Continuing our breakdown of the Opening Day roster…
#20: Elliot Johnson
I already broke down Johnson’s game here, so I won’t rehash
it. While I don’t think Johnson’s performance is going to make or break the
season, I think it’s fair to say that how much playing time he gets will be a
pretty good gauge of how successful the Royals are this year. I imagine that
the plan is that he’ll start once a week at various positions, maybe twice a
week on occasion. That’s 30-40 starts, maybe 150 plate appearances. Maybe he
gets 20-30 plate appearances as a pinch-hitter, or as a late-inning
replacement, but really, he should max out at around 180 plate appearances.
(With the Rays in 2011, he got 181.)
If Johnson gets more than that, most likely one of three
things happened:
1) Alcides Escobar gets hurt, and the Royals elect not to
bring up Christian Colon to fill in;
2) Another starter gets hurt, and the Royals have so little
depth to fill in anywhere that Johnson is forced into duty;
3) The winner of the second base job tanked, the loser doesn’t
impress anyone in Omaha, and they turn to Johnson out of desperation.
None of these scenarios are appealing. (2) is the most
likely by far; if any Gordon or Francoeur or Moustakas or Hosmer or Butler get
hurt, Johnson is going to see a lot of at-bats.
Now, that won’t necessarily happen. All five players are in
their 20s, they all have a history of durability, and none of them went on the
DL last year. But – and this is no knock against Johnson – if you told me right
now that he winds up with less than 200 plate appearances this season, I’d feel
a lot better about the possibility that the offense takes a big step forward.
Unless, you know, Johnson himself gets hurt, and we’re
treated to a heaping dose of Miguel Tejada instead.
#19: Kelvin Herrera
As you know, I am overly fond of comps for young players,
and many of these comps make no sense whatsoever in retrospect. But all last
winter I said Kelvin Herrera was the new Rafael Betancourt, and – with one
important caveat – you could drop Herrera’s rookie stat line into Betancourt’s
career and no one could pick it out.
While their end results are the same, they get there in
different ways. Both pitchers rely heavily on a fastball that they throw with
pinpoint command, which is why they issue very few walks. (They both give out a
fair number of intentional walks, but strip those aside, and Herrera walked 15
in 84 innings – 1.60 per nine – and Betancourt has walked 107 in 618 career
innings – 1.56 per nine.) They both combine their control with strikeout stuff
– Betancourt’s career rate is slightly higher than Herrera’s.
Both also have fairly large platoon splits; for his career,
Betancourt has a .205/.230/.336 line against RHP, but .260/.323/.410 line
against LHP. As a rookie, Herrera was .235/.268/.311 against RHP, and
.275/.351/.392 against LHP. In Betancourt’s case, his susceptibility to
left-handers kept him in a set-up role for most of his career, although he
finally earned the closer’s role with the Rockies last year, at age 37, and did
just fine.
While the results look the same, their repertoires are
different. Betancourt’s main secondary pitch is a slider, and he tosses the
occasional changeup. Herrera’s main off-speed pitch is his changeup, and he
throws the occasional curveball. This is important because slider-centric
pitchers tend to have big platoon splits; changeup- and curveball-centric
pitchers tend to have small splits, if any split at all. One season is not
nearly enough of a sample size to judge Herrera, so despite his relative
struggles last year, there’s good reason to think that he will be able to get
left-handers out going forward. Particularly since his changeup is nasty.
The one important caveat, and the reason why Herrera has
potential above and beyond what Betancourt has accomplished, is that his
fastball is qualitatively better than Betancourt’s. It’s much faster, for one;
while Betancourt’s heater has registered in the 91-93 range throughout his
career, Herrera averaged 97.4 mph on his fastball according to Pitch f/x,
higher than any pitcher in baseball other than Aroldis Chapman last year.
And the other difference is that Herrera’s fastball sinks as
much as Betancourt’s rises. Betancourt’s groundball percentage for his career
is 30%, and was as low as 23% in 2006; both numbers are insanely low. Herrera,
by contrast, was at 55.5% last year, which is Trevor Cahill/Tim Hudson sinker
territory, only with a pitch coming in at 97 mph.
For his career, Betancourt has surrendered 65 homers in 618
innings; that’s not a bad ratio per se, but it’s the biggest weakness in his
game. Herrera, by contrast, gave up only four home runs in 84 innings last
year, and that’s not really a fluke. More impressively, he gave up all four
home runs by April 21st. In his first 10.1 career innings, Herrera gave up five
homers. Since then, he’s working on a streak of 76 innings without allowing
one.
Despite his flyball tendencies, Betancourt’s command has
made him a consistently effective, if not dominant reliever. He had one
transcendent season, in which he was arguably the best reliever in baseball, in
2007 (79 innings, 51 hits, 6 UIBB, 1.47 ERA). He followed that with his only
bad season in 2008 (5.07 ERA, thanks to 11 HR in 71 innings). Every other
season of his career has been almost indistinguishable.
