Shimmy And Shake
by Andrew on Dec 13, 2006 9:33 AM PST
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PrintLots of roster moves yesterday. First, the Pirates claimed Franquelis Osoria off waivers. Osoria's most interesting attribute is his 2.56 ground ball to fly ball ratio in 47 big league innings. Combine this with this almost mediocre strikeout rate, and you have a guy that might have a couple decent years as a middle reliever. I would have rather seen Tim Hamulack or Wilson Valdez go, but I'm not going to cry about losing Osoria.
Last night was the deadline for tendering contracts to arbitration eligible players. Joe Beimel and Mark Hendrickson are in, Toby Hall and Jayson Werth are out, and Wilson Betemit wasn't arbitration eligible in the first place, despite what I've been saying.
Hall was an easy non-tender candidate. He had no place on the Dodgers with the Lieberthal signing, and he would get three million dollars plus through arbitration, far too much for a guy with a career .300 on base percentage and mediocre defense. If Ned got anyone for Hall, I would have gladly tipped my cap to him.
In my world of lowered expectations, retaining Hendrickson is sort of a good idea. While he may not be very good, his strikeout rate is almost high enough for him to be a decent middle reliever, and if four or five guys get hurt, he's a better option to start than Danny Muegge. I guess this is worth the three or four million that Hendrickson would get in arbitration.
However, If you are going to retain Hendrickson, why would you keep Beimel? You already have one near useless soft tossing lefty, why do you need another one? Sure Beimel had a decent year last year, but that was almost certainly luck. His 3.85 K/9 ratio and 1.42 K/BB and .9 HR/9 don't give me much hope for his future success. Lance Carter had a better strikeout rate in 2006 than Beimel. If you want to take a chance on a guy like Beimel and sign him to a minor league contract, sure, why not, Beimel showed us that even the worst pitchers could have a decent season in middle relief. However, once you start paying a guy like Beimel actual money, he becomes a drain on the system. Retaining Beimel also creates a roster crunch, because the Dodgers kept Beimel, either Loney, Kuo or Repko need to start the year in AAA. While the solution here is easy to me, send Repko away and we never speak of him again, I doubt that's the decision that will be made. It's far more likely that Loney will go from the guy that should have been the first baseman to missing the 25 man roster in the span of two months. If Beimel is still on the Dodgers at the end of 2007, I'll be shocked.
Finally, there's Jayson Werth. A few weeks ago, I would have seen this as one of the worst moves Ned has made, but my opinion on Werth has shifted a little. One of the posts I never got a chance to make thanks to my avalanche of work was that Werth might have been a guy that got injured at the right time, his minor league numbers give no indication that the power he showed in 2004 was sustainable, so maybe he wasn't the .260/.360/.500 guy I hoped he would become. However, this is still amazingly short sighted. Even if you assume that Werth's power isn't real, he's still a huge asset. He's shown patience, the ability to play all three outfield positions, good base running skills, and if you're into that sort of thing, he had several big hits as a Dodger. Even if Werth only hit something like .234/.338/.374 like he did in 2005, he's still better than Juan Pierre plus he has the upside of that .260/.360/.500 season I was talking about. Isn't that worth risking a million dollars or so? When the best power hitter on the team is a guy sitting on the bench, should the Dodgers be desperately trying to retain anyone with even the potential for power? Colletti's willingness to get rid of cheap players with upside is rather disturbing.
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Total agreement
An additional factor in his favor is that he is right handed, and the whole Dodger outfield at this point is left handed. He would be a perfect platoon candidate in the corners (since we know Juan Pierre will play every game).
I think his power was real, though. He's a great big guy with a long swing--wouldn't it seem natural that a guy like him could add power as he came into his mid-20s? He lost his power in 05 because of the wrist.
I think Werth (if healthy) has a 20 homer season or two left in him.
by Alfredo Griffin on Dec 13, 2006 5:38 PM PST reply actions
Now hang on
Juan Pierre career line: .303/.350/.377
Jayson Werth career line: .245/.333/.420
Juan Pierre OPS: .727
Jayson Werth OPS: .753
Juan Pierre AB: 4110
Jayson Werth AB: 721
So Juan Pierre gets on base more, Jayson Werth hits the ball harder, and the additive difference just barely skews to Werth. The trouble is sample size: Werth just hasn't hit all that much. And regardless of explanations about injury and whatnot, he's had one strong half-season and one weak half-season. That suggests the kind of high variability that specifically demands a large sample size. Given this, it seems a little premature to start throwing around glib assertions about Werth being better than Pierre (for whom there's a nearly 6x larger sample).
Put another way: if your article is predicated on the notion that Werth's 16 HR in 2004 were anomalous, then they're the sort of thing that artificially inflates a small sample. Your own argument suggests that it's premature to say that Werth is demonstrably better than Pierre.
I also think you need to factor steals in there someplace, as those bases will erase some of the power advantage in Werth's slugging percentage.
