never before been such a valuable pitcher, and expecting the same type of production is probably a bit optimistic…or is it?

Bill James projects a 4.23 ERA in 217 innings for Correia.   Zips has Correia pegged for a 3.93 ERA in 171 innings.  Basically, both Zips and James project Correia to be a bit above league average, just like last season.  I personally see Correia as no better than an average pitcher, but that is still very valuable, especially to a team like the Padres that does not currently have many (if any) pitchers projected to be much better than average.  Lets say, just for the sake of argument, that Correia will be a 2 WAR pitcher in 2010, valuing him around $9M.

Reports are Correia wants to be paid between $3M and $4M.  Meanwhile, the Padres want to pay him something closer to $2M.  In either case, Correia’s expected production exceeds his salary.  Not tendering Correia a contract makes no sense.  If the team cannot afford the $3M or $4M it might take to employ Correia, they should trade him to a team that can.

Doing so will allow the team to get something, rather than nothing for Correia.  In fact, they could probably get something decent.  The argument that the Padres would have no leverage in trade negotiations is irrelevant.  Assuming there are a decent amount of teams (and there are) who could benefit from adding a league average starting pitcher to their rotation, competition between teams should allow the Padres to get a fair deal for Correia.

To sum things up: the Padres should not non-tender Kevin Correia.  He is not expected to earn more money in 2010 than he is expected to produce on the field.  The Padres would benefit from either keeping Correia, or trading him to another team.  Of course, the Padres may just be using the threat of a non-tender as a negotiating ploy, making all this excitement somewhat moot.

by Daniel Gettinger

Last week, Corey Brock pointed out Kevin Kouzmanoff has the highest “fielding percentage of any Major League third baseman (.988) and the fewest errors (3).”

Brock argued, “the number of errors and fielding percentage the Padres’ third baseman has in 2009 certainly show that he should be, at the very least, in the discussion for the holy grail of awards for fielders.”

I disagree.

Kouz’s lack of errors are great, but not making errors on balls a player gets to is only one component of defense.  The other major defensive component for a third baseman is range.  And Kouzmanoff does not have great range.  UZR feels Kouzmanoff’s range has been -1.4 runs below average.

His overall UZR of 2.3 (3.4 UZR/150), seems about right to me.  It reflects Kouz’s consistency on balls he gets to (4.1 errors runs above average), but dings him for his below average range.

Baseball Prospectus is even harsher.  Their fielding metric sees Kouzmanoff’s fielding as about 5 runs below average this season.

The problem with fielding metrics is they are not very precise.  Over long periods of time, they seem to do a pretty decent job, but even a sample of 115 games (the number of games Kouz has played this season) is not sufficient to reach any definite conclusions.

That said, in 2008, UZR saw Kouzmanoff as 2.7 runs above average.  Like this season, Kouz made few errors, but displayed only passable range in 2008.  Based on his stats this year, as well as last year, I feel comfortable stating that Kevin Kouzmanoff has been a slightly above average fielder this season and projects to play the same way the remainder of the season.

Average fielding is fine, but it is not gold glove worthy.  The N.L. gold glove winner at third base should be Ryan Zimmerman.  It is not a close call.

Due to his phenomenal range, UZR feels Zimmerman has been 16 runs above average with the glove this season.  Zimmerman’s past suggests such a positive UZR may not be a fluke.  He struggled with injuries last year, but in 2007, Zimmerman was 17.4 runs above average at third base.

No other N.L. third basemen is within 10 runs (approximately one win) of Zimmerman defensively. Pedro Feliz and Casey Blake, both of whom trail Zimmerman but lead Kouzmanoff in UZR, have been 4.7 and 4.3 runs above average defensively.

Kouzmanoff has been solid with the glove, but to even consider him for the gold glove is ludicrous considering how good Zimmerman has been.  Limiting errors is great, but getting to the ball is important as well.

by Mike Rogers

Over at Project Prospect, there’s a nice and informative scouting report on the swing of 1st year pro, James Darnell. I had a three part series that looked at the 2008 college bats the Padres took in June of 2008 and I loved everything about James Darnell’s college statistics. I’m still a big time Darnell fan and think the former South Carolina Gamecock can be, at the very least, an average right fielder in the majors (not sure he can stick at third).

