The Second Annual Dan Meyer Awards

During Major League Baseball's award season, the best of the best are featured (maybe not always with the Gold Gloves). And we should celebrate the best. But there is always a flip side. For every best, there was a worst. Saying that does understand that even the worst MLB players in a particular year are among the best players in the world. MLB players are an elite group of talent. So keep that in mind.

Baseball will award its most valuable player. The Flagrant Fan awards what my friend, Mike Hllywa of Off Base Percentage, likes to call the LVPs. These players did not have good seasons. These players were, in most cases, worse than replacement level. These players made fans look at GMs and ask, "What were you thinking?"  Some of these players have big contracts that now look like albatrosses. Like I said, you celebrate the best? You also have to celebrate the worst.

Why are they called the Dan Meyer Awards? That's a long explanation and I will save myself some typing by referring you to last year's award post.  Suffice it to say that Dan Meyer played twelve Major League seasons and compiled -6.5 fWAR and -5.5 rWAR. That was a lot of negative value for that long of a career!

To qualify, each positional player had to have at least 450 plate appearances except for catchers that only needed 350. Here are your 2014 Dan Meyer Awards for the LVPs (h/t to Mike) for each position. We will consider the pitchers in a later post:

Catcher: This one was easy. A.J. Pierzynski was the only catcher in baseball with more than 350 plate appearances that scored in the negative numbers on offense, defense and base running. Quite a few were in the negative for two of the categories, but only AJP nailed the three-fer. The Red Sox released him and then blasted him in the press (anonymously, of course) and then the Cardinals signed him and the guy actually played in the post season. AJP only walked 3.9 percent of the time and had a wOBA of .277.  With positional points because of the importance of catching, it is very difficult to score a negative WAR as a catcher. AJP nailed it.

First Base: This is quite interesting that the first two positions winning this award feature players who played for both the Cardinals and the Red Sox in 2014. And I hate to pick Allen Craig here as it feels like I am piling on. Mr. Craig had a brutal season in 2014 after being feted as the world's best clutch hitter in the years leading up to 2014. Injury probably played a part. Either way, he fell out of favor in St. Louis by a fan base that became enamored with Matt Adams and Craig became part of the trade that brought John Lackey to Cards. Hopefully, the season was an outlier for Craig as his 66 OPS+ for 2014 was half of what it was in the prior two seasons. Craig played a lot in the outfield too in 2014, but we will just limp it all together here. Honorable mention goes to Ryan Howard, but that is another story entirely.

Second Base: Alberto Callaspo had a fairly brutal season for the Oakland A's. His .580 OPS was awful and a hundred and twenty points below his career average. Plus, for the first time in his career, he scored in the negative for his fielding. He is a second baseman who turned 31 in 2014. The early thirties for second basemen is like the age of 27 for rock stars. Careers seem to die quickly at the position. Perhaps Callaspo will rebound. He will need to because his season was one of the rare misses of the Oakland front office. Oh, and Callaspo grounded into 18 double plays too. Ouch.

Shortstop: Yes, all you haters, Derek Jeter wins the Dan Meyer Award at shortstop for 2014. He was 20th in defense (there were worse, believe it or not) and he was next to last in offensive value. Obviously, his age caught up to him and his offense could not make up for his defense. But the commercials were cool and he will be in the HOF in five years. So there you go.

Third Base: This was another easy call. How about a 63 wRC+ and a .260 wOBA? How about being almost two wins below replacement level? How about doing that while not fielding well and not running well? And, he still came to the plate 607 times. Our hero here is Matt Dominguez of the Houston Astros. The former first round pick simply hasn't found himself in the Majors. Dominguez doesn't walk and he doesn't hit. That is a deadly combination combined with not fielding well and not running the bases well.

Left Field: It is safe to say that this is another easy pick. No left fielder has a poorer season than Domonic Brown and like Dominguez of the Astros, the Phillies have hoped against hope that this prospect ship would come in and it foundered instead. Brown was absolutely brutal in 2014. Like Dominguez, Brown had almost two wins below replacement. He had a 75 wRC+ and a .280 wOBA to go along with having a poor season in the field. Either Brown needs a change of scenery or he simply is never going to live up to the hype. Interestingly, Dayan Viciedo was the runner up for the second year in a row. That's hard to do.