All that said: I do think they should have tried harder to keep Werth - and I hope they end up re-signing him. They need power in a big way, and if they're willing to pretend that Kent's still got the chops to bat 4th, why aren't they willing to take a flyer on the possiblity that 16 HR half-season in 2004 wasn't a fluke? It seems like a cheaper option than the Gonzales signing, and perhaps more likely to work, if you're looking to hedge your bets on power.
Or maybe they just know his wrist will never, ever heal.
by librarian @ True Blue LA on Dec 13, 2006 10:02 PM PST reply actions
Re
Even in his terrible 2005, Werth was still a 3.2 win player. In twice as many at bats, Pierre was worth 3.5 wins in 2005 and 3.8 in 2006. Players with the skill set the Werth have displayed are incredibly valuable, and are worth the million dollar chance that his wrist is gone.
If you factor in SB and CS
Thanks for the thoughtful response! A long reply:
The first is that Werth has tremendous upside and should have been retained. I'm in perfect agreement with that. You'll note that I specifically closed my first comment by making that point. But that's only one half of the discussion.
The second is that the original post suggested that Werth is "better than" Juan Pierre. Indeed, the original post argues that he's better "even if he hit something like he did in 2005." (My emphasis.) My point is simply this: even if you use his (superior) career figures - as I did - the sample is too small to make this sort of argument about his hitting. Indeed, Paul Scott's response - that he's "just as good" - seems like a far more reasonable position, though still one that's based on a comparatively small sample to ensure reliability.
You'll notice that my comment in no way argues for Pierre's superiority: it's quite restrictively an argument about sample size. I would think that Andrew would be specifically receptive to that argument, given his long-term emphasis on the importance of sample size in evaluating players. See, for example, excellent past discussion of the Marlon Anderson acquisition: (Slowest Gazelle) and (Guys Named Delwyn). The Werth career sample is certainly much larger than the Anderson season sample, but Werth's bi-modal distribution suggests a very high standard deviation - and thus the need for an especially large sample.
That leaves the question of stolen bases. You're right that Pierre's high CS hampers him. But over his career, if you take his 325 SB, and subtract 116 CS, he's added a net of 209 bases. Add these 209 bases to his 1551 TB, and you get an adjusted SLG of .428, for an OPS of .778. Do the same calculation with Werth's 17 SB, 3 CS, and you'll get an adjusted OPS of .772. Now, this isn't a perfect measure: a CS can have a greater impact than merely erasing a single. But now we're in an area of intangibles that's very hard to mathematically measure. In any case, the difference of +.006 in favor of Pierre is statistically meaningless, given Werth's sample size: we just can't make arguments about which one of these guys is stronger offensively given the numbers available. Indeed - this is the very soul of the "upside" concept: Colletti should keep Werth because the data is not yet "in."
Defense is a different matter: Werth has been a very consistent ~110 Rate2 outfielder - the lack of bimodal distribution suggests that the sample is large enough to see a significant difference, here, compared to Pierre's 99 career Rate2. But Andrew's judgment concerned Werth's offense, not his defense. Same goes for the expense question. Both of these points are excellent reasons to keep Werth - which I think the Dodgers should have done.
This is already too long, but I'd like to close with this: thank you very much for this excellent, informed discussion. I know I don't comment much around here (and I know how hard it can be to trust the motives of an outsider), but I really am a partisan supporter of the reasoned, mathematical analysis Andrew provides here. Indeed, I followed Andrew to this blog from his old home at Dodger Math, specifically because I like this approach so well. I hope you'll read this as a friendly, interested conversation, and not as an attack.
by librarian @ True Blue LA on Dec 14, 2006 2:25 PM PST up reply actions
Mea Culpa
(Particularly since "his minor league numbers give no indication that the power he showed in 2004 was sustainable.")
by librarian @ True Blue LA on Dec 14, 2006 2:53 PM PST up reply actions
Clarification
I do agree that we have no clue if Werth can hit for power, but its certainly worth that investment to see if he can. There's a good chance that Werth would be pretty useless in 2007, he hasn't swung a bat in a year in a half, but a player with the skill set he's shown is worth the minor investment, even if it doesn't pay off until 2008.
Looks to me like we've reached agreement
Plus, one of my favorite Dodger Stadium memories is the night Werth clobbered a drunken yahoo with one punch, when said yahoo ran out onto the field late in the game. I'd pay him just against the chance he might repeat that valuable service.
by librarian @ True Blue LA on Dec 14, 2006 5:36 PM PST up reply actions
Roster
Jayson Werth is a fine player. The Dodgers will miss him.
I wouldn't keep either Hendrickson or Beimel. Hendrickson isn't consistent enough of a pitcher to fit into the starting rotation of a pennant contending team. Beimel isn't a particularly noteworthy reliever either. If the Boys in Blue are going to take the next steps up the ladder, they are going to have to leave guys like these behind.
by BlueLobo on Dec 14, 2006 7:47 PM PST reply actions
Hendrickson
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