River Avenue Blues

Will the Yankees gamble on Nick Johnson’s health?

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This year’s free agent market features a number of players who carry an injury risk. Some of them missed part or all of 2009, while others come with a medical red flag. These players will all get deals, though, as long as their demands aren’t outrageous. Teams love one-year deals. It means minimal risk for them. We’ve already seen the Rangers gamble on Rich Harden. Could the Yankees be the next?

The New York Post reports that the Yankees “are talking” with Nick Johnson about a one-year deal. It is not known how serious these talks have become, but George King has a quote from Johnson’s agent, Rex Gray, who says that “things are moving forward.” Even that quote, though, doesn’t explicitly refer to the Yankees and Johnson. So there’s reason to doubt the two sides are anywhere close to an agreement. But, if true, it presents an interesting option to replace Hideki Matsui at DH.

Johnson falls in the second category of injury risk free agents, the kind that carries a medical red flag. In his eight-year major league career, Jonson has broken 600 plate appearances just once, and has had more than 500 plate appearances just three times. One of those three was last season, a good sign, but Johnson’s injury history is long enough to give any team pause. From a Hardball Times article about Johnson:

In 2003, he had a fracture in his right hand, and missed more than two months of the season as a result. He struggled in 2004 after having a lingering back injury, as well as a fractured cheekbone from a batted ball. He never did on track during the 2004 season, in all likelihood a result of his back injury.

After that Johnson stepped to the plate 547 times in 2005 and then 628 in 2007. He ended the latter season on the DL, however, with a broken femur, the result of a collision with teammate Austin Kearns. That kept him out the entire 2007 season. He returned in 2008, starting slow before suffering a torn ligament on the ulnar side of his right wrist. Even during his mostly successful 2009 season he missed half a month with a strained hamstring.

When healthy, Johnson produces immense value. In only two seasons has his on base percentage dipped below .400 — 2002, his first full season, and 2004, the season he struggled with back problems. He walks more than he strikes out, though he doesn’t strike out a whole lot. His contact rate is right around Hideki Matsui’s. Even better, he had a reverse platoon split in 2009, hitting .281/.420/.389 against righties, but .316/.440/.444 against lefties. Kind of like…Hideki Matsui.

At this point in his career, Johnson’s weakness is his power. Once an asset, his ISO fell to .114 this season after residing around or above .200 in his previous healthy seasons. The wrist injury probably has something to do with that. He might recover some power in 2010, he might not. But even if he doesn’t, he’s still a valuable offensive asset. That on-base percentage and contact rate would play well in the two-spot behind Derek Jeter.

Signing Johnson as the team’s DH would probably close the door to Johnny Damon. If, as Joel Sherman has repeated for the past two weeks, the Yankees see Damon as a 70-game left fielder and 70-game DH, there wouldn’t be room for him on the roster. After a day filled with reports that Damon won’t return to the Yankees for less than the $13 million he earned in 2009, on a multiyear contract, the Yankees could be ready to move on. Or maybe the Yankees are using this to get Damon to the table.

While Johnson presents a medical risk, Damon carries a relatively clean injury history. He hit the DL for the first and only time in his career last July, and has 600 or more plate appearances in each of the past 12 seasons. In the two seasons before that he had over 500 plate appearances. He plays through minor injuries, and while those might catch up to him as he ages, he’s still a much better bet to bat 600 times in 2010.

Injury is the only risk Johnson carriers, but it’s clearly a significant one. If they sign him as DH and go with Melky Cabrera (or Brett Gardner) as the left fielder, they leave themselves vulnerable if Johnson lands on the disabled list. I’d like a Johnson signing much more if they were to land a bigger bat for left field. Say, Matt Holliday. Without him, a Johnson injury would devastate the lineup, leaving an outfield of Cabrera, Curtis Granderson, and Gardner, with Nick Swisher at DH.

Given the choice, though, between a multiyear contract for Damon at $13 per annum and Johnson on a one-year deal, I’ll take Johnson. If healthy he replaces Damon’s production (they had near-identical wOBAs in 2009), and any recovery of power would make that even better. Time at DH could also mitigate the injury risk. I’d rather have Damon because of his familiarity, flexibility, and durability, but if his demands don’t come down, Nick Johnson presents a quality alternative.

Photo credit: David Zalubowski/Associated Press

Tellem explains Matsui’s Anaheim move

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Apparently, Arn Tellem is really taking to this whole blogging thing. Just a few weeks after touting the virtues of signing Hideki Matsui, Tellem issued another Huffington Post missive. This time, he explains why Matsui went west. According to Godzilla’s agent, Matsui wanted to play for a potential winner and had the Yanks, Red Sox and Angels on his short list. Because the Red Sox have a DH, the Angels sans Vlad were an appealing target, and when they made an early offer, he was inclined to take it.