The scouting report makes a very interesting swing comparison: Justin Upton. Now, Steve Carter (who is using an alias but did play college baseball), cautioned he’s not expecting near the offensive production of Upton, but that they do have similar swings. An excerpt from the conclusion:

Darnell has the tools, ability, and swing to be a very solid offensive 3rd baseman. Eighteen home runs and a .998 OPS between Low-A Fort Wayne and High-A Lake Elsinore is certainly nothing to scoff at. But, the real test for Darnell will come at the Double-A and Triple-A levels. Then we will find out if he is just a polished college hitter pounding A-ball pitching, or a legitimate prospect. If he can improve his upper body pattern and make a few other refinements, he could go from a potential Casey Blake with patience type, and move toward his ceiling of a pre-2009 breakout Ryan Zimmerman with a higher on base percentage.

So, there’s some things to like. Casey Blake with patience definitely isn’t anything to scoff at and Ryan Zimmerman with better OBP is very good outcome as well. There’s a lot to like about Darnell.

Now, while you’re perusing the Project Prospect website, feel free to read my PITCHf/x look at Jake Arrieta, a Baltimore Orioles right-handed pitcher. Yeah, it’s self-promotion and I will not be ashamed of it! Why should you read about an Orioles pitching prospect? Well, because I’ll be writing these types of pieces for Project Prospect when prospects make their debuts. So, I want you to get used to the format for when I pen my piece on Mat Latos (which I already looked at his debut right here for FF) through the PITCHf/x lens.

by Daniel Gettinger

Often when writing a post, I cite a player’s season stats.  For pitchers, K/9, BB/9 and HR/9 get a lot of play around here.  Position players are typically reduced to impossible to pronounce abbreviations such as OPS, OBP, and UZR.*  That said, at any given moment, I only have a vague notion of how well a player has been playing.  Without looking it up, I could not tell you what Chase Headley’s OBP is.  Likewise, I have no idea what Chad Gaudin’s ERA is.  I do not sit around memorizing the stat lines of every Padre player, and frankly, I don’t really care to.

*As much as I love it for being a useful tool in player valuation, I sometimes feel the best part about wOBA is that the vowel in the acronym rests in a linguistically elegant position, giving it a word-like pronunciation.

Because I do not keep close tabs on the season stats of every Padre, I find it productive to occasionally “re-calibrate” by browsing through the Padres page on Fangraphs (or even ESPN).  Every time I do so, I learn something new.  For example, a few days ago I was reminded that the Padres briefly employed Duaner Sanchez, and that he was an absolute disaster.  Today, I stumbled across the stats of another disaster: Eliezer Alfonzo.

This season, Alfonzo has an OBP of 0.211 and a SLG % of 0.274.  He has a BB rate of 2.8%, and a total of 5 extra base hits in 109 plate appearances.

Let me put this in perspective for you.  His 0.214 wOBA is second worst in the major leagues amongst players with at least 100 PA.  Alfonzo’s 0.485 OPS only slightly exceeds Albert Pujol’s 0.446 OBP. Think about that for a moment.

Look, I recognize that Alfonzo’s stats do not reflect his true talent; that is, going forward, we expect Alfonzo to hit better.  I also realize that Alfonzo was not exactly the Padres first choice catcher.  The team picked him up just so it would have a body to fill in in case Nick Hundley or Henry Blanco got injured.  But that does not make Alfonzo’s play this season any less comical.

There is not a single type of pitch he has been able to hit.  Per 100 pitches, Alfonzo is -2.11 runs below average against fastballs, -3.83 against sliders, -2.97 against curve balls, -3.32 against change-ups, and -4.92 against splitters.  His specialty, if you can call it that, has been hitting the cutter, where he is only 0.23 runs below average per 100 pitches.

