Kevin's Royals Blog

Rodney Harrison's second interception of a Donovan McNabb pass came late in the fourth quarter in yesterday's Super Bowl, giving the Patriots their third championship in four seasons. More importantly, the pick ended the football season, which means baseball can only be right around the corner. To celebrate, I have a couple of (hopefully interesting) baseball-related thoughts:

It’s almost become cliched to say Zack Greinke’s a different cat who marches to the beat of his own drummer. Of course, he probably acts like a 21-year-old is supposed to act, but there’s just something very different about the way the guy pitches (he’s working on a knuckleball to go along with his grab bag of four other pitches, all thrown at varying speeds), thinks (like people decide what to wear in the morning, Zack decides how he’s going to pitch a few minutes before the game starts), and speaks (he ended his pitcher-of-the-year acceptance speech with an, "Uh, see ya."). Needless to say, whatever he’s doing is working, because he came up to the majors at 20 and held his own against the best hitters in the world, many being ten years or more his senior.

Most of Greinke’s success can certainly be attributed to his talent, but some of it also must be credited to his clearly advanced mind that allows him to remember how he pitched every hitter during a game, and not throw the same pitch in the same spot to the same guy in later plate appearances. The interesting thing is that while the Royals have taken considerably more interest in statistical analysis and performance scouting when it comes to the First-Year Player Draft, I think they’ve also started a fad by selecting players who are head-and-shoulders above the rest in understanding how to hit or how to pitch. For example, their selection of Billy Butler last June was widely criticized as another "signability" pick, but the Royals insisted that he was also worthy of being taken 14th overall because of his combination of power and on-base skills as an 18-year-old. He proved the Royals right, hitting a destructive .373/.488/.596 at Idaho Falls, KC’s rookie ball affiliate. In that same draft, the Royals took left-handed pitchers J.P. Howell (Texas) and Matt Campbell (South Carolina), two guys who are a tick below average on their stuff, but several ticks above average on their knowledge of how to change speeds and set up a hitter.

The advantage to taking these mentally advanced players is that it’ll likely take them a shorter period of time to reach the majors and allow them a better chance of succeeding right away. Baseball’s a game of adjustments, and guys like Greinke and Butler are way ahead of the game because they adjust to their competition all the time anyway.

Still wondering why Allard Baird hasn’t picked up an everyday left fielder yet? Detroit’s five-year, $75 million signing of a declining Magglio Ordonez should serve as a good reason. Just like last year’s contract with Ivan Rodriguez, the deal provides the Tigers with an out clause if the player spends a certain number of days on the disabled list because of a certain injury. In Ordonez’s case, if a recurrence of his left knee problems cause him to spend 25 or more days on the DL in 2005, the Tigers will have the option of voiding the remainder of his contract. It’s a good idea for a team to protect itself from dedicating a ton of money to a player with injury problems, but the Tigers would’ve been better-served by not entering into this contract in the first place. Check out his park-adjusted OPS figures:

SEASON	OPS+
1998	93
1999	119
2000	125
2001	135
2002	152
2003	142
2004	110

That’s a fairly simple way of looking at it, but it appears that Magglio peaked in 2002 and that his production has started sliding down the other side of the hill. It’s fair to say that the injury caused such a severe drop in his 2004 numbers across the board, of course. I think he'll be significantly more valuable to the 2005 Tigers than he was for the 2004 White Sox, but it’s the years after this coming season that have me concerned about the intelligence of this deal for Detroit. Ordonez is due $34 million over the final two guaranteed years of the contract, a lot of money for a player who will likely be nothing more than a shell of his former self.

Here’s an useless bit of trivia: In the ten years the American League Central division has been together, Ordonez is tied for fourth place on the all-time division home run leaderboard with 187 bombs. The player he’s tied with – Bobby Higginson – is, ironically, also the player likely to be released to make room for him.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 07, 2005 at 2/07/2005 01:53:00 AM. |