Pain for Padre Pitchers

The San Diego Padres busted out for a 10-1 home clobbering of Miami last night, increasing their total season scoring by 11%. 

The "Hitless Wonders" were positively Ruthian compared to the 2014 Friars, who are not just last in the Majors in scoring, batting average, on base percentage and OPS this year, but for half a century.

Pitcher Ian Kennedy smacked a home run earlier this season, tying him for fifth on the club. Of the nine Padres with 50 or more plate appearances, just three are batting over .230 or getting on base better than 28% of the time. Overall, the team is roughly replacement level at the plate and on the base paths. Considering that they've stolen 23 of 31 bases as a team, replacements might be warranted at bat.

Petco is partly to blame for their struggles. The park is baseball's leading run-killer. But going into yesterday's game, Baseball Prospectus's R.J. Anderson reports, "even park-adjusted numbers produce a bad odor, as the Padres' .219 True Average is more than 10 points below the worst offense on record since 1950: the 1981 Blue Jays, who were led in plate appearances by Alfredo Griffin, owner of a .243 on-base percentage." 

Injuries have robbed the team of some of its top performers. Center fielder Cameron Maybin has missed two thirds of the season with a torn bicep. His replacement, Will Venable, is hitting half of Maybin's .361/.410/.500. Utility infielder Alexi Amirista (.185/.267./.272) is no Chase Headley at third; then again, Headley hasn't been himself either (.186/.250/.314) when healthy.

It's hard to imagine the offense not improving, if only because the worst offenders will eventually be replaced. In the meantime, Padre pitching has done its part to keep the team within five games of .500. But without more of those 10-1 shellackings, some history is going to get make in San Diego this year.

Deciding To Retire: It Helps To Not Be Good Anymore

You're 37, you've had a fine Major League career, one of the 250 best of all-time, according to Baseball-Reference.com. You've brought home to your family, your agent and your somewhat over-bearing Uncle $91 million. 

As an above-average hitter playing middle infield, and then third base, you made All-Star games and got down-ballot MVP votes. As recently as three years ago you batted .338, with time at DH, third, first and second, and led your team to within an out of a World Championship.

But that was in a ballpark that gets Valentine's Day cards from batters, on a team pulsing with hitters. As a second baseman and shortstop with limited range, hitting .300 was real valuable, but now that you're a first baseman and DH whose range could be bronzed, you're barely a replacement level player. 

Last year, you got shipped off to the geriatric ward in Philadelphia before getting rescued toward season's end by the Dodgers. You made $16 million, but no one is offering you more than a million or two this year to pinch hit, school the youngsters and bid adieu one road trip at a time.

It might have been tempting for Michael Young to discount his services to a contender in hopes of securing a ring and taking a run at 3,000 hits. But the odds of the former are long and the latter are astronomical considering he's 675 base knocks away. Moreover, Young is perched at .300 in the batting line and would almost certainly compromise his status.

So Michael Young has traded himself to his family with a batting title; a Gold Glove, however unearned; two 100+ RBI seasons; four seasons of 100+ runs and four seasons of 20+ homers. He led the league in hits twice, made seven All-Star appearances and conducted himself with class every day for 14 years. 

That's not a bad resume. It's not a bad way to go out.

The Critical Importance of Replacement Players

Seamheads long ago established the notion of a "replacement-level player" as the level of production a team could expect from a a freely available replacement -- generally considered a journeyman Quadruple-A player -- if their star suddenly succumbed to injury, illness or severe knuckleheadedness. (See: Ramirez, Manny) Its purpose is to divine the real value of a player, much the way we buy homeowner's insurance based on the cost of rebuilding the house rather on its market value.

Replacement level hitting for a right fielder is necessarily a more stringent standard than for a second baseman because right fielders who can hit .250 with 15 home runs come free with a purchase of 10 gallons of gas, whereas middle infielders who can hit their weight make Major League rosters as long as they bring their own gloves.
 
This explains (in part) why catcher Buster Posey, with a .919 OPS so far this year has been worth about 2.3 wins with the bat, while right fielder Jose Bautista, with a .975 OPS, has been worth just 1.7 wins. (The other component is ballpark: Posey plays half his games in a pitcher's park; Bautista plays half his in a stadium that favors neither pitcher nor hitter particularly.)