To add insult to injury, Alfonzo appears to be terrible on the base paths.  His “speed score” of 0.7 this season is third worst amongst catchers with at least 100 plate appearances.  Bengie Molina is infamous for his lead filled feat, but even he has huffed and puffed his way to a 1.4 speed score.

Alfonzo’s atrocious play does not actually bother me.  Very few people think he is a good player, and he is almost certainly not in the Padres long-term plans.  I just get a kick out of how bad he has been this season.  In an odd sense, his awfulness is sort of fun.  At least in my convoluted mind.

Just a little shameless self-promotion from me today (and I normally don’t do this, but…). I joined the writing team over at Beyond the Boxscore, and my first article went up today evaluating the Jake Peavy trade last Friday.

I’d really like it if everyone that reads this would go there and read the entire thing, since it’ll please Padres fans to read the outcome. Thanks.

by Mike Rogers

Clayton Richard made his San Diego Padres debut on Saturday against the Milwaukee Brewers after being acquired by the Pads for Jake Peavy (trade valuation coming from me sometime tomorrow on Beyond the Boxscore where I’ll be joining the BtB team of writers) on Friday. Before we jump into the PITCHf/x, lets look at the start through the numbers:

5.2 IP, 2 H, 1 ER, 3 BB, 5 K, 90 pitches (49 strikes), 8 ground outs, 4 fly outs.

Now, onto the graph-y goodness. First up is the release points (click images to enlarge):

Richard stands 6-foot-5 and weighs in at 240-pounds, but he was consistently “releasing” the baseball at just under 6-foot. So, he comes from a 3/4 arm slot. But, he repeats his delivery well and comes from a very consistent release point.

Now, the strikezone plot:

He only threw 49 strikes out of the 90 total pitches, so he was a bit wild. The view is from the catcher’s perspective, so he worked away from right-handed hitters for most of the night, but given the amount of right-handers he faced, that’s not surprising.

And speaking of how he attacked right-handed and left-handed batters, here’s a couple pie graphs:

Typical platoon split: drops the change-up versus left-handed hitters, and picks it back up against right-handers. Overall, though, he worked the fastball (either four-seam [FF] or two-seam [FT]) all night.

And now the pitch flight graph (again, courtesy of Harry Pavlidis):

My breakdown of Clayton Richard differs a bit from Myron Logan’s. I attempted to split up the four-seam and two-seam fastballs as best I could, but I still might be/am probably wrong on some of them. I wound up with 48 four-seamers and 21 two-seamers while averaging 91.7 MPH on the former and 90.4 on the latter. His four-seamer seemed to have a bit more arm-side run, but less sink (minimally). Just keep in mind that I was eye-balling the fastballs and made some judgement calls, so they aren’t anywhere near 100% accurate (and if they are, it’s absolute luck on my part).

As far as his breaking ball goes, MLB Gameday classified three of them as curveballs, but after graphing them out, there was virtually no difference in flight path from his slider. I don’t know if he throws a curveball or a slider, but on the flight paths I went with curveball as I believe that’s what the scouting report on him says. As you probably noticed, I classified them all as sliders on the other graphs — that’s just a little mistake on my part, but they’re still depicting the same data set. Either way, he’s got a bit of “sweep” on his slider and some decent downward movement.

Meanwhile, his change-up has some arm-side run but very little sinking action.

On the whole, Richard looks to have pretty average stuff for a big, tall lefty, but his results speak for themselves thus far: 4.32 FIP in 142.1 big league innings pitched. So, he’s definitely a back-end starter, but he’s got value as he’s probably above-average for a number 5 starter.

