Which Cleveland Indians Deserve Your All-Star Votes?
Less than two weeks remain before the 2011 MLB All-Star voting closes, and Cleveland fans across the country are sure to be punching their ballots for Tribe players to get as many Indians on the AL team as possible.
Believe it or not, several Indians are already among the voting leaders as of the most recent update. But before we cast our final ballots, it behooves us to ask: what Cleveland players really should appear in the Midsummer Classic.
According to yesterday’s Baseball Prospectus playoff odds update, the Indians have a 15% chance of making the playoffs, meaning they have a roughly 4% chance of reaching the World Series. That’s a real, if small, chance that the outcome of the All-Star Game and its prize of home field advantage in the Fall Classic will matter to the Indians.
With that in mind, blindly punching the ticket for the Tribe’s players might not be in the Indians’ best interest. To help you make your decisions, I’ve categorized the nine Cleveland players on the ballot by how much hometown bias it would take to justify picking them. Happy voting!
Pull the Lever
Asdrubal Cabrera, Shortstop (second, 1,647,802). He leads all AL shortstops in average (.296), slugging percentage (.507), OPS (.850), and wRC+ (142). Alexei Ramirez’ big advantage with the glove probably makes him the better player (he leads Cabrera in WAR, 3.1 to 2.4), but Droobs’ star power, presence on the most surprising team in baseball, and clutch hitting make him a solid choice. And someone’s got to stop Derek Jeter. (more…)
Is Cleveland Indians’ Lineup in Trouble?
The wheels are starting to come off the wagon for the Cleveland Indians.
The Tribe had lost five games in a row before last night’s victory over the Twins. Scoring wasn’t the Indians’ biggest problem through the rough stretch—they’d given up 6.5 runs a game this month heading into Tuesday’s action. But with just seven runs scored in their last five games amidst Manny Acta’s lineup shuffling—even last night, Cleveland won 1-0—questions have begun to arise about the reliability of the Tribe’s lineup.
But before any judgment is passed down, we Indians fans owe it to ourselves to ask the question: Are Cleveland’s hitters playing poorly, or are they just getting unlucky?
To answer this question, we turn to Batting Average on Balls in Play, also known as “hit rate.” BABIP is exactly what it sounds like: the proportion of balls hit inside the confines of the diamond that result in the batter reaching base, which for most hitters is about 30% of the time. While some players have abnormal natural hit rates, most major variations from the mean—especially this early in the season—are due to random chance.
Thanks to The Hardball Times’ super-special awesome xBABIP calculator, we can get an estimate of what players’ hit rates would be in a luck-neutral environment based on factors like speed, power, strikeout rate, and batted-ball profile. By plugging his expected hit rate (xBABIP) in for his actual BABIP, we can get an idea of how a player would do in a completely neutral context.
Using their xBABIPs and Power Factors, I calculated luck-neutral slashlines for all 15 Indians to have come to the plate in 2011. Here are the results, sorted by the differences between their expected and actual OPS+’s: (more…)
Manny Acta is Awesome, Part I: Tribe Manager Defends Carlos Santana
Fans and writers who get wrapped up in narrow-minded traditional statistics don’t think too highly of Cleveland Indians catcher Carlos Santana.
The 25-year-old backstop is hitting just .228 in 51 games. His 6 home runs, 24 RBI, 26 runs, and 2 stolen bases aren’t bad for a catcher, but they don’t compensate for the fact that he’s looking up at names like Yuniesky Betancourt (.232) and Mike Aviles (.230) on the batting average leaderboards.
Of course, that doesn’t tell the whole story. Santana has an extremely low .252 BABIP, from which we can reasonably infer that he’s gotten unlucky. But even if this was his true talent level he’d be a well-above-average hitter (119 wRC+ entering Friday’s game) thanks to a .692 Power Factor and the second-highest walk rate in the American League (18.4%).
There are some—the Plain Dealer‘s Chuck Yarborough, for example—who look only at Santana’s batting average and declare that he is mired in a slump. But, as the PD‘s Paul Hoynes reported Thursday, Indians manager Manny Acta is not one of them: (more…)
Buster Posey Injury: Outrage Over Collisions About Celebrity, Not Principle
The blogopshere has been abuzz about the proper place (or lack thereof) of home-plate collisions in Major League Baseball since San Francisco Giants catcher and arguable face of the franchise Buster Posey broke his leg when Florida Marlins outfielder Scott Cousins barreled into him in a play at the plate last week.
Some have defended the righteousness of such plays—injuries are part of the game, they say, and when a runner is barreling home in a close game, the catcher is obliged to take one for the team—but for the most part, the incident seems to have called attention to the need to put an end to baseball as a contact sport.
“Buster Posey should be the last catcher in baseball history to suffer an injury on that kind of play,” FanGraphs’ Dave Cameron wrote, while ESPN’s Buster Olney compared that allowing such collisions in baseball to “having a pile-driving contest in the middle of a tennis match.” Oakland Athletics GM Billy Beane even publicly declared that he would rather lose a game than see his catcher, Kurt Suzuki, put himself in harm’s way.
I believe the intentions of those who think a rule change is in order are truly good, and I don’t doubt the genuineness of any individual people who have come out in support of banning home-plate collisions. I happen to agree with them. But the national firestorm this has created isn’t rooted in deep-seated principles—it’s about Posey. (more…)
Nine Cleveland Indians Would Qualify for Free Agent Compensation Picks
It’s way too early for the Cleveland Indians to be thinking about free agency—only four Tribe players are not under team control for the 2012 season, and there will (hopefully) be a pennant run at Progressive Field between now and November. But the latest updates of the Elias free agent rankings are still noteworthy.
Every offseason, the Elias Sports Bureau designates the top free agents on the market as either “Type A” or “Type B.” If the Type A or B player’s team offers him arbitration after his contract expires and the player rejects, his former team is compensated for its loss in the coming year’s amateur draft.
In every case, the team that unsuccessfully offered arbitration to a ranked free agent gets a “sandwich pick” between the first and second rounds of the draft. In addition, whoever signs a Type A free agent must give its first-round pick to the player’s former team (unless the signing team has one of the first 15 picks, in which case they lose give up their second-round pick).
According to MLBTradeRumors.com’s latest Elias Rankings Update, nine Cleveland Indians players would qualify as either Type A or Type B picks if their contracts expired tomorrow. (more…)
