The Thome Trade

I realize this post is not the most timely as the trade for Jim Thome actually transpired over a week ago.  But as more and more rumors of the Orioles being active players in the trade market continue to pop up, I can't stop thinking about what the Thome trade means for the direction the Orioles organization is going to take at the trade deadline.  If the Orioles were willing to deal two prospects for a 41 year old DH that most likely will not be with the team after this season, they certainly must consider themselves buyers at the trade deadline and contenders for a playoff spot.  The Orioles front office will most likely be looking to upgrade the roster at the trade deadline at the cost of either young major league players or prospects.  I don't think that is the right strategy to take at this point for the Orioles.

First, let's look at the Thome trade.  The Orioles traded Kyle Simon (RHP) and Gabriel Lino (C) for Thome.  Kyle Simon was a 4th round draft pick of the Orioles in the 2011 draft out of the University of Arizona.  Simon was pitching in High A Frederick and had accumulated a 2-8 record with a 3.96 ERA and a 4.44 FIP. The reason he was expendable was that he doesn't miss enough bats and only had a 6.07 K/9 rate with the Keys.  He kept his walks under control with a 2.60 BB/9 rate in 72.2 innings but according to Kevin Goldstein of Baseball Prospectus, his best asset is an upper 80's sinker that generates a lot of groundballs.  Without any plus secondary pitches, his profile seems to fit best in middle relief which is where the Phillies have already moved him. 

Gabriel Lino signed with the Orioles in 2009 out of Venezuela at 16 years old.  His numbers this season in Low A Delmarva aren't terribly inspiring with a line of .218/.282/.340 and only 4 home runs.  However, as a 19 year old playing his first season in full season ball, the scouting reports are very important for him at this stage of his career.  You can read a great scouting report from Mike Newman of FanGraphs here.  From the scouting reports I've seen, Lino has good raw power potential and the athletic ability to become an average to plus defensive catcher.  The bat is still a work in progress, but he's still very young so it has time to develop.  The range of outcomes here is wide, but he could have a career as a regular or a defensive minded backup if the bat doesn't develop.

So how much value is Thome going to bring to the club this year in order to offset the value of these two youngsters?  ZiPS projects Thome to hit for a line of .243/.339/.486 in 124 plate appearances which would provide 0.6 WAR to the team.  It looks like ZiPS still expects Thome to play in the National League and doesn't forecast the uptick in playing time available with the Orioles by playing DH.  So let's add another 100 plate appearances or so.  That makes Thome worth about 1.0 WAR from now until the end of the season.  This is a little simplistic, but let's say for the sake of argument that the combination of Chris Davis, Mark Reynolds, Wilson Betemit, and Nick Johnson would have produced 0.5 WAR at DH.  That makes the addition of Thome worth about 0.5 WAR to the Orioles this year on the field.

This is the 3rd time Thome has been traded in the past 4 seasons, so we should be able to gauge his market value from the other times he was moved during the season.  Here are the recent trades he has been involved in:

August 31, 2009: Traded by the Chicago White Sox with cash to the Los Angeles Dodgers for Justin Fuller. 

August 25, 2011: Traded from the Minnesota Twins to the Cleveland Indians for a player to be named or cash.  In September, the Indians sent the Twins $20,000.

June 30, 2012: Traded by the Philadelphia Phillies to the Baltimore Orioles for Gabriel Lino and Kyle Simon.

If you're like me, you had to look up Justin Fuller just to see who he was.  The best I can tell, he's no longer playing professional baseball.  Last year, Thome was traded for $20,000 and 2 years prior he was traded for a non-prospect who is now out of professional baseball.  But this year for the Orioles to get him from the Phillies (who had Ryan Howard coming back, no DH spot and no place to play him), they had to give up a decent catcher prospect and a future middle reliever?  Something doesn't smell right here.  Why would Dan Duquette agree to give up 2 prospects when the going rate was either one non-prospect or cash?  Now both of the prior deals were August waiver deals after the trade deadline but that shouldn't change Thome's value to this extent. 

This deal seems like an overpay.  In the end, it may not matter much if the two prospects the Orioles traded don't amount to much.  But we have to question the process that the Orioles front office took in consummating this trade.  The Orioles improved a very small amount on the field, while giving up a decent prospect in Lino and a not so great prospect in Simon.  Based on the prior deals that Thome has been involved in, Duquette should have been able to consummate the deal by only including Simon.  That deal would have been justifiable to take a shot at the second wild card, which the Orioles currently hold if the season were to end today.  As it is, it looks like Duquette misjudged the market price for Thome in a hurry to add a piece to the roster. 