Center Field: Fangraphs.com did not have any center fielders with a negative fWAR because of the position importance. Their two lowest ranking CF guys were tied at 0.4 and they were Michael Bourn and B.J. Upton. But Upton gets the nod because he had more plate appearances AND because baseball-reference.com DID rank him in negative territory. Poor Upton has become such a symbol of this new pitching age that he cannot seem to get beyond the mire he has found himself in the last two seasons. New glasses might have helped in the second half. But he still finished with a wRC+ of 74 and he struck out just shy of 30% of the time. Ouch. Fortunately, he is still capable in center field and can still go get the ball because his offense has been an Atlanta nightmare.

Right Field: What in the world happened to Jay Bruce? His OPS dropped a hundred and fifty-three points in 2014 from 2013. He batted his weight and his ISO dropped sixty points. His wins above replacement fell off five wins from the season before on both major stat sites. And while fielding statistics still have their flaws, they tell a story of a guy who fell down in his fielding as well. One big difference became his success against left-handed pitching. His OPS dropped against them by a hundred and eighty points from 2013 to 2014! I suspect that infield shifts hurt him as his BABIP fell to .269. Whatever the case, Bruce went from a very useful and valuable player to terrible in one fell swoop. Let's hope that it was a fluke season and he'll bounce back.

We could probably throw the DH in there too which would be Billy Butler. But he got to the World Series, so he can smile about it now. Adam Dunn was in the building, but at least he hit some dingers, a marketable skill set nowadays.

Thus is the list of Dan Meyer Award winners for 2014. God willing, come back this same time next year for the 2015 awards. And remember that the pitchers are not forgotten. The Kyle Davies Award winners will be announced soon.

Coming to Terms With Dusty Baker

No, this isn't a post about how much money Dusty Baker is going to make this year. This is a post about long-term perceptions about a man and his managerial record. Those perceptions were smug and happy when Baker's teams were not performing well. But then we are confronted with a Reds team in 2010 that defied all the projections and won their division over the almighty St. Louis Cardinals. The season left Baker just one vote shy of winning this year's Manager of the Year Award that went to Bud Black (a man who Baker once managed). After such a season, it's time to confront the stereotypes about Baker and take a closer look.

One place to start is his record. Johnnie B. Baker has now managed a total of seventeen years in the majors. Four of those seasons (or nearly 25%) resulted in his team leading the division. Six other times, his teams finished in second place. In one of those seasons (1993, his first) his team won 103 games and did not make the playoffs (no wild card then). The team that won the NL West that year was the Braves...an east coast team. Yeah, it was weird. Another time his team came in second, his team won the NL pennant after getting into the playoffs via the wild card. He has won the Manager of the Year Award three times (1993, 1997 and 2000). He has a .522 career winning percentage. That's a pretty good resume.

Baker managed the Giants for ten years. Only two of those years were not competitive. Every other year, the Giants came in first or second. He then moved on to the Cubs where they won their division the first year he arrived. That was the Cubs team that came within a Bartman of going to the World Series. Up until that season and during it, the perception of Baker was all good. But unlike San Francisco, where he had sustained success, after the Bartman series, the Cubs went downhill and every remaining year that Baker was there was worse than the year before. The Cubs won 89 games in 2004 and then 79 and then 66. When things go sour at Wrigley, things go sour. Just ask Lou Piniella.

It was those last two years in Chicago that the perception turned sour. And to be frank, the Fan is mostly talking about himself, but the Fan isn't alone. Baker became reviled in Chicago. The fall from grace after his initial season led to his reputation that he ruined young pitchers. The reputation is at least partly earned. Prior, Wood and Clement all pitched over 200 innings as young men in 2003. None of the three would ever be the same. It may be argued that he did the same thing to Shawn Estes in 1997 and Bill Swift in 1993.

