Let’s wrap up an interesting work week of baseball news with some links from around the web.
Raul Ibanez is confounding his critics, writes Jeff Passan. Count me among the harsh critics of the puzzling move.
While Ibanez is off to a fantastic start at the plate and, surprisingly, in the outfield, though, my stance has not changed. Too many people are focusing on the results, not the process that guided the decision. Not to mention, the left fielder and his line of .343/.405/.676 and 174 OPS+ are certainly going to regress back to the mean considerably, as he has been known to have hot spurts for months at a time. At the price–including the draft pick attached to his Type A free agent status–there are not too many legitimate defenses to paying a 36-year-old outfielder that much, especially in the economic climate in which it went down.
The most interesting quote in the article, though, came from Philadelphia Phillies general manager Ruben Amaro.
When the Phillies signed Ibanez, general manager Ruben Amaro Jr.
said they considered Ibanez an average defender, perhaps a tick below
average. Never did they bother with statistics that claimed Ibanez
among the game’s worst fielders.
“I do not buy numbers defensively. At all,” Amaro said. “I look at
fielding percentage. But that other business? I don’t buy it a lick. I
think defense is subjective. You know, if you watch a guy, whether he
has range or not. You can’t study a guy’s routes to the ball by the
numbers. It doesn’t happen.“
For a general manager to admit being ignorant to a metric that can help him carry out his job more effectively–and then citing fielding percentage, which does not account for balls that players do not reach–is a concerning development for Philly fans.
It is indeed surprising that Ibanez has graded out so well defensively, according to +- and UZR. Banking on that trend to last seems like a trap, though, and I doubt the left-handed-hitting outfielder will rank near the top of FanGraphs’ WAR for too much longer.
And there are still two years left after 2009. I am happy Ibanez is doing so well. He is a hard worker and good presence in the clubhouse, making him a tough player to root against. Odds are, though, the deal will seem like the mistake many predicted it would become at its conclusion. Sample size 101.
The end of the Emilio Bonifacio era in Florida? According to Dave Cameron, it could be coming soon.
I am not a fan of Murray Chass, but he wrote an excellent column–I will not call it a blog post, Murray, don’t worry–on Selena Roberts’ lack of credibility and his opinion of her book about Alex Rodriguez.
Steven Goldman chimes in with his take on the book. Goldman is one of many writers to question Roberts’ credibility (or lack thereof).
Writing for YES as I do, I run the risk of being labeled a pro-Rod
shill if I defend Alex Rodriguez too vigorously. And yet, I’ve been a
Selena Roberts detractor for years, because whenever she picked up her
pen to write about baseball as a New York Times columnist I
tended to become ill. I go out of my way not to attack fellow writers
out of a sense of professional courtesy, but when Roberts wrote
passages such as —
At 42, Beane didn’t invent
sabermetrics, a sci-fi word formed from S.A.B.R., the Society of
American Baseball Research [sic] (a k a The No-Life Institute). But
with its philosophy filtered through his Ivy League predecessor in
Oakland, Sandy Alderson, Beane applies the tenets of numeric efficiency
found in the stapled baseball abstracts of the 70’s fringe writer Bill
James.
– she sunk so far below professional standards that
it removed any obligation I might have felt. Anti-intellectualism and
schoolyard, ad hominem attacks aren’t deserving of professional
courtesy, and if she thinks Bill James is a fringe writer (those
“stapled baseball abstracts” quickly gave way to bestselling mass
market paperbacks and hardcovers), well, she is fringe ignorant.
Another baseball passage that sent me running for the bathroom was
written when Roberts imagined that Tony Clark was in a competition with
Jason Giambi for playing time.
She sided with Clark. “At the
plate, Giambi is a withering vision of power… with an on-base
percentage of .376, which would be impressive in ‘Moneyball’ wisdom but
falls flat in Yankees logic considering he is paid to produce runs, not
draw walks.” Walks produce runs, period, but never mind. Roberts also
argued that Giambi’s weakness with the glove meant that he was, “not
the Giambi that anyone expected when the Yankees seduced him with the
perfume of cash in 2001.” If Roberts expected Jason Giambi to be Don
Mattingly around the bag when the Yankees acquired him, she was the
only one. As I wrote at the time, going after Giambi for his defense is
a bit like saying that Mark Twain was a bad writer because he looked
terrible in a bikini. It wasn’t anything anyone ever expected of him.
Roberts
has a weak track record in terms of thinking and knowledge of baseball,
and she also led the charge against the Duke lacrosse players in the
2006 rape case, the one that ended with the prosecutor who brought
charges being discharged. As Jason Whitlock wrote on Saturday,
Roberts has never been called to account for these columns. Among her
last words on the subject: “No one would want an innocent Duke player
wronged or ruined by false charges — and that may have occurred on
Nifong’s watch — but the alleged crime and the culture are mutually
exclusive… A dismissal doesn’t mean forget everything. Amnesia would
be a poor defense to the next act of athlete privilege.”
Yes,
let’s look on the bright side, because jocks having slightly more
restrained keg parties makes calling innocent young men rapists
worthwhile.
Craig Calcaterra had an excellent outlook on the Manny Ramirez situation.
Sad news about Dom DiMaggio, who passed away at 92.
Ken Rosenthal believes that A.J. Hinch was a strange managerial hire for the Arizona Diamdondbacks.
Kevin Goldstein takes a look at Xavier Paul, the outfielder who was called up in the aftermath of Ramirez’s suspension.