Since the Orioles have a plethora of left handed DH types, this deal doesn't make any sense to me.  The Orioles real need is starting pitching, not a left handed DH.  I wouldn't be surprised if that's what the Orioles focus on next.

This started out as a post about what the Thome trade meant to the Orioles direction at the trade deadline.  It turned out to be a more in depth review of the Thome trade.  I guess I had more to say about it than I thought.  Next time, I'll outline my position on what the Orioles should do at the deadline and also what they're likely to do.  Somehow, I have a feeling that the two won't match up.

What's Behind Jake Arrieta's Fast Start?

Third year Orioles starting pitcher Jake Arrieta is off to a very nice start to the season through three starts with a 2.66 ERA and 0.89 WHIP.  Buck gave him the nod on opening day and so far has been rewarded for showing faith in the young right hander.  The ERA estimators agree that his good start is legitimate rather than just a result of good luck.  Currently, Arrieta has a 3.33 FIP, a 3.55 xFIP, and a 3.55 SIERA.  All of these are much improved marks from anything that he's put up in his previous two seasons.  Has Arrieta changed at all as a pitcher?  What's behind this good start?

Since three starts is still only about 10% of his work for the season, we have to be careful to not read too much into certain numbers.  Most of his statistics are not reliable at this point.  I'll just get it out of the way now...small sample size.  I know, I know.  But if we didn't analyze baseball in small sample sizes at this point in the season, what would we talk about?  With that out of the way, I'll do my best to only look at the stats that become at least semi-reliable in the small sample sizes.

The first stat that becomes reliable at this point in the year is velocity.  And that just so happens to be much improved for Jake so far this year.  Check out this velocity graph from fangraphs.  Click on it to embiggen.

His average fastball velocity so far this season has been 93.8 mph.  In 2010 and 2011, it was around 92.5 mph.  So through his first three starts, he's gained about 1.5 mph on his fastball.  There is no question that is a positive development.  I don't recall the exact number, but someone did a study on the effect of an increase in velocity for a starting pitcher.  There was something like a .50 ERA improvement for every mph increase.

It's more informative to look at his K% and BB% rather than K/9 and BB/9 at this point in the season, since it makes the sample size bigger.  Usually, I don't mind using K/9 and BB/9 but this early in the season, the percentages are better.  Through 79 batters faced, Arrieta has a 20.3 K% which is up from 17.8% last year.  So he's made a small improvement in his K%. 

Drilling down even farther, Jake has a swinging strike % of 7.5% so far in 2012.  In 2011, it was just about the same at 7.4%.  It's been shown that swinging strike % has a high correlation with K%.  League average has been about 8.5% for the last few years, so he's actually below average there.  He's accumulated 16 strikeouts in his 79 batters faced and 20.1 innings thrown.

It's in his walk rate where he's made a big improvement.  He's only walked 4 of the 79 batters he's faced this year, which is a rate of only 5.1%.  If he could somehow keep this BB%, we will see a big step forward out of Arrieta this year.  There's no way to really know if he can keep this up.  Throughout his minor league and major league career so far, his walk rate has been around 11%.  Hopefully, this is real improvement but his BB% just hasn't stabilized yet so it's hard to say.

The last thing I'll look at are his luck stats.  His BABIP is an extremely low .214.  Obviously, this won't last and some of those line drives he's been giving up will start falling for hits.  Jake is stranding 67.9% of runners that reach base, which is slightly below the league average of 72.5%.  We can expect this number to improve slightly.  Lastly, his HR/FB rate is fairly normal at 9.1%.

What I'd take away from Arrieta's performance so far is the fact that his velocity is up 1.5 mph, he's getting a little lucky on his balls in play, and he has greatly improved his walk rate.  If he can maintain the velocity and keep some or most of the gain to his walk rate, I think we're going to see the best year of Jake Arrieta's career this season.  Maybe the Orioles did have a real opening day starter after all.

I'll leave you with this look at the pitch f/x graph of his pitches so far in 2012. Enjoy.

Season Preview: Orioles



Photo by Steve Nesius/Reuters



I don't think anyone will be surprised that the Orioles are projected to come in 5th place in the AL East this season by my method or by anyone else's method of projecting team records this season.  The AL East has 3 of the best teams in baseball in the Yankees, Red Sox, and Rays and another in the Blue Jays that is quickly taking the steps to get to their level.  Unfortunately, that leaves the Orioles in last place for the foreseeable future.  With a terribly tough division, the Orioles just don't have enough talent to seriously compete.  But let's see what they project to bring to the table this year.  The fielding component is from the Fangraphs fan projections, so it has the least amount of reliability of all the projections.  The hitting projections are from Dan Szymborski's ZIPS system.  To see how I compiled these projections and analysis, see my introduction to the series here.

