MVN - Most Valuable Network

Shane Costa

For a 25 year old backup outfielder with a grand total of 99 major league games on his resume, Shane Costa certainly seems to get his share of play on various discussion boards. I would wager that he gets more mention that David DeJesus and Emil Brown combined.

Generally, there are two schools of thought on Costa:
1. He has a quick bat, some developing power, decent speed and might as well be playing instead of Brown or Reggie Sanders. I have even seen this camp metion Costa as THE answer at one of the corner outfield spots and we might as well trade Billy Butler for a future ace.

or

2. He cannot field, doesn’t have enough power and may be solely responsible for banishing Aaron Guiel to Japan. This camp will tell you that Costa has never hit at any level, will never be able to improve his fielding and at age 25 is done.

I reside somewhere in the valley closer to view number one, but am not firmly entrenched therein.

Shane Costa does have a quick bat and he can put it on virtually any pitch: he can’t always put that pitch in play, but it’s a start. Throughout his career, Costa has struck out roughly 1 in every 10 at-bats and roughly once every 8 times in the majors. Costa has yet to turn the ability to avoid the strike out into an ability to draw walks. In fact, the ability to get wood on the ball all too often puts Shane in an early hole (129 0-1 counts versus 83 1-0 counts). Consequently, Costa’s on-base percentage lags behind his other batting numbers and keeps his OPS in the ‘backup outfielder’ range.

Costa did exhibit some emerging power, or a least a power spike last season. He slugged three home runs in the month of April before going down with a hamstring injury, but none thereafter in the majors. Shane did mash 10 home runs in 199 at-bats for AAA Omaha during the year. Keeping in mind that Costa did hit 20 doubles in 72 major league games, if he could add a 15 home run bat to his resume - then he might draw consideration as at least a platoon piece in the outfield.

The potential Costa has with the bat is evident in that he posted plus 800 OPS numbers in two of the four months in which he spent the majority of the time in the bigs. His Post-All Star break OPS of .760 was one hundred points higher than his Pre-Break mark. Additionally, Shane gets better as the game goes on: his OPS in his 1st at-bat was just .631, by the 3rd at-bat it was .954. Those are all signs that Costa could become a decent everyday hitter.

Now, Shane did struggle mightily in the field last year, committing six errors and two pretty awful misplays (one of which was topped only by Kerry Robinson’s climb the wall for a ball that hit on the warning track routine as the worst of the year) that might as well have been errors. His throwing was erratic and his arm is probably average at best strength wise.

Now, I would point out in his defense, that Costa’s struggles were really not any worse than those of Emil Brown (see Craig’s column yesterday), Raul Ibanez and Aaron Guiel (who also spent some time in center without any real experience playing there) in their first seasons of major action. If you put any stock in Range Factors, Costa’s rating of 2.43 in right, 2.77 in center and 2.14 in left all would have ranked him in the top six at those positions had he managed those factors over the course of everyday play.

Will Costa suddenly develop into a 300-380-500 guy who tracks down everything in the field (and catch them when he gets there)? No. In fact, he probably never becomes better than average with good range in the field and likely will never develop the acumen to post really high on-base numbers. Even Brown and or Sanders are shipped out and Costa did post an everyday line along the order of .290/.345/.480 that probably would not be enough to keep Billy Butler, Mark Teahen and David DeJesus from being your everyday outfield in 2008.

Still, assuming Costa continues to improve at the plate and develop some power and assuming he steps up his defensive play to an average level, I view Costa as a viable option as your fourth outfielder. A guy you can plug in for three weeks when one of your regulars goes down. Frankly, after 99 games, his numbers are far better than those of Ibanez, Guiel, Torii Hunter and Luis Gonzalez. There are four pretty different careers, so I would say that the book is still out on Shane Costa.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 25th, 2007 at 1:54 am and is filed under Player Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.