Estes is a particularly gruesome story. Estes only logged 70 major league innings in 1996. He was really young at the time. In 1997, he pitched over 200 innings despite walking 100 batters. Think about that for a second. Estes had never pitched that many innings before and despite pitching behind most of that year, he won 19 games with a 3.19 ERA. If you look at his game log, almost every single game featured him throwing 110 or more or 120 or more pitches. Estes never again had a year as good as 1997.

Bill Swift pitched mostly in relief up until 1992. He saved 17 games in 1991. He was converted to a starter in 1992 and pitched 164 innings, a jump of 70 innings from the year before, but still reasonable. 1993 was Baker's first year with the Giants and as mentioned, they won 103 games and fought for the pennant down until the final day of the season only to fall one short. Swift jumped to 232 innings that season. He was never the same pitcher again.

All that said, Baker didn't manage in a vacuum. He had bosses who could have made him take care of his pitchers. The whole idea of gradually breaking pitchers in was just beginning in the late 1990s. Baker came from another era. His GMs didn't stop him from giving young pitchers so many innings. His pitching coaches didn't. But the damage was done. What happened to Prior, Wood and Clement combined with the Cubs slide permanently scarred Baker.

That's why it was surprising to this observer when the Reds hired him in 2008. Unlike the Cubs experience, each year has gone a little better for the Reds since Baker's been there culminating of course with the division title. He hasn't overused anybody. He handled Leake just right in this writer's humble opinion. The same with Wood.

There are other good things to say about Baker's run with the Reds. He's put Votto, Bruce and Stubbs out there every day and let them develop into great ball players. He handled his bullpen really well including changing Arthur Rhodes from a one batter specialist to a set up man when it warranted the big left hander. Rhodes had another incredible season.

Dusty Baker cannot be denied his 2010 season. There is nothing to point at to say he didn't manage it well. The big thing now is how the team will do in the coming seasons. Baker had a lot go right in 2010. Scott Rolen had his best year in a long time. His two catchers had career years. Votto blossomed. Bruce blossomed. The team just seemed to gel. It would be difficult to imagine some of those players doing as well in 2011 as they did in 2010.

But it really doesn't matter. This writer needed to come to terms with Dusty Baker as a manager. As usual, a manager gets too much credit when things go well and too much blame when they go bad. But Baker and the Reds didn't win the division in a fluky way. They did it the old fashioned way. They earned it.

Jay Bruce Is Important to the Reds

After completing his third season for the Cincinnati Reds, it is hard to fathom just how young Jay Bruce is. Jay Bruce didn't play college ball. He was drafted out of high school just five years ago (in the first round). He was only twenty years old when he came in fifth in Rookie of the Year voting in 2008. And now Bruce is only 23 years old. And yet, after Votto and Rolen, Bruce may be the third most important position player for the Reds.

Jay Bruce sealed the division title for the Reds on Tuesday night with a walk off homer. It was his second walk off homer of the season and the tenth time this season he has had a go ahead hit. Scott Rolen has 15 of those and Joey Votto has 33, which is an amazing stat and just one more reason why he is the MVP. But the point is that Bruce is starting to show the kind of player he can still be.

There were a lot of doubters last year for Jay Bruce. He was so bad for a while that the Reds sent him down to the minors for a brief refresher course. But he has rebounded nicely this year and with the exception of his strikeout total (which is too high), Bruce has posted the highest Batting Average, On Base Percentage, doubles, total bases and OPS of his short career. His 118 OPS+ is third on the team behind Votto and Rolen.

Bruce has also become an excellent right fielder and Baseball-reference.com gives him a dWAR of 1.4 for the season. Bruce has 18 assists in the outfield in the last two seasons. He has above average range too.

Bruce has looked much more comfortable this year and is going to the playoffs for the first time. As his .818 OPS indicates, he is on his way to being a very good player in the majors and at the age of 23, we haven't seen but the tip of the iceberg on what Bruce is going to accomplish in his major league career.