Catcher

Role	Player	Bats	PA	ZIPS BA	ZIPS OBP	ZIPS SLG	Fielding	WAR
Starter	Matt Wieters	S	600	0.268	0.334	0.429	5	4.5
Reserve	Taylor Teagarden	R	100	0.197	0.264	0.345	0	0

Wieters is projected to have a very strong season at catcher for the Orioles this year with 4.5 WAR, which is actually a little bit lower than last season's 5.0 WAR.  The hitting projections are similar to his season last year, while the defense projects him to be closer to human after being other worldly last year.  I think this projection could actually underrate Wieters for the upcoming season as he could easily improve further in what will be his age 26 season.  The power really started to emerge towards the end of 2011, as he hit 12 home runs in August and September combined. If he carries his power surge over into 2012, Wieters could actually come close to all of the crazy expectations he had when he was coming up through the minors. 

As long as Teagarden's back injury doesn't sideline him too long, he should see about 100 pretty dull plate appearances.  If he misses time, odds are Ronny Paulino will fill in as Matt Wieters' caddy and provide similar nondescript performance.  This is the only position where the Orioles are projected to get the most WAR in the division. 

First Base

Role	Player	Bats	PA	ZIPs BA	ZIPs OBP	ZIPs SLG	Fielding	WAR
Starter	Chris Davis	L	450	0.250	0.299	0.440	0	0.5
3B Relief	Mark Reynolds	R	220	0.218	0.320	0.361	0	0.5
C Relief	Matt Wieters	B	10	0.268	0.334	0.429	0	0
Depth	Nick Johnson	L	20	0.223	0.350	0.318	0	0
Prospect	Joe Mahoney	L	20	0.254	0.299	0.380	0	0

The team is only projected to get 1.0 WAR out of first base this season.  Largely, that is the result of a poor season being projected for Chris Davis.  ZIPS does project him to hit 23 home runs with 72 RBI's so the projection isn't all terrible.  However, he'll really have to bring his thunder stick to the plate if he wants to make up for his projected .299 OBP.  The playing time projections imply that Davis loses his job at some point to Mark Reynolds, likely in August or so.  The only way that happens is if the O's find someone else to play 3B.  Maybe they could move Betemit to 3B and find someone else to DH, whether that's Reimold, Davis himself or maybe even Nick Johnson.  That is providing that Johnson makes it to August in one piece; realizing with his history that's pretty unlikely.

Second Base

Role	Player	Bats	PA	ZIPS BA	ZIPS OBP	ZIPS SLG	Fielding	WAR
Starter	Robert Andino	R	500	0.249	0.301	0.358	3	1.5
Reserve	Brian Roberts	S	150	0.265	0.332	0.411	-1	0.5
Prospect	Ryan Adams	R	50	0.260	0.307	0.381	-1	0

Brian Roberts is still recovering from his concussion problems, though he recently began taking batting practice and fielding ground balls. Still, there isn't a time frame for him to return to action so 150 plate appearances is all we can reasonably project at this point and even that is just a guess. The projected starter at the position, Robert Andino is projected to be slightly below average and accumulate 1.5 WAR. As the Orioles second baseman, his triple slash is projected to be .249/.301/.358 with a positive fielding number. The 28 year old is more than adequate as a back up infielder at 3 positions, but he's stretched a little bit in a full time role. Though his game winning hit to end the season against the Red Sox last season was a sublime moment for Orioles fans.

Did the Orioles Change J.J. Hardy?

J.J. Hardy created a minor stir the other day in an AP interview when he claimed that the Orioles told him to change his approach during his first batting practice session with the team last year.  During his time with the Minnesota Twins in 2010, the hitting coaches told him to focus on hitting line drives the other way instead of using his natural ability to pull the ball.  Jim Presley, the Orioles hitting coach apparently told him to re-focus on pulling the ball, hitting for power, and hitting homeruns.  Since it's pretty rare to hear about a player saying that the Orioles changed him for the better, I figured I'd check into the validity of Hardy's statement.

We know that Hardy hit much better in 2011 than in 2010.  His triple slash in 2010 was .268/.320/.394 with a .313 wOBA.  In 2011, he slashed .269/.310/.491 with a .343 wOBA.  So he slugged .100 points higher, gained .030 points of wOBA and also hit 30 homeruns compared to 6.  But did he get better because the Presley told him to pull the ball?  Or was it just a good year and him finally being healthy?

Here is a picture of his spray chart from 2010 to get a better idea of where he was hitting the ball.