“In the end,” Tellem writes, “Hideki chose to accept Angel’s offer rather than wait for Yankees to decide whether they wanted to bring him back. Failure to act quickly might have caused L.A. to withdraw its offer and forced Hideki to sign with a weaker team, thus forfeiting a shot at another World Series. Conflicted, Hideki stayed up all Sunday night mulling his final move in this limited game of musical free-agent chairs. He didn’t want to be left standing.”

Matsui’s agent still believes the slugger to be “a complete player” and claims the Angels will test his knees in left field during Spring Training. The plan would be to give Matsui one or two starts a week in Anaheim. If that’s what Matsui and Tellem were after, the Yanks were never a viable option, and I have to wonder if the Angels will stick to their word or if those promises are just the sweet nothings of a December courtship.

Open Thread: Baseball’s nastiest pitches

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We all talk about how a guy has nasty stuff, whether it’s a lively 98 mph heater or knee-buckling curve or a changeup that seems to stand still in midair. As filthy as some of these pitches look on TV or in person, we now have the tools to evaluatem in a more scientific way. Using the magic of PitchFX, Tom Haberstroch (ESPN Insider only, sorry) determined what the nastiest (and meatballiest) pitches in baseball were over the last few seasons. Of the three best, two come from Yankee hurlers…

Mariano Rivera, cutter
This isn’t a lifetime achievement award; Rivera’s cutter is about as consistently good and destructive as any pitch anyone has seen. Somehow, the pitch has showed zero signs of age. The 92-to-94 mph cutter still treats lefties’ bats like dry twigs with right-to-left movement suitable for a slider and velocity more appropriate for a fastball. It’s not “see ball, hit ball” as much as it is “see ball, pretend ball exists four inches away, swing at air, hopefully hit ball.” Simply put, the human brain cannot react quickly enough to adjust for the lateral movement. The pitch’s most dominant stretch of the Pitch f/x era came in July of this past season, when Rivera threw the patented cutter 141 times and didn’t give up a single hit, with only two balls leaving the infield.

CC Sabathia, slider, 2008
Sabathia’s slider was an absolute beast in 2008 but of a slightly different breed than Randy Johnson’s because it relied heavily on horizontal movement instead of overpowering speed. In 2008, his slider gave lefties fits by bending an average of about six inches toward the outer half of the plate at 80 to 82 mph.

How nasty was it?

During a stretch of eight starts in June and July, not a single lefty mustered a hit off Sabathia’s slider despite swinging at it 61 times.

Sure, CC wasn’t in pinstripes in 2008, but I’m counting it anyway. The other pitch to crack the top three was the 2009 version of Tim Lincecum’s changeup. The worst pitches came from a variety of junkballers; Jeff Suppan, Livan Hernandez, and the like.

Elsewhere on the four-letter, Jerry Crasnick wrote a puff piece declaring Mariano Rivera the most valuable pitcher of the decade while simultaneously declaring Sidney Ponson the the worst.  I know Mo’s great, but come on, dude’s just a reliever. Why not vote a reliever the worst pitcher of a decade? Because they aren’t that important, and Sir Sidney hurt his team more as a starter. Why doesn’t that apply for the best pitcher as well?

Anyway, you guys know what’s up. The Nets are taking on Utah, while the Rangers and Islander kick off a home-and-home. Here’s your open thread. Treat it like you’d want it to treat you.

By the Decade: Yankee catchers

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With the baseball portion of the ’00s behind us, it’s time to reflect upon the Yankees by decade. On the whole, it was a very successful decade by the Yanks. The team won two World Series and four AL titles. They finished in first all but two years and bookended the 2000s with thrilling championship runs. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be exploring how the team looked by position, and today we start with the catchers.

[TABLE=42]

On the whole, as the above table shows, the 2000s were the decade of Jorge. The borderline Hall of Famer caught two-thirds1 of the Yankees’ games, and he did so with spectacular results. Say what you will about Posada’s current defense, but the man can hit. As a catcher, he put up a .286/.387/.500 and fell just one dinger shy of 200 home runs. The only knock against Jorge are the double plays. He hit into 128 of them over ten years.

After Jorge though, the Yankees see a precipitous drop in backstop production. On the whole, Yankee catchers hit .268/.354/.450, and everyone not named Jorge were pretty bad as a group. Yankee back-up backstops managed just 27 home runs and a combined offensive line of .224/.263/.326 in 1648 at bats.

