Good players on bad teams - Jose Altuve

I thought I would start a little series on good players that play on really bad teams. The subject has always fascinated me. The ultimate example, of course, is Steve Carlton who won a Cy Young Award in 1972 by winning 27 games on a team that lost 97 games. Just to give you an idea of how much of an anomaly Carlton was that season, he went 27-10 that year. The rest of the starters went 19-68! Carlton was rewarded for his efforts. But usually, good players on bad teams are overlooked because nobody is paying attention to teams playing so poorly. Jose Altuve is one of those good players.

Altuve is not without some notoriety. Known as the shortest player in baseball, Altuve is generously listed as 5'5" and 175 pounds on his Baseball-reference.com player page. And perhaps most know him as one of the best players on a really bad team. But I think he is still overlooked a bit. His numbers from his first two seasons in 2011 and 2012 do not blow you away. But most will not consider that he was only 21 and 22 years old during those seasons. Now in his third year, at the age of 23, he is still improving.

And despite his team's 13-33 record thus far, Altuve is certainly a bright spot. According to Fangraphs.com's leaderboard, Altuve ranks tied for sixth of the 28 qualifying second basemen in the majors. That is pretty darned good. While it is too early to really tell, one of the biggest upturns for Altuve has been his fielding.

In 2012, both B-R and Fangraphs ranked his fielding pretty poorly. B-R had him at 18 runs below average and Fangraphs at 13.4 runs below. This season, Fangraphs has him at 4.3 runs above average and B-R gives him five above. Altuve has made only one error this season, has improved his double play ratings and is showing more range.

And for a guy his size and considering that he has little support and protection, he is a very good offensive player. Altuve should easily surpass 180 hits at his current pace with an outside chance at 200. He has always had a good line drive rate and was over 20% in that category in his first two seasons. That rate is at 25% this year. He hits a lot of ground balls and that rate is up this year too. But that is not necessarily a bad thing for a small, quick guy. He has a .296 average on ground balls, which is way above the league average.

The big thing to watch for this season for Altuve is how he holds up during the season. Last year, his OPS for each month dropped every single month of the season. His OPS in the second half last year was 87 points lower than his first half. Like last year, Altuve is off to a good start. It will be interesting to see if he can hold up better than he did in his first full season a year ago.

I would not call Jose Altuve a superstar or even a great player. But he is a very good player who can do some things offensively, is playing better defense, will get his 30+ doubles, steal some bases and be an above average base runner.

Altuve is a very good player on a very bad team. That is a shame. He would get a lot more attention and be appreciated a bit more if his team did not guarantee that his efforts would be obscured by the mediocrity around him.

Jose Altuve under a microscope

This is the third post in which I try to rate how well I did on my first ever mock draft. To this point, I liked my catcher (Mauer) and did not much like my shortstop (Desmond). Today, I take a look at my second baseman, Jose Altuve. When I was looking at the available second basemen, I saw Altuve's name and I saw the .290 average and .340 on-base percentage along with the 33 steals. Those things looked pretty good to me so I picked him. I knew nothing about the guy except that he was Freddie Patek-kind of short. Altuve is listed at five foot, five inches which is ridiculously short for a baseball player. I wish now that I had known more than just his size and a few counting stats.

It turns out that Altuve was tied with Murphy of the Mets as the sixteenth best second baseman in baseball last season. Since there were twenty-two qualifying second basemen last year, sixteenth isn't very good. What hurt Altuve the most in his ranking was his fielding. And this was a big surprise for me. Of all second basemen that qualified for the batting title, Jose Altuve ranked next to last with his fielding.

The reason this is such a surprise is that Jose Altuve has better than average range. Both his range factor and his range factor per game were above average. But still, his fielding earned him -15.8 runs in 2012. Among ALL qualifying middle infielders, including shortstops, only one scored worse than -15.8 (Weeks). Heck, even Jeter scored better at -15.2. And that was despite Altuve coming in sixth in putouts and seventh in assists.

The problem, it seems for Altuve is he simply did not convert enough of his chances in the field. If you look at scouting reports, part of the problem seems to be his release is not quick enough and he doesn't have a strong enough arm. Then again, what would expect for an arm from a guy who is five foot, five inches tall?

Jose Altuve is not a bad offensive player. His offense rated at 5.9 runs above average and his base running rated at 4.2 runs above average. He did steal 33 bases, but he was thrown out on 11 attempts, which makes his success rate of 75% marginal. But he did score 80 runs for a team that was woeful on offense, so his on-base skills are noted here.

His patience at the plate improved a lot over the 55 games Altuve played in 2011. In that small sample size, his rate at swinging at pitches out of the strike zone was 41.3% according to PitchF/X. And he improved that to 29.4%. For a guy with Altuve's game, that needs to come down even more. But he hardly ever swings and misses. He did so at a remarkably low 4.1% in 2012.

Altuve hits his fair share of line drives at 20.2%, but he hits a lot of ground balls. His ground ball to fly ball rate is 1.94. That is extremely high on the ground ball side. His BABIP on those ground balls was .277, so it works out okay for him since the league average is .238. One interesting fact, though, is that since he hits so many ground balls, he only popped out to the infield two times in all of 2012. At least he isn't hitting into cheap outs.

All in all though, I probably could have done better with my choice, which shows I shouldn't perform a writing career change and focus on the roto world. But there is a flicker of hope. Two projection systems I looked at believe Altuve will continue to improve offensively while improving defensively to at least not so harmful. Apparently, that is the best I can hope for.