The spray charts in this post come courtesy of the great site Texas Leaguers.  J.J.'s 2010 chart looks pretty evenly balanced with a lot of fly balls to center and right field, but not that many to left.  It looks like Hardy followed the directive he received from the Twins pretty closely except for the few homeruns that he did actually hit out to left.  Now, here's his spray chart from last summer with the Orioles.

The 2011 chart has many more hits to left field than either center or right.  Look at all of those homeruns that Hardy hit either to straight left field or right down the line in left.  Hardy actually hit 26 homeruns to left field last season, while only hitting 4 to center and none to right.  Homeruns are good, right?  I wonder why the Twins didn't want him to hit them.

While following the Twins suggestion during 2010, Hardy basically turned into a light hitting shortstop whose only value came from playing good defense.  On balls that he hit to left field in 2010, his ISO (isolated power) was .168.  He showed similar power to all fields as his ISO to center was .125 and .159 to right.  But look at what he did in 2011.  His ISO to left field was an absurd .443!  The easiest way to calculate ISO is to subtract a player's batting average from his slugging percentage.  Anything over .200 is great.  His marks to center and right were similar to 2010, .111 to center and .099 to right.  ISO is a good way to measure a hitter's raw power, and looking at Hardy's numbers it's clear that he had a lot of success pulling the ball in 2011.

It's not often that we hear about the Orioles changing players for the better.  But this is a clear case of the Orioles hitting coach looking at a player's approach and making a change to help him.  Hardy turned from an all defense shortstop in 2010 to one of the Orioles best hitter's in 2011 because of Presley telling him to pull the ball.  Hardy definitely got his career back on track in 2011 by following Presley's advice and even earned himself a 3 year extension from the Orioles for $22.25 million.  Let's just hope that he can carry over his success from last year into the upcoming 2012 season.

Duquette on Defense - Part II

In the last post, we looked at the Orioles infield defense in terms of John Dewan's Defensive Runs Saved (DRS).  In this post, we'll examine their outfield defense.  The idea spurned from comments made by Dan Duquette on Clubhouse Confidential.  The projected outfield for the O's this year is Nolan Reimold, Adam Jones, and Nick Markakis.

We'll start with Reimold.  Though this will be his 4th season in the major leagues, due to injuries and management decisions he has only received a little more than a season's worth of innings in the outfield.  Starting with 2009, his DRS by season are -3, 1 and 2.  UZR disagrees with his defense in 2009, giving Reimold a -7.9 UZR and a -13.9 UZR/150.  2010 and  2011 are fairly similar under both systems.  I'm not sure how to determine which system was better in 2009, so we'll just say that he didn't have a great year in the field in 2009 but he's been about average in 2010 and 2011.  There's nothing wrong with having average defense in left field as it's considered more of an offensive position.  Though the Brett Gardner's of the world would maybe like to change that perception.

Adam Jones is the most controversial player on the team in terms of measuring defense.  None of the systems seem to agree on the quality of Jones' defense.  The gold glove recipient in 2009, he has been all over the place in the defensive metrics.  The best way to look at it may be in a simple graph detailing his defense since he became the O's starter in 2008.

  

	DRS	UZR
2008	11	5.8
2009	5	-7.6
2010	1	-4.3
2011	-9	-8.7

The only time that there is any agreement on his defense is from last year when both systems agreed that he was really terrible.  DRS says Jones was a great defender in 2008 and progressively got worse each season.  2011 was the only year that DRS says he was a below average defender.  On the other hand, UZR thinks Jones was a poor defender going back to his gold glove year of 2009.  My opinion from having watched him over the years is that while he has really good range in going after balls because he's a good athlete, he doesn't take the best routes to balls or get the best jumps.  Both of these things would hurt him in the metrics since they both measure the number of balls he does or doesn't get to.

In right field, the hope is that Nick Markakis will be ready for opening day after his offseason abdominal surgery.  Assuming that he's ready or that he's ready shortly thereafter, let's see how he's done on defense.  Nick put up a +20 in 2008, but then put up lesser marks of -4, -2 and -4 the last 3 years.  +20 is incredible; he should have won the gold glove in 2008, not in 2011.  Maybe it was a makeup call. Nick seems to have turned into a slightly below average fielder.  Already 28 years old, we probaby don't have a lot of improvement to look forward to.

This was a fun look at the DRS statistics of the projected starting Orioles defense this year.  It seems that some of the O's are overrated on defense such as Jones and Markakis.  But maybe Wieters is even better than we thought and Reynolds may not be as terrible as everyone thinks.  I'd be interested in looking at how Duquette uses DRS to acquire or get rid of players.  That's a little hard to look at considering the Orioles didn't pick up any hitters of note in the offseason.  We'll save that one for sometime down the road.