Overall, the Padres got a good haul in the Jake Peavy deal.

by Mike Rogers

Stephen Strasburg started again today against the cross-town rivals, University of San Diego, beating the Toreros 5-3 on the back of another gem by Stephen Strasburg. His line today was:

8 IP, 5 H, 2  R, 2 ER, 18 K, 1 BB, 1 HR allowed, 1 2B.

Yeah, that brings his 2009 line up to:

20.1 IP, 13 H, 5 R, 4 ER, 45 K, 4 BB, 1 HR allowed,  3 2B, 0 3B.

I’m not making these things up. He really is striking out 60.8% (45 K’s)of the batters he faces (74) while walking just 5.5% — which is actually UP from his 4.4% BB rate of last year.

But, his mechanics should be under some scrutiny as they’re very Mark Prior-like. Read more after the jump…

Read the rest of this entry »

by Mike Rogers

Fangraphs just keep getting better. They now have updated the UZR Defensive numbers to include outfield arms and double play runs. Back when The Hardball Times updated their 2008 outfield arms data, Myron looked at it and helped bolster his idea that Brian Giles should be moved off of the right field postion and switch to the oppostie corner. So, lets take a look at Brian Giles now with the UZR outfield arms update.

Brian Giles’ arm is bad. Like, on the extreme end of the worst bad. I’m talkin’ -19.5 runs bad over the last three years.  When the talk about outfield arms was being bandied about as being incorporated into UZR, it has been said that it only really effects the guys on the ends of the category — the very good (Jeff Francoeur) and the very bad (Brian Giles). Giles’ arm is averaging -6.5 runs off of his defensive value on average from 2006-08, and that’s not weighting it at all which would change that since he’s declined each of the last three years: -4.2 in 2006, -5.8 in 2007 and -9.4(!) last year. So, let’s just call it -6.5 runs, over his average of 140 games played in those three years. That would then become about -6.9 runs or we’ll just call it -7.

Defensively, as I noted in the comments of Myron’s post I linked to earlier, the arms ratings really puts a dent in Giles overall value. My comment noted that without arms ratings his defense is +4.42 over the last 4 years. Run that to a Wins Above Replacement conversion using CHONE’s projected .346 wOBA (and a league average of .332), and I get +8.52 offense, +4.4 defensively, +20 for replacement level and -7.5 for positional adjustment, converted to wins above replacement I get 2.4 WAR. Multiply by 0.85 to account for playing time and that’s 2.06 WAR — a bit above-average.

However, if you account for his arms ratings, and to keep it on the 4 year average like I used in my comment, his 4 year arms ratings comes out to -19 (2005 was +0.5 for him in RF). Averaged out, that’s -4.75 runs per year with his arm. Run this into a WAR conversion and his WAR drops to +1.97 WAR. A one-year deal on the open market for a 1.97 WAR player is $9.07 million. Value for a 2.4 WAR player for a one-year deal on the open market? $10.96. Basically, his bad arm is worth about $1.89 million to the bad in terms of his value.

by Mike Rogers

Here’s the final part in my three-part breakdown on the Padres 2008 draft in which we looked at the college bats that San Diego drafted last June. So far in Part 1, we broke down the first five and then did the same for the next five in Part 2. Here in part 3, we’ve got the final 3 bats that they took from the college ranks that are in my college hitters study; Robert Lara of Central Florida, Aaron Murphree of Arkansas, and Dan Robertson of Oregon State, right after the jump…

Read the rest of this entry »

by Mike Rogers

Update: I have included the 2007 numbers for Adam Zornes. Keep in mind that this was over just 67 plate appearances, so his numbers are much more uncertain than his 2008 stats which came across 264 PA’s.

In part one of my look at the Padres 2008 draft, I’ve discussed the stats and scouting reports of the first 5 college bats that the Padres selected – Allan Dykstra of Wake Forest, Logan Forsythe of Arkansas, James Darnell of South Carolina, Blake Tekotte of Miami (FL), and Sawyer Carroll of Kentucky. Here in part two, I will do the same for the next 5 bats that they took in the 2008 draft; Cole Figueroa of Florida, Adam Zornes of Rice, Beamer Weems of Baylor, Matt Clark of Louisiana State, and Derek Shunk of Villanova. So, lets get started…

Read the rest of this entry »