Let’s Stop Burying The Living
As you may have noticed, two new writers joined the site today. Erik Manning shocked everyone by writing about a member of the St. Louis Cardinals, while Dave Allen tackled the fly ball depth of David Ortiz. We’re all thrilled to have these two on board, and while I’m just a dude who writes here, I’m pretty proud of what the site has become. These two just keep adding to the awesomeness that is FanGraphs. Even if David fired me tomorrow, I’d still be a fan.
Anyway, I didn’t mention those two articles just to suck up to the new guys. Instead, I wanted to build off of Other Dave’s topic about Ortiz. During his disastrous run in April and May, you could walk around any city in America and run into someone proclaiming that David Ortiz was washed up. The bat speed was gone. He was off the juice. His weight caught up with him. He lied about his age. The theories were almost as numerous as the people spouting them, but the conclusion was all the same – Ortiz was finished.
Of course, he wasn’t actually finished. He was just about to start hitting like the David Ortiz of old, in fact (he’s at .308/.400/.654 in June, by the way). Despite what everyone saw, said, and agreed upon, Ortiz was on the verge of a big performance spike.
This isn’t an isolated incident, either. Last year, I was one of many who wrote off Carlos Delgado when he started the year hitting like a middle infielder. Right after we all declared him too old to play, he started hitting like an MVP candidate again. The Tigers cut Gary Sheffield because he looked done in spring training, and he’s been one of the Mets best hitters this year. Jason Giambi hit .208/.342/.379 in 2004, then led the American League in on base percentage in 2005. Scott Spiezio was released by the Mariners in 2005 because he was 3 for 47 and looked as bad as anyone ever has, then proceeded to post an .862 OPS for the Cardinals in 2006.
We could go on and on. The list of guys who have been written off as over the hill and then shoved that right back in everyone’s face is long and distinguished. You would think that eventually, we’d learn our lesson. There may be a point at which a major league player just loses enough of his ability to stop being productive, but we suck at figuring out when that point is. We’re so bad at it that we should just stop trying.
We haven’t figured out what numbers show that a player is truly washed up. We haven’t figured out what it looks like when that happens. We haven’t figured out how to combine scouting and statistical analysis to give us a warning before a player heads off the cliff. All we’ve figured out is how to guess wrong a lot. Young player struggle, old players struggle, middle age players struggle, and we don’t have any good way of figuring out why in most cases. Just because a player experiences a drop in performance, and is old, does not mean that age related decline is the reason for the performance. More often than not, it’s just bad luck.
Let’s stop pretending that we can identify players who have “just lost it” overnight. Too often, they find it again the next morning.
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Amen. Great point.
I think this has to do a lot with sample size. In a lot of cases, one or two months, or even a full season of dismal performance is not sufficient enough to conclude that a certain player is finished or not, especially if there is some kind of injury or other factor in the mix. But if you have a guy like Ken Griffey Jr. who has been performing at a near-replacement level for several years now, I think you have enough evidence to confidently say, “his days as a productive player are OVER.”
It could be small sample sizes or it could indicate erosion in skills. Guy loses bat speed, guy compensates to adjust. It’s probably very difficult to predict whether or not a player has enough left in their toolkit to make an adjustment, so while you may be able to detect the erosion, you wouldn’t be able to predict whether or not it was recoverable.
Hear, hear.
Great content as always, Dave.
Quick question re: WAR. Does a player with a WAR of 3 today (e.g, David Wright) mean that his value is 3 wins above replacement level thru this point of the season or 3 wins over the whole season?
Thanks.
WAR is a counting stat, so it would be 3 wins above replacement level through this point of the season. So if a player were to reach 3 WAR halfway through the season, and we projected him to play the second half as good as the first half, we would be projecting him to be a 6 WAR player for the entire season.
would the Mets go from say 35-34 record with him to 32-37 without him, or would it be 33.5-35.5. The whole “games above/below .500 conundrum. :)
THank you. Took me a while to get back to where I asked this question!
So you’re telling us the Mariners gave up too soon on Richie Sexson and Jose Vidro last year, and should resign them?
can we safely say that Brian Giles is washed up?
Did you read the article, or just skip to the comments section?
Spiby is all washed up.
Giles has had deteriorating performance for years now. last year he blipped up a bit, this year down a bit but the overall trend has been down.
His ISOs
2004 .190
2005 .182
2006 .134
2007 .145
2008 .150
2009 .080
Homers
2004 23
2005 15
2006 14
2007 13
2008 12
2009 2
wOBA
2004 .366
2005 .393
2006 .342
2007 .338
2003 .376
2009 .251
A couple of babip spikes to .320 and .321 in part explain ‘05 and ‘08 upticks in wOBA, as those are above his career norm and even his good Pirate years.
And it isn’t all Petco, as he used to hit more homers on the road than he does all year as a Padre.
And a platoon season or 2 babip spike for Spiezio when he was 33 as an example that players don’t slowly decline. Sure, they don’t usaully fall off a cliff, sans injury, but old players decline and sometimes get injured, usually (eventually inevitably).
Ortiz is having a nice little June and no doubt he may have been “buried” prematurely. His ISO has still gone from .349 to .290 to .243 to .157. Season isn’t over yet but he seems a decent bet to finish below .243 this year.
And maybe he will pop back up next year, even as a slightly heavy 34 year old, a time when guys of his body type of lore used to slow down a little bit.
Delgado had been injured in ‘07. Took him a while to snap back.
I do not dispute the general tone of the article. Hard to say definitively when a guy is kaput.
I think Spiby read the article and may have been kidding around a bit. But to me, Giles is on the road to done. He may have a nice little snap back but the decline pattern is pretty blatant. And I know there was a lot of defense of him, that he was worth the option, $9 million, WAR above 4 or whatever last year. I think that ignored somewhat the general decline pattern and vested a lot on the spike last year in his value.
Can he bounce back? I guess. I wouldn’t want to waste a spot on my team seeing if he will.
Yeah, damn, I thought it was time for a throw some dirt on Vlad Guerrero thread. What is he, 78 years old now?
Jim Edmonds last year, another example. Of course he can’t find work now…
Maybe teams were worried he’d revert a la Fernando Tatis. Unfair, as Fernando has hit into bad luck. I am just pissed as a Mets fan because he has hit into a zillion DPs this year
So there is hope for Magglio Ordonez, after all. I was getting worried.
Not sure I agree with this. Teams need to evaluate their players constantly, and figure out when to bench or cut their fading stars. When do we make those descisions?
Don’t be so logical swyck. Who do you think you are, Branch Rickey? :)
BTW, to steal a line, players go bad like people go bankrupt: two ways-slowly and then suddenly.
I agree with Swyck. Remember, all fading stars come around, except those that don’t. Bring back Richie Sexson!
Pretty much all the guys you use to illustrate your point are sluggers heavily suspected of juicing.
yeah, and why were they heavily suspected? because they suddenly started to suck! so what’s your point?