Welcome to my silly summer project, the Designated for Assignment blog. As some of you know, I’ve long held a small interest in writing and I figured, while I work three days a week over the summer, I might as well indulge my interest and work on my writing skills at the same time.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably a friend or family member whom I have pointed in this direction, or perhaps a follower on Twitter, all 4 of you. I’m still trying to figure out this whole Twitter thing.
What will I be writing about, you ask? Well, I don’t really have a clue, but as you all surely know, I am borderline obsessed with baseball, so inevitably the majority of the posts will be about that. I’ll try to mix in some team analysis, mostly Giants, with some broader-picture posts and some fun research projects. I’ll also be throwing in some random posts about nothing in particular; we’ll just kind of see how this goes.
You may note that the picture to the right is of former Giants and current Blue Jays left fielder Fred Lewis, who the Giants essentially gave away on April 15th after spending four years as an effective fourth outfielder. Lewis was drafted in the second round of the 2002 amateur draft, and when he made a six game cameo appearance at Triple-A Fresno in 2004, he appeared on Baseball America’s Top 100 Prospects list at #78. After 11 PA’s with the big boys in 2006, Fred posted a .292/.366/.550 slash line in 192 PA’s at Fresno in 2007 before coming up for good.
It was his year and a half at Fresno when I first became a fan of Fred’s. He was, to me, the kind of ballplayer I wanted to be: lithe, effortless, fast but with a touch of power, a good outfielder who played with a certain grace. I became convinced that Lewis was the Giants’ left fielder of the future.
Ah, but to be a Giants fan is to know disappointment. The Giants, instead of starting an exciting young outfield including the 26-year-old Lewis and the 24-year-old Nate Schierholtz (who had slugged .560 and played an astonishingly good right field in Fresno the year before), decided to resign a 33-year-old Randy Winn and to give Phillies reject Aaron Rowand a five year, $60 million contract. Rowand was 30 years old and, although he was coming off an excellent year in 2007, he had been below average in ’06 and ’05, and he promptly put up an OPS+ of 94 in 2008, 90 in ’09, and an abysmal 68 so far this season.
Anyway, back to Lewis. He received only 180 PA’s in 2007 and hit .287/.374/.408, and in 2008 he delivered a .282/.351/.440 line in 521 PA’s, good for a 105 OPS+. For some reason, he only got 336 PA’s in 2009 as the Giants gave a combined 615 PA’s to Schierholtz and Eugenio Velez (more on him in a minute), who delivered with OPS+’s of 81 and 83, respectively. Lewis didn’t even make the big league club this spring, and, after putting up a ridiculous .409/.536/.773 line in 29 PA’s in Fresno, was sent to the Blue Jays for $75,000.
After being told by the team that drafted him that he was unwanted, and three seasons as an average-at-worst outfielder, and after being sent to a more difficult league in the most competitive division in the sport to boot, Lewis has put up a slash line of .280/.324/.460 in 217 PA’s for Toronto, good for a 112 OPS+. Meanwhile, the Giants have given Rowand, Schierholtz, Velez, Mark DeRosa, Andres Torres, and John Bowker a combined 794 PA’s in the outfield this season, and they have OPS+’s of 68, 93, 67, 42 (!!), 134, and 58 respectively, with Torres representing the only batter who measures above average.
For some of that massive heap of epic fail, explanations can be gleaned. DeRosa, who’s 42 OPS+ almost defies belief*, signed for 2 years and $12 million before this season, and seems to have some sort of wrist injury that he’s been dealing with. Rowand is costing the G-men $12 million this season, and, incredibly, for the next two seasons as well. If there’s one thing a general manager has trouble accepting, it’s realizing that your $60 million investment isn’t exactly performing the way you had hoped. Schierholtz is only 26 and is just waiting for his power to come around, but in all honesty is receiving the PA’s he should have gotten two years ago and probably isn’t any better than a fourth outfielder. Torres is raking, and Bowker is another young-un who has hit in the minors and just needs exposure to big league pitching.
*Since expansion in 1993, there have been 16 seasons with 300 PA’s and an OPS+ of 42 or lower. The lowest? Luis Sojo, who put up a sterling 32 OPS+ for the Mariners and Yankees in 1996, with a slash line of .220/.250/.272. DeRosa probably won’t get to 300 PA’s this season, but it’s worth mentioning.
But it’s the curious case of Eugenio Velez that’s got me so furious. About a year and a half younger than Fred, he broke in with the big league club in 2008, a year after Lewis’s arrival. In the three seasons and 666* PA’s since then, he’s got a career OPS+ of 80, and an OBP of just .303, right at the Mendoza line of that statistic. He played well-below-average defense at second base in 2008 and 2009 before management decided they’d rather he play well-below-average defense in the outfield. But Velez offered an eye-popping tool, his considerable speed, which entranced management into keeping him around to put up a .275 OBP in 54 PA’s this season, while Lewis gets sold for chump change and promptly on-bases 50 points higher and slugs 90 points higher than his de-facto replacement.
*666? Ominous.
I just don’t understand why Brian Sabean decided it was time for Lewis to go and Velez to stay. The numbers clearly show that Lewis is a valuable player, and significantly more so than Velez. At worst, Fred is a major-league average outfielder, and for $455,000 he deserved better than to be kicked to the curb. These are the kind of decisions that can add or subtract two or three wins a season, and in the NL West that could be the difference between making the playoffs and watching them from home. But the Giants management never really has paid much attention to numbers, not when there’s a 34-year-old, injury-prone outfielder with a career 96 OPS+ who’s been traded twice in the last 13 months on the market for $6 million a year. Gotta catch ‘em all!
You know, it was the triples that made me fall for Fred Lewis at first. He hit 47 of them in his 2500 or so PA’s in the minors, and he proved those numbers were no fluke by hitting 11 in 2008, 7 in triple-happy AT&T Park. The triple is, of course, the most exciting play in the game, all nine fielders struck into motion as the runner rounds second at full speed, flops face-first into third and wraps his arms around the bag. The whole play is poetry in motion; it’s often described as “the most exciting twelve seconds in sports.” It’s hard not to love a player who regularly finds himself standing on third after a shot in the gap.
So long, Fred. You deserved better.