I think that bodes well for the consistency of Herrera’s
skill set, only at a potentially higher level than Betancourt. The only real
concern with Herrera is simply health; he missed almost all of 2009 and 2010
before the Royals made him a reliever, and making 76 appearances last season
approached, if not crossed, the line of danger last season.
But if he’s healthy, he’s almost certain to be effective.
Given the variability inherent to the role, that’s a rare trait for a reliever.
#18: Aaron Crow
Well, I guess Crow is a reliever for good now. If the Royals
had known they were using the #12 pick in the draft – and giving a major-league
contract to – a reliever, I wonder if they would have still taken him. (In fairness,
I wanted Grant Green, who’s turned into the A’s version of Christian Colon, a
perfectly useful bench guy who’s going to be stretched as an everyday player.
Point, Dayton Moore.)
At least Crow’s a good
reliever; he’s basically a slightly worse version of Herrera. Herrera averages
97.4 on the gun; Crow averages 94.7. Herrera’s groundball rate is 55.5%; Crow’s
career rate is 52.5%. Herrera has substantially better command, possibly
because Crow tries to get hitters to chase his slider, which does lead to more
strikeouts.
That slider is the difference between the two. He threw it
39% of the time last year, which is an astonishing number for a breaking ball.
As he’s gotten settled in the relief role, he’s become exclusively a two-pitch
pitcher – he threw curveballs about 5% of the time, and exactly two changeups
all of last year. Unlike Herrera, he’s earned his platoon split honestly – for
his career, Crow’s line against RHP is .218/.298/.287, while against LHP it’s
.257/.333/.424.
Having two right-handed set-up men with varying repertoires
is an asset if Ned Yost knows how to use them. Despite last year’s splits, Crow
is the guy to use when predominantly right-handed hitters are due up, while
Herrera’s the guy to turn to when it’s mostly left-handers or switch-hitters
coming.
If this is Crow’s permanent role now, it would be nice if
the Royals take the bubble wrap off of him a bit. He threw just 62 innings as a
rookie – he was battling a sore shoulder late in the year – and last year,
despite pitching in 73 games, threw just 65 innings. Crow is five inches taller
than Herrera, he’s three years older, and he’s trained as a starter – he should
be the guy throwing 80-90 innings a season. Particularly with the improvements
the Royals made to their rotation, increasing Crow’s workload would help insure
that their big four relievers are the only ones who ever need to pitch in
meaningful late inning situations.
#17: Luis Mendoza
If he was projected to pitch in any kind of meaningful role,
Mendoza would rank a lot higher than this, because let’s be honest: we still
don’t know what he is. Is he the journeyman AAAA pitcher who, through 2010, had
pitched 84 innings in the majors and allowed 92 runs? Is he the pitcher who, in
his last 17 starts of last season, averaged over 6 innings a start and had a
3.82 ERA with a pretty K/BB ratio of 74 to 28? And where does the 2011 Mendoza,
who led the PCL in ERA but struck out just 81 batters in 144 innings, fit in
the equation?
I don’t know. I do know that Mendoza’s impressive
second-half performance coincided with learning a new cutter from Dave Eiland
in late June, adding credence to the theory that his improvement was not simply
random variation.
(Advanced data doesn’t really help here. Pitch f/x doesn’t
even recognize his new pitch as a cutter – it lists it as a two-seam fastball.
Mendoza threw his four-seam fastball over 70% of the time every year of his
career until last season – last year, he threw it just 28% of the time, his
“two-seamer” 40% of the time, and his slider, which he threw less than 10% of
the time previously, was thrown 22% of the time. My guess is that his cutter is
confusing their algorithms, and is getting classified as a two-seamer sometimes
and as a slider other times.)
I also know that Mendoza is still only 29 – he’s six weeks younger than Luke Hochevar – and that
he’s not even arbitration-eligible yet, and won’t be a free agent for four
years. So I know that the Royals should have a lot of motivation to find out
who he is.
But as it stands, right now he’s the team’s seventh starter,
and is more than likely to spend the year in long relief. A year ago that made
sense, because his OPS rose dramatically after his first time through the
lineup – but his difficulty the second and third times through the lineup
disappeared around the time he learned the cutter.
If it were me, Mendoza would start the year in the rotation, and get a month or two to prove whether he really can be a cheap league-average innings eater. If he lost the job to Bruce Chen, I’d argue that’s a defensible decision, and I’d credit the Royals for having enough depth that they didn’t need Mendoza in their rotation.
Instead, he’s going to lose his job to Hochevar. If the
Royals are right, more power to them. If they’re wrong, they can’t claim that
they didn’t have any better options.
