The Dodgers just acquired a shiny new pod, with wisps of morning dew suggesting a new day has arisen. The pod has all the shiny things that our current left field situation lacked. For the old school the vaunted three hundred batting average along with the ring in box is enough. For the new school his plus OBA of .350 seemed to seal the deal. The price was cheap enough, no quibbles here on the price.
These are the career stats of the Pod. You can hope he's all about 2010, but don't count me in that group
Besides the nice enough numbers for 2010 what do the peripherals suggest he's actually been doing. His current triple stat line is a glossy .310/.358/400 in a left handed Jamey Carroll sort of way. Dig a little deeper and we see a 35% hit rate which is 3% higher then his career norm of 32%. What does that mean? It means our Pod has been lucky and his actual (expected batting average) is really around .260. Baseball HQ recently took a look at the Pod on July 13th:
Latest Player Analysis : 7/13/2010 - The 2010 Forecaster had this to say about Scott Podsednik (LF, KC): "Age, health, opportunity questions conspire to make a repeat [of 2009] improbable." Last year, Podsednik had a .304 BA and 30 SB with the Tigers. This year, Podsednik has a .301 BA and 25 SB with the Royals -- and there are still two-and-a-half months left in the season. Was the Forecaster wrong? Podsednik has stayed healthy and received full-time AB, two things that seemed improbable. But his impressive 2010 owes much to good luck. Podsednik is riding a 35% h%, four points higher than his three year average. In addition, Podsednik's never strong power has sunk to a new low: he has a 39 PX, seventh worst among all batters with at least 200 AB. Taken together, the inflated h% and utter lack of power make it no surprise that Podsednik's .248 xBA is more than 50 points worse than his actual BA. In other words, his .301 BA is a FLUKE. -- Randall
So basically back on July 13th, the baseball HQ analyst expected our POD to start to normalize, and realize a fairly large drop in his batting average, which of course would then send his glossy OBA back to the more Pierre levels of .320 - .330. The man has a 6-7% walk rate, so his whole OBA is just about all batting average.
Now you can throw out all of what he has done up to the point he has joined the Dodgers because he has just joined a new league, in a much different pitching environment. He is leaving two of the best offensive environments in baseball for the pitching rich NL West. He doesn't have to do much to be better then what Xavier Paul gave us the last two weeks but I'd temper those expectations if anyone thinks they are going to get some kind of savior.
In the end what the Pod does or doesn't do doesn't really matter. Unless Andre, Kemp, Blake, and Martin start to hit, this team is going nowhere fast. The blame for the offensive decline should not have rested on the failure of Xavier Paul, but on the failure of the big hitters to produce when Manny went down. The Pod is just a band aid but unless they staunch the bleeding of our big bats, this offense will bleed out.