It’s amazing to look through that list and try to remember some of the names. Chris Stewart made one forgettable appearance for the Yanks when both Jorge Posada and Jose Molina were injured. I do not remember Michel Hernandez’s five games in pinstripes. Wil Nieves was spectacularly awful, and even Ivan Rodriguez was but a shell of his former self in 2008.

For the Yankees, Posada’s success atop this list underscores the importance of having a solid catcher. For two reasons, the team hasn’t been able to find a decent back-up. First, no one wants to play behind someone as good as Jorge. Second, good catchers are very, very hard to find. That’s the driving reason behind my belief that the Yankees shouldn’t move Jesus Montero from behind the plate quite yet, and it’s a driving reason why Baseball America’s Top 10 Yankee prospects list features four catchers. In this day and age, developing a defensively solid catcher who can hit guarantees some modicum of success.

In August of the first year of the decade of the 2010s, Jorge Posada will turn 39. He may stick it out behind the plate, seeing reduced playing time of course, for the next few seasons, but when the next decade ends, he likely won’t be the team’s leader behind the plate. From our vantage point at the end of the decade, we can truly appreciate just how good Posada has been, and when we compare him to everyone else, well, it’s not even close.

Looking at his numbers, I can unequivocally say that Posada is the league’s catcher of the ’00s too. Perhaps Mike Piazza turned in some better offense numbers early on and perhaps Joe Mauer beats him these days. But no one else has sustained this level of play for as long as Jorge did. For the Yankees, behind the plate, it truly has been the decade of Posada.


1 Due to availability of the data and some late-inning replacement situations, the total numbers of games played by position will not add up to the 1620 games the Yankees played from 2000-2009. Numbers are from both Baseball Reference and the Baseball Musings Day-by-Day Database. (Return)

Revisiting the trade market for a left fielder

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With Mike Cameron now with the Red Sox and with Johnny Damon holding out for more cash, the Yanks have to explore new options to fill their left field vacancy. They might choose to sign a solid DH and keep Melky Cabrera in left field, but because they let Hideki Matsui sign with Anaheim, it appears they won’t explore that option immediately. Right now they’re looking for a solid left field option. There might not be a ton that interests them on the free agent market, but what about in a trade?

We’ve explored the trade market previously and have found little of interest. There are two names on the list, Josh Willingham and David DeJesus, who could, under the right circumstances, be attractive. The problem with both, though, is that they have two years left of team control at reasonable prices. Neither the Royals nor the Nationals have good reason to trade them, unless they got something significant in return — say, Austin Romine. That doesn’t make sense from the Yankees end. Why trade your No. 2 prospect for the relatively small upgrade from Melky to DeJesus or Willingham?

If the Yankees plan to upgrade their left field situation, they’ll have to sign a free agent — Damon, Matt Holliday, Jason Bay — or get creative with a trade. This might hurt. Since most of their top prospects aren’t near major league ready, they would probably have to deal a major league chip. For the Yankees, that means Phil Hughes or Joba Chamberlain. No, dealing either is not an ideal scenario, but perhaps the Yankees could find a situation where trading one of them would bring back a pitcher and a left fielder.

That means bringing back a bad contract — or at least an overvalued one. These trades get tricky, and chances are the Yankees wouldn’t want to take this path. With that in mind, these ideas are just for fun. They’re just different, albeit highly improbable, ways of acquiring a pitcher or left fielder. In fact, I’ll even call myself out before I start: my trade proposal sucks.

Would the Dodgers trade Matt Kemp?

With the Dodgers owners going through a complex and messy divorce situation, the team finds itself in a tough financial spot. Counting their obligations to players no longer on their team (Andruw Jones, Juan Pierre, Jon Garland), they owe $62 million to their 2010 team. That’s before their bevy of arbitration-eligible players. Matt Kemp, James Loney, Chad Billingsley, and Hong-Chich Kuo will all get big raises in their first arbitration years. Russell Martin, Andre Ethier, and Jon Broxton are in their second years. George Sherrill is in his third. This could end up costing the Dodgers a ton of money, so perhaps they’d be willing to trade one of those players for a most cost-controlled one.

Of the arbitration players, Matt Kemp is obviously the most attractive. Ethier put up good numbers as well this year, but he has poor lefty splits. For one player that’s not a big deal, but with Curtis Granderson in the fold, the Yankees should avoid any player with big platoon splits. Kemp can play good defense at a corner, and has a good bat. Would LA want more than just Hughes or Chamberlain, though? Kemp, after all, is the more known quantity. Or would they just accept a year of cheap production from Joba or Hughes? I’m figuring they’d want more, which makes this a bit tougher deal to stomach.