#16: Greg Holland
I really don’t think enough has been made about how unlikely
Greg Holland’s emergence as a dominant reliever was. Two years ago, he was a
short right-hander with okay stuff and command issues, a former 10th-round pick
who in five minor-league stops never had an ERA under five. I don’t have my
2011 copy of the Baseball America Prospect Handbook on me, but I’m pretty sure
he didn’t even rank among the Royals’ top 30 prospects. He started 2011 in
Omaha and didn’t get called up until mid-May.
He then pitched 60 innings, allowed 37 hits, walked 16
batters and struck out 74. He became the second Royal ever – after Robinson
Tejada in 2009 – to have twice as many strikeouts as hits allowed.
It was one of the best middle-relief seasons in franchise
history, but given his history we wanted to see him do it again. And when he
got cuffed around in April, losing two games and allowing 13 hits and 8 runs in
6.1 innings, it looked like 2011 might have just been a wonderful outlier. But
it turned out he was pitching through a strained ribcage muscle; he missed
three weeks to let it heal, and when he came back was almost the same guy he
was the year before.
2011, all season: 60 IP, 37 H, 16 UIBB, 74 K, 3 HR, 1.80 ERA
2012, May 12th-: 61 IP, 45 H, 26 UIBB, 81 K, 2 HR, 2.08 ERA
His command was not quite as sharp, but he still missed tons
of bats. (While Holland’s K/9 ratio was a full point higher in 2012 than 2011,
he actually struck out a slightly lower percentage of batters overall – 31.5%
instead of 31.8%. But because he faced more batters per inning, he had more
opportunities for strikeouts. This is one example of why I’m trying to switch
over to strikeout percentage instead of strikeouts per inning.)
I didn’t see Holland pitch in the minor leagues, so I don’t
know if he’s a fundamentally different pitcher now than then. He threw hard in
the minors, but I wasn’t expecting an average fastball of 95.6 mph, which he’s
maintained throughout his career. He has used a nasty splitter as an out pitch,
although that can’t alone explain his success, as he throws it only about 5% of
the time. (I’m approximating – Pitch f/x doesn’t recognize his splitter at all.
I’m thinking the Pitch f/x people still need to tighten up their algorithms a
little.)
It’s tough to reconcile the pitcher we’ve seen the last two
years with the pitcher we were told about in the minor leagues. But the Greg
Holland we’ve seen has legitimate closer stuff, and he’s done it two years in a
row now, and at this point we can stop worrying about whether it was a fluke.
Like Joakim Soria, Holland was an unexpected gift for the Royals’ bullpen.
The difference is that Soria was unexpected because no one
had seen him pitch in so long, and it is to the Royals’ credit that they
scouted him and thought he could jump straight from A-ball and the Mexican
League to the majors. But in Holland’s case, everyone had seen him pitch, and
no one was particularly impressed.
But this is where relievers come from. They come from humble
beginnings, they come from the Northern League (Jeff Zimmerman) and from
underneath (Dan Quisenberry) and they master a new pitch (Bruce Sutter) and
they’re 28th-round picks who learn the perfect slider (Sergio Romo). Greg
Holland’s transformation is small potatoes compared to, say, Jonny Venters.
Relievers are comets that arrive unexpectedly, and disappear just as fast.
Which is why, when you’ve got a superfluous one, you need to trade him right
away.
The Royals never traded Soria because they never understood
that when you’re losing 95 games a year, a great reliever is superfluous even
when you don’t have a replacement. And they don’t seem at all eager to turn
trade from their current depth of relievers. But they really should. A team that
likely can’t find room for Donnie Joseph or Louis Coleman is a team that can
afford to trade relievers for help elsewhere.
GMDM is probably gun shy after the last time he blew up his bullpen.
ReplyDeleteSound reasoning on your part, Mr Navarre. Horrible reasoning on Mr. Moore's part.
ReplyDeleteUnless, you know, Johnson himself gets hurt, and we’re treated to a heaping dose of Miguel Tejada instead.
ReplyDeleteBecause, of course, every team has a backup utility guy that’s lights out, and should be clearly be starting for another team. Stupid Royals.
Having two right-handed set-up men with varying repertoires is an asset if Ned Yost knows how to use them.
I bet there’s some posts coming that shows Ned Yost doesn’t, right? Stupid Royals.
I think that bodes well for the consistency of Herrera’s skill set, only at a potentially higher level than Betancourt.
Huh, so a guy that throws way harder, with more movement, and a plus changeup might do better than a guy that doesn’t have either of those. It’s rocket science, people..
