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.

Some really bad starts to the season

After the first week of the season, we are all smart enough to know not to make a big deal out of extremes in performance both up or down. Batters and pitchers will start the season hot or cold and generally will end up somewhere around where they usually do. Perhaps you can see a trend after only a week. But doing so should be with the utmost caution. 

Here are some players who have really started the season in a bad, bad way. 

Zack Cozart. Cozart has walked to the plate twenty times thus far. He has one successful sacrifice bunt. That is the entire sum of his offense. He has hit four ground balls, seven fly balls, three line drives and all have led to outs. He struck out the other five times. He has not walked. He is the only regular player who has no average, no on-base percentage and no slugging. 

Raul Ibanez. Old Raul does have a homer and has driven in four runs. Compared to Cozart, he looks giddy with his .211 batting average. But his BABIP is .375. It's a good thing, because in his twenty plate appearances, he has struck out ten times. In twenty plate appearances, Ibanez has put seven balls in play. Fortunately for him, four of them landed safely somewhere.

   

Mike Moustakas. The Royals were hoping that this was the year that Moustakas started to come on as a player. It could still happen, but is off to a really bad start. In seventeen plate appearances, he has walked twice...and that's it. He has only struck out twice, so he is the opposite of Ibanez. Moustakas has put thirteen balls in play and none of them found a happy home and all turned into outs. He has not yet hit a line drive. Oh, and he's made two errors already. 

Allen Craig. Somewhere, George Harrison is singing, "Roll over Beethoven." Craig has come to the dish 24 times. He has struck out three times and walked once. So he has put the ball in play twenty times. Seventeen of those have been ground balls. Naturally, only two of them have gone through for hits. 

Ryan Flaherty. Flaherty notched his first hit last night in nineteen plate appearances. His strike zone awareness is a problem. He has swung at only 43.3% of pitches IN the strike zone and 40.9% of pitches OUT of the strike zone. 

Ian Desmond. Desmond's numbers do not look too bad. How he got there is a little strange. He leads the Majors in swinging at pitches out of the strike zone at 52.8% and is second overall in total swing percentage. He is not getting cheated up there. He also leads the Majors in swinging strike percentage. Settle down, young fellow. And how can we forget.

B.J. Upton. The poor guy seems just as lost as last year. His contact percentage on swings is the lowest in baseball at only 56%. He just can't seem to get the bat on the ball.

Talked baseball on Dear Mr. Fantasy podcast

Chris McBrien (@cmcbrien) and the Fantasy Doctor (@TheFantasyDR) are really, really good at doing podcasts. They speak well (and fast) and the show is one of the best I have ever listened to. And it is entertaining even if you are not into Fantasy Baseball.

Next to them, I felt a little like a brown shoe in a tuxedo convention (to borrow an old comedian's line). But it was fun and you should listen. Just follow this link.

Semi-annual post on BJ Upton, the head scratcher

There seems to have been two concurrent and recurrent posts heading into the tenth season of writing this blog. The first was already avoided when Big Papi signed early with the Red Sox. That made this year's "Should the Red Sox sign him," post unnecessary. The second is a yearly or every other year pondering of B.J. Upton. Perhaps, after the year that his brother, Justin, put up last year for the Diamondbacks, he will become the third one. But let's worry about that later. First, let's ponder Melvin Emanuel Upton, the free agent.

Upton has played for eight years already for the Tampa Bay Devil and not devil Rays. And he is heading into his year 28 season. He was the second pick of the first round of the 2002 draft behind only the Pirates and Bullington. In nearly a thousand plate appearances in A ball, Double-A and Triple-A in 2003 and 2004, he tore up his leagues and was Baseball America's #2 prospect in 2004.

Upton got a cup of coffee with the Rays as a nineteen year old kid in 2004 and held his own. But he was still too raw so he played all of 2005 and most of 2006 in the minors and got another taste of big league life in 2006. That time, he struggled.

Even so, the Rays were ready for him in 2007. He was still an infielder then, or so the Rays hoped. He played 48 games as the Rays second baseman in 2007. But the move was already begun to move him to the outfield and 78 games were played out there.

And in 2007, it seemed a new superstar had emerged. He finished that season with an .894 OPS and a .386 wOBA. His .393 BABIP in 2007 should have warned us, but we didn't think as strongly about such things back then. All most of us unlearned writers knew was that he hit 24 homers and stole 22 bases and looked like a star.

He still looks like a star. But he hasn't really lived up to 2007 ever since. His OPS fell 110 points in 2008. It fell another 98 points in 2009. His power evaporated and he became a speed player who struck out too much. The last three years have leveled off somewhat for Upton. He has settled into the .750 range in OPS the last three seasons and his wOBA in the .320 to .330 range. His fielding and his base running were valuable. But he never did become that superstar.

Is that possibility still in there for Upton? Geez, every time you look at the guy, you just have to think so. Some players simply look more physically gifted than others. We notice that stuff as far back as grade school. The tools all seem there...the speed, the power in the bat...the glove.

But now he is a free agent and teams have to take a gamble on what he could be because his price tag will be higher than what he has been thus far. He'll be slightly cheaper than Bourn. But will he be the better buy of the two?

And you know what? For like the sixth time in the history of this blog, the answer is yes. Take Upton's 81 games out of the cavern in St. Pete and put them in Philadelphia or in Atlanta and you might have an entirely different player. Saying that, his career splits are nearly identical at home and on on the road. Hmm...

There are other annoying little tidbits. Upton had a .438 OPS last season against power pitchers. .438. Let that sink in a second. You can kill Upton late in the game with a power arm out of the bullpen. His OPS in the seventh inning in 2012 was a minuscule .377 and was only .554 in the eighth inning. In both of those innings, he struck out more than thirty percent of the time.

And though Upton's homer total rose to a respectable 28 in 2012, his plate discipline disappeared. For his career, Upton has only swung at 23.7% of pitches out of the strike zone. In 2012, that rose to 30.7%. And that is the conservative PitchF/X stats. Fangraphs has him at 32.7%. His swinging strike percentage of 14.9% was easily the highest of his career after averaging 10.9% for his career.

And both major stat sites have shown his defense to have deteriorated some this past season. Baseball-reference.com has never rated him as high defensively as Fangraphs has. But in this case, after watching so many of his games, Fangraphs seems more correct there. The guy can power glide with the best of them.

There is another troubling stat. Upton struggles against power pitchers, but he is the most successful against the fastball. He does not have a positive value against any other pitch a pitcher throws him. It would be interesting to see statistics on what power pitchers threw him. Was he sitting dead red and flailed away at their off speed stuff?

So yeah. Here we are again with BJ Upton. Once again, there is a lot of head scratching wondering if he will ever become the player we all thought he would be. Or is his game forever doomed to be flawed as pitchers exploit his weaknesses with him unable to adjust? This time, a team will have to shell out a lot of dough to find out.