MLB Trade Deadline: Do Cleveland Indians Need a First Baseman?
With just five days remaining before the non-waiver trade deadline, two of the Tribe’s needs are clear: pretty much everyone agrees that the Indians could use an outfielder and a starting pitcher.
Given Grady Sizemore’s injury history and the poor performances we’ve seen from Travis Buck, Austin Kearns, and Shelley Duncan, an extra outfielder has seemed like a wise investment for the Indians for months. And that was before Sizemore and Shin-Soo Choo both got injured and will be out for at least another month.
Meanwhile, Cleveland has been in the market for starting pitching help since November. Justin Masterson, Josh Tomlin, and Carlos Carrasco’s rotation spots are safe, but while Fausto Carmona has been unlucky and David Huff looked great in his season debut, neither can be fully assured of job security at this juncture.
But, looking at the depth chart, the Indians have another, potentially more pressing need that has seemingly gone unnoticed: first base. (more…)
Is Matt LaPorta Underrated or Overrated?
It’s safe to say Matt LaPorta’s career isn’t panning out as well as the Cleveland Indians had planned.
When LaPorta came to the Indians from the Milwaukee Brewers as the centerpiece of the 2008 CC Sabathia deal, Tribe fans were tantalized by whisperings of prodigious power and future 40-plus-homer seasons. He was ranked 23rd on Baseball America‘s 2008 Top Prospects list, and came in at 27th before the 2009 campaign.
He got off a decent start to his MLB career by hitting 7 homers with a .750 OPS in 52 games in 2009, but he flamed out in a big way in 2010 when his OPS fell to .668 and he was nearly a full win below replacement level (-0.9 WAR).
This year, he’s been something of a paradox: LaPorta is simultaneously being underrated and overrated. (more…)
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…)
Attention Manny Acta: Matt LaPorta is a Good Hitter
Filling out the Cleveland Indians’ batting order must be a hard job for Manny Acta.
It’s not just that everyone in the lineup is producing—it’s that, for many Tribe hitters, statistics to date aren’t necessarily reliable for predicting future performance. Michael Brantley, Asdrubal Cabrera, and Jack Hannahan are looking better than ever before. Travis Hafner and Grady Sizemore have gotten fairly lucky (when healthy—another factor), while Carlos Santana and Shin-Soo Choo have been struggling because of bad fortune.
There’s a lot of gray area here, and I don’t think there’s a single right way to fill out the lineup card. But there’s one thing Acta continuously does that seems to be to be objectively wrong: putting first baseman Matt LaPorta in the No. 8 slot. (more…)
