Where’s the Patience?

Bengie Molina has bashed three homers in a three-game span, powering the Giants to a pair of wins.  He’s got seven of the team’s NL-low 16 dingers, but through 104 plate appearances, still hasn’t drawn a walk, and yes, the Giants are last in that category as well as scoring.  Sadly, Molina’s .308 OBP is just the fourth-lowest among the team’s eight regulars, and it’s two points above the team’s rate.

 

Fun With Comparables

My favorite baseball annual, Baseball Prospectus, lists statistics for the players it profiles, and uses its proprietary PECOTA system to project a player’s likely statistics for the upcoming season. PECOTA projects player performance based on comparisons with thousands of historical player-seasons. The annual also lists for each player his four highest scoring comparable players, as determined by PECOTA. These are the four most similar comparables, and not the entire sample from which PECOTA generates its projection.

The comparables are only supposed to suggest what a player might do in a particular year; if the top comparables for young outfielder Johnny Wetcougar, 22, are Dave Winfield and Ed Delahanty, the most you can infer is that the system likes him and thinks he’s going to be a good hitter in the style of those players at a similar point in their career. The comparables do not suggest either that Wetcougar will deliver 3000 hits like Winfield or get drunk and fall off of an open drawbridge like Delahanty. The PECOTA comps are not destiny, but they do represent a snapshot of how the listed player was performing at the same age as the current player. Thus, if a 23-year-old hitter is compared to Sammy Sosa, he’s actually being compared to a 23-year-old Sammy Sosa, not to Sosa at the age of 31, when he was one of the best hitters on the planet, or Sosa at 38, when he was an adequate DH who could stand to be platooned.

Having made that statement, I am not forced to admit that I like to take them as destiny, or at least a hint thereof.  Between now and Opening Day, I’ll be taking a look at the comparables for each of the players likely to get major playing time for the Giants this season, with the hopes of discerning what sorts of performances we might expect from them.  We start today with catcher Bengie Molina.

Molina’s top four comparables are Brian Harper, Darrin Fletcher, Bill Freehan, and Jeff Conine.  Harper’s age-34 season was his second-to-last, and marked a steep decline for him.  He actually caught in only 25 games for the 1994 Brewers, a significant decrease from the 130-odd he’s caught in each of the previous two years.  He had fewer than half the plate appearances he’d had in either of the two previous seasons, most of those at DH.  His rate stats (.291/.318./398) may have explained why Phil Garner used him so much less, but it also had something to do with the rise of 24-year-old Dave Nilsson.  For the first time in six years, Harper’s EQA was less than the league average.  The next season, he had seven plate appearances with the Athletics, and retired.

Darrin Fletcher at 34 had 453 plate appearances for the 2001 Blue Jays, which was way too many considering his rate stats fell off a cliff from previous seasons.  .226/.274/.353 (a .218 EQA) is unacceptable, certainly from a catcher not known for his defense.  But with Kevin Cash the best catcher in their farm system, the Jays were a bit stymied for a solution.  So desparate were the Jays for a catcher that for 2002, they signed minor-league journeyman free agent Ken Huckaby, whose claim to fame at the time was one major-league at-bat, albeit for the 2001 world champion Arizona Diamondbacks.  Fletcher’s EQA fell to .202 in 2002, and he retired.

Bill Freehan was one of the great catchers in the 1960s.  A five-time Gold Glove winner, he held the career record for fielding percentage until 2002, and was runner-up for the AL MVP award in 1968, when his Detroit Tigers won the World Series.  At 34, though, Freehan was in his last season, catching in 61 games, the same number as Bruce Kimm, and only two more than John Wockenfuss.  He retired at the end of the season.

At 34, Jeff Conine still had six more years of above-league-average hitting ahead of him, and would play until he was 41.  The fact that PECOTA sees Conine as a comparable for Molina is encouraging, but the fact Conine was not a catcher makes this comp perhaps less reliable.

It might be argued that Molina’s career highs in RBI (and double plays hit into!) last season was the result of career highs in games and plate appearances, something of a red flag for a catcher who will turn 35 in July.  Fortunately, Molina is in the last year of his contract, and Buster Posey should be ready to take over behind the plate in 2010.