In truth, though, neither every team nor every situation has the same replacement level. A team that enters the off-season knowing its star third baseman will inaugurate the following campaign in rehab has time to recruit a fill-in whose talent level is closer to average. Similarly, a franchise with the advantages of a big market, payroll flexibility and a savvy front office can fish for bigger catches than can, say, the Padres.

None of which quite explains how three of the five most valuable Yankee position players are replacements. Presumably, DH Travis Hafner (.269/.387/.529), outfielder Vernon Wells (.270/.323/.477) and first baseman Lyle Overbay (.255/.292/.484) were available to the entire league. Indeed, Overbay, who compiled negative value for two teams last season before they cut him, is playing for the MLB equivalent of sofa cushion change -- $1.25 million. Yet the trio is filling in admirably for Alex Rodriguez/Kevin Youklis, Curtis Granderson and Mark Teixeira. 

It's important to note that although Hafner and Wells are viewed with jaundiced eyes, both have been above-average players for their careers. Pronk is being viewed against his heyday, which is long gone, and Wells against his contract, which was two years and $75 million more than was warranted. Wells delivered little for his $21 million each of the last two seasons, but the two before that he batted .275 and smacked 22 homers a season. Injuries have been Hafner's Achilles heal -- (ironically, he's suffered Biblically over the past decade, but an Achilles heal problem is not among his travails) -- but over the past four seasons, he's produced .268/.361/.453, or 25% above average.

The Sabermetric definition of replacement level for an outfielder is around a .600 OPS. The number wouldn't be much different for a DH or first baseman. Clearly, that is not the standard employed by the Yankees, whose three super-subs have published above-average chapters in April and May. Average OPS for premium hitting positions like corner outfield, DH and first basemen this year is roughly .744, a number cleared by Overbay and obliterated by Pronk and Wells.

Not every Yankee replacement is contending for an All-Star berth. Jayson Nix at shortstop (.230/.306/.294) has defined replacement-level while further burnishing Derek Jeter's bonafides. Eduardo Nunez, pressed into service at short when Kevin Youklis's bulging disc has required Nix to slide to third, is posting a .200/.290/.275 self-indictment with poor defense. With Youk back on the field, Joe Girardi can sit Nunez and endure just one offensive lost cause in the lineup.

Middle infielders who can swing a stick are hard to come by, even for the Yankees and even with lead time. Give a smart franchise time and money to plug holes at positions accustomed to big thumpers and apparently they can deliver starting quality players. Or maybe they've just been unbelievably lucky.

A Giant At First, At Last

This probably deserves a more in-depth discussion, but I've only got some stray moments to make the following point. Sometimes, your team's biggest pickup isn't the gold-plated free agent acquisition; it's the journeyman whose signing escapes your attention.

Case in point: the offfensively offensive San Francisco Giants signed Aubrey Huff in the off-season, following a desultory 2009 campaign in which he hit .241/.310/.384 for Baltimore and Detroit. (Plus, he attempted six steals in 2009 and got thrown out each time. Ouch.) But Huff had a stick befitting a first baseman prior to that, so the Big Men took a flyer on him.

Huff has rebounded to a more representative .281/.361/.450 so far in 2010, which is nothing for a first baseman particularly to write home about unless your sister has been staffing the position the last five years. Which appears to be the case in the West Bay. Here is the Giants' recent production from that position:

2009: .271/.328/.405
2008: .248/.313/.371
2007: .262/.324/.410
2006: .257/.307/.410
2005: .257/.316/.399

A .734 OPS from a first baseman, which is the best of this bunch, is the profile of a weak-hitting second baseman, and costs a team a win or two relative to the back-up first-bagger on any decent roster. The word for this is dreadful, or perhaps abysmal, or possibly awful. This is the level of expectation that awaited Aubrey Huff when he arrived.

Huff, at the sustainable pace he's on, adds four wins beyond replacement level. So San Fran has boosted its offense by five or six wins thanks to this one player whose addition was little noted. That's the difference between being a .500 team and competing for the wild card in the NL.

The Giants are nonetheless mired in an offensive swamp, scoring just 4.07 runs/game, worse than everyone but Pittsburgh and Houston, which is to say, the worst in the majors. It's not Aubrey Huff's fault that he's the second best hitter on the team, but even a side with the Giants' lights-out pitching can't win consistently with a lineup for which a hard foul ball is a moral victory.

So San Francisco may squander the six-game edge that Aubrey Huff gives them. That doesn't diminish the value they added when they made -- what seemed at the time -- a pretty nondescript offseason pickup.

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