Is he the journeyman AAAA pitcher who, through 2010, had pitched 84 innings in the majors and allowed 92 runs? Is he the pitcher who, in his last 17 starts of last season, averaged over 6 innings a start and had a 3.82 ERA with a pretty K/BB ratio of 74 to 28? And where does the 2011 Mendoza, who led the PCL in ERA but struck out just 81 batters in 144 innings, fit in the equation?
I don’t know.
‘************
(Advanced data doesn’t really help here. Pitch f/x doesn’t even recognize his new pitch as a cutter – it lists it as a two-seam fastball. Mendoza threw his four-seam fastball over 70% of the time every year of his career until last season – last year, he threw it just 28% of the time, his “two-seamer” 40% of the time, and his slider, which he threw less than 10% of the time previously, was thrown 22% of the time. My guess is that his cutter is confusing their algorithms, and is getting classified as a two-seamer sometimes and as a slider other times.)
Of course you don’t know – the numbers aren’t giving you THE answers. Rany wouldn’t recognize a cutter if it hit him in the wrist. It’s really hard to evaluate somebody when the numbers just aren’t adding up, huh?
He has used a nasty splitter as an out pitch, although that can’t alone explain his success, as he throws it only about 5% of the time. (I’m approximating – Pitch f/x doesn’t recognize his splitter at all. I’m thinking the Pitch f/x people still need to tighten up their algorithms a little.)
Well, darn, if Pitch f/x doesn’t record it correctly, how can Rany know if someone is good or not?
Like Joakim Soria, Holland was an unexpected gift for the Royals’ bullpen.
That damn Dayton Moore, accidentally pulling things out of his ass, of course. He surely didn’t draft wisely, he just stumbled into a solid closer.
A team that likely can’t find room for Donnie Joseph or Louis Coleman is a team that can afford to trade relievers for help elsewhere.
Dayton Moore traded for Donnie Joseph last year. He drafted Louis Coleman. He brought them into this organization. He built the entire fuckin bullpen, again. He’s drafted bullpen guys, traded bullpen guys, built the entire thing pretty consistently. It’s absolutely ridiculous that you end your post with the idea that the Royals have no idea what bullpen people are worth, or how to handle them, or when to trade them, etc.
Wow, Unknown, you sure put on your cranky pants this morning.
ReplyDeleteNed Yost's struggles with in-game decision making is well documented.
Spending actual money on Miguel Tejada is a bad idea. If he makes the ML roster, he gets over a million dollars, money better spent elsewhere.
Dayton Moore is very good at building bullpens, especially on the cheap. Problem is, paying Soria what he was worth was like putting a Blaupunkt into a 1978 VW Golf. Rany's point is that Joseph and Coleman are good--making a superfluity of relievers in the organization. Trading one or two guys for a bench bat is not the worst idea in the world.
Ned Yost's struggles with in-game decision making is well documented.
ReplyDeleteSo is every single manager, ever. If you ask fans, no manager for their team has ever helped them win games, they’ve only cost them a ton of games each year.
Spending actual money on Miguel Tejada is a bad idea. If he makes the ML roster, he gets over a million dollars, money better spent elsewhere.
Says who? He’s barely even played yet.
Rany's point is that Joseph and Coleman are good--making a superfluity of relievers in the organization. Trading one or two guys for a bench bat is not the worst idea in the world.
No, Rany’s point is that, obviously, the Royals don’t understand that quality relievers are often short-lived, and they don’t know when to trade them. They’re clearly too dense to trade one or two guys for a bench bat. Stupid Royals.
Good thing I picked up my new Anti-Troll deodorant today. Mmmm smells lemony fresh.
ReplyDeleteOkay so Billy Beane chases a quality middle reliever in Moneyball but what did he really give up ?
My point is what will GM's really offering for Relief Pitching ? I don't believe GM's are out there offering the Royals anything for their current middle relief. I'm not sure that is an avenue to upgrade.
I do wonder, before Atlanta and Tampa Bay started turning out so many quality pitchers they are forced to make trades for the new ones coming up, did they see an increase in quality relievers first ? I don't remember anything about previous Royal pitching prospects except that guys like Colt Griffin never worked out for the Royals. Now they turn in above average relievers. Is it only a few more years before they start turning into #2 & #3 quality guys ?
Miguel Tejada is 38 years old. He didn't play in the major leagues last year. It's been five years since he was a 2-WAR player. Breaking camp with him would be a mistake.
ReplyDeleteAre you seriously saying that GMDM's record in trades is sterling, and doesn't deserve some criticism?
You didn't address my point about paying for a platinum-plated closer when the rest of the team was copper-bottomed. That shows that Moore does not have impeccable knowledge of the value of relievers.
I wonder is unknown realizes the Royals haven't made the playoffs since 1985 and Dayton Moore has yet to sniff .500 lol what a douche
ReplyDeleteOK, Unknown, time to come clean. Are you Dayton Moore, or Ned Yost?
ReplyDelete