Would the Reds trade Jay Bruce and a pitcher?

One way to get more in a trade is by taking on a bad contract. The Reds have a couple of those in Aaron Harang and Bronson Arroyo. Neither is an ideal fit for the rotation, making any potential deal tougher to stomach. But if it meant bringing back Jay Bruce, would that make it more enticing?

In his short major league career, Bruce has been mostly a disappointment. He suffered a few injuries and had embarrassingly low on base percentages when healthy. He’s still just 22, 23 in April, so there’s time for his bat to develop. He’s particularly bad against lefties, or at least has been so far in his major league career, making him a bit tougher option. The Yanks would take a gamble not only on his development as a hitter in general, but also his ability to hit major league lefties.

Then there’s the pitching end. Arroyo has had his ups and downs in Cincinnati, and could be an option at the back of the rotation. Unfortunately, his salary is more in in with a No. 2 starter, $11 million next season with a $2 million buyout of his $11 million 2011 option. Is that a worthy trade-off for the gamble on Bruce? Probably not. The Reds would get a young pitcher in return, but would lose a young, promising outfielder. I have to wonder if they’d do this type of deal.

What about Josh Hamilton?

There’s little to no chance that the Rangers trade Josh Hamilton this off-season. He still has three years left of team control, and has been one of the team’s best run producers. Yet maybe, as Hamilton enters his first year of arbitration, the Rangers will look to cash in on him.

Hamilton has three years of service under his belt, but has amassed just 1406 plate appearances. He’s missed time in 2007 and 2009 with injuries, and in 2009 it appears that his injuries sapped his production. He fell from a .901 OPS in 2008 to .741 in 2009 and had just more than half the plate appearances. We know that Hamilton was disappointed with the Rangers’ contract extension proposal, so maybe, just maybe they’ll look to unload him now, hoping for a bigger return.

The Yanks would probably have to include more than Joba or Hughes, which, as with Bruce, is difficult when there’s such a risk involved. Hamilton is very good when healthy, but again, he has just a little over two years’ worth of plate appearances in three seasons. Still, he doesn’t demonstrate a terribly pronounced platoon split, and would likely see a power boost at Yankee Stadium. He’d fit perfectly at one of the corners and in the No. 5 spot in the lineup.

Of all the crazy, high-risk moves on this list, I like the Hamilton one the best. But, like the rest, it’s probably not feasible.

Outside option: Seth Smith

The Rockies probably have no reason to trade Garry Seth Smith. He has two more years of reserve-clause time, then three years of arbitration. But with Carlos Gonzalez, Dexter Fowler, and Brad Hawpe in the outfield, it appears Smith is again destined for a reserve role. Maybe the Rockies would be better off cashing in on him now.

The issue is of matching on prospects. The Yankees would not trade Joba or Hughes for a player with Smith’s home/road splits: .998 OPS at Coors vs. a .770 one on the road. His platoon splits aren’t terrible, .745 OPS against lefties and a .898 against righties, which is good, but it still doesn’t justify the move. The Rockies have no reason to trade Smith on the cheap, and it’s unlikely the Yankees would overpay for that type of player.

Brad Hawpe has better home/road splits and similar platoon splits, but he’d cost even more in a trade, even though he’s 31 years old this season. For his production he’s still cheap, $7.5 million in 2010 with a $10 million 2011 option ($0.5 million buyout). I imagine the Rockies would want even more for Hawpe than for Smith, probably one of Hughes or Chamberlain. I’m not sure I’d do that. It would also mean signing another starter, of which there are few on the market.

What all this tells me is that the Yankees probably won’t deal for a left fielder. They’ll either re-sign Damon, sign Holliday, or sign a big DH and go into the season with Melky as the left fielder.

Baseball America’s Top 10 Yankee Prospects

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Baseball America posted their top ten Yankee prospects today, and predictably Jesus Montero topped the list. Austin Romine and Arodys Vizcaino rounded out the top three. Four of the ten players are backstops.

In the subscriber only scouting report, Montero is said to have improved his defense behind the plate, however he’s still a below average defender. More importantly, they said he “hasn’t delivered completely on his raw power, but he’s close to projecting as an 80 hitter with 80 power on the 20-80 scouting scale.” That’s what I’m talkin’ about.

Andrew Brackman, who still managed to crack the top ten, was said to have regained some command in Instructional League. Good news.