Dan Duquette on Defense

This is my first post ladies and gentlemen.  I will be primarily focusing on the Orioles but I may write about general baseball from time to time.  Everything I write about will have a sabermetric slant to it. I hope you enjoy my writing.

During this offseason, the show Clubhouse Confidential hosted by the great Brian Kenny on the MLB Network has quickly become a favorite of the sabermetrically inclined baseball fan.  Earlier this week, Dan Duquette, the GM of the Orioles was on the show to discuss the O's offseason and in particular his approach to advanced stats.  While the whole interview was extremely interesting for any fan and I'd recommend watching the whole thing here, the part that interested me the most was when Kenny asked Duquette what he thought was the biggest change in statistical analysis since his time as GM with the Expos in the early 1990's.  Duquette responded by saying the biggest change was in quantifying defensive statistics, and that he specifically likes John Dewan's Defensive  Runs Saved.

Defensive Runs Saved measures how many more or fewer plays a defender makes than league average and uses the compilation of the player's statistics to come to a final number of how many runs each player saves over the course of the season.  It is generally referred to as the plus/minus system.  After all of the plays are added up, a players's contributions are summarized in a nice round number.  Please follow the link for a more detailed explanation than I can provide here.

Since the General Manager of the Orioles claims to use the system, I figured I'd take a look at how the Orioles players fare to get a better idea of how the front office sees the players in terms of their defensive value.  The 3 O's players who are generally considered the best defenders are Adam Jones, Matt Wieters and J.J. Hardy.  Let's see if that holds up using DRS while looking at 3 years of data where possible.  Even the folks who created the various defensive statistics state that you can't make a determination on defense with less than 3 years of data.  The chart below gives some context to the numbers.

Defensive Ability	DRS
Gold Glove Caliber	+15
Great	+10
Above Average	+5
Average	0
Below Average	-5
Poor	-10
Awful	-15

Matt Wieters had a fantastic year with the glove behind the plate in 2011.  Donning the tools of ignorance, Wieters compiled a DRS of +14, which led the league for catchers by a considerable margin.  That total added about 1.5 wins of value to the team on defense alone.  And he's gotten better each year in the majors, starting with a -1 in 2009, following that with a +5 in 2010 and finally ending with the +14 we just talked about from last year. Wieters has also gotten better each year at throwing out runners.  Check out his percentage of runners caught stealing since his rookie year of 2009; it's pretty impressive.

2009 - 32%

2010 - 45%

2011 - 59%

Last summer, the Orioles traded Koji Uehara for Tommy Hunter and Chris Davis.  Since Chris Davis is projected to start at 1B this year, let's see how he fares in terms of DRS.  I'm only going to look at how he did at 1B since that is where he's projected to play this year, but it's safe to say he plays a below average 3B as well.  The last three years, the 26 year old has put up the following marks: -5, +1, -4.  Keep in mind that he hasn't been playing full seasons at 1B in the Texas Rangers loaded organization.  I think it's fair to say the Orioles projected first sacker this year is average to slightly below average at 1B.  If he's hitting for power, that's fine.  If not, he doesn't have his defense to rely on to provide value.  So he'll have to hit in order to keep his job.

It's impossible to know what the team is going to get out of Brian Roberts this year because of the concussion issues, but let's take a look at his defense if he does play.  Mired with injuries over the past 3 seasons, Brian compiled marks of -4, 0 and 1 over the last 3 years.  The 34 year old put up some great defensive seasons way back in 2003 and 2005, but it's safe to say his days of great defense are over.  The best we can hope for is average defense from the keystone position this year.

Shortstop J.J. Hardy was known for his good defense before he exploded for 30 homers last year.  In terms of DRS, he compiled a mark of +3 in 2011.  The two prior years were very similar.  It's safe to say that J.J. is still an above average shortstop but is no longer the gold glove caliber shortstop he was early in his career.  While he's hitting the way he did last year, he's an extremely valuable player.

Much has been made of Mark Reynolds' miserable defense at 3B last season.  According to DRS, the negative reaction was warranted.  He cost the team 29 runs more than an average third baseman.  That figure was more than twice the next worst third baseman.  However, there is a theory that players have off years in the field just like they have off years at the plate.  If there was ever a player who had a chance to test that theory, it would be Reynolds.  The two years prior, he was worth -3 and -6 runs below average.  Still not great, but not nearly the disaster we saw last season.  For the Orioles sake, let's hope that he had an off year and won't be this bad going forward.  If he is, I see a permanent move to 1B in his future.

Next time, we'll take a look at the outfielders.