Yanks Acquire Pudge
The New York Yankees made a splash today, acquiring Ivan Rodriguez from the Detroit Tigers to replace the injured Jorge Posada behind the plate. In reality, Pudge will take at-bats from Jose Molina, who had been doing the catching in Posada’s absence. How big of an upgrade is Rodriguez over Molina?
Pudge is a slightly below average hitter, putting up a .295/.338/.417 line that translates into a -0.39 WPA/LI for the season. For a catcher, being a nearly league average hitter is very good, and when combined with his defense behind the plate, makes Pudge something like a +3 win player (compared to a replacement level catcher) over a full season. With 1/3 of the year left, that makes Pudge about +1 win over replacement covering the final two months.
Speaking of replacement level, Molina is basically the poster boy. He’d racked up -1.56 WPA/LI in just 192 at-bats, thanks to his .229/.279/.307 line for the season. While he’s a good defensive catcher, so is Pudge, and the offensive difference is pretty significant.
The Yankees just added a one win upgrade in their line-up in exchange for Kyle Farnsworth. Kinda makes the Angels marginal improvement yesterday look bad in comparison.
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But the Angels are already running away with their division, whereas the Yankees are in a three-team dogfight (and just as close a three-way for the wild card). Over the rest of regular season, one win isn’t going to make any difference to the Angels; for the Yankees, it could be the dividing line between going on and going home.
Or, looking at it another way, the Angels had fewer gaping holes so it’s harder for them to make much of an improvement with any single deal.
Fewer gaping holes? Isn’t Juan Rivera/Garrett Anderson/Gary Matthews Jr. their LF/DH platoon? Aybar/Izturis at short? An injured Mike Napoli and Jeff Mathis at catcher?
Agree with traced. Angels needed a big bat but first base was not the optimal position for improvement. Although there wasn’t much out there (I wonder what the price for Bay really is?).
Very excited Yankee fan here. Great trade for the Yankees. When I first heard they traded Farnsworth for Pudge, I got a text from my friend while I was on the train and I thought that trading Farnsworth was genius and something I wanted Cash to do for a while, to sell high on his hot streak when you have a very deep pen with Bruney coming back and Melancon pitching so well in the minor leagues, but I was kind of upset they went the Pudge rout who I thought was a minor improvement as a backup catcher being that he is over the hill (36 year old catcher who had a .294 obp last year). I knew about Pudge’s bad year last year but I came home and was shocked to find he’s having a decent year this year somehow (check out his June and July #s: http://www.baseball-reference.com/pi/bsplit.cgi?n1=rodriiv01&year=2008). He will undoubtedly be our starter with Molina the backup and that’s a major offensive improvement.
Farnsworth is a career shaky pitcher, poster boy for inconsistent flame thrower who SHOULD’VE been a closer but never put it all together, and despite his recent hot streak Bruney can give the same production.
I think Cashman has done a tremendous mid-season job. We went from:
7 Melky
8 Molina
9 Gardner
BP Farnsworth
to this
7 Nady
8 Pudge
9 Melky
BP Marte
Can you guys plug Pudge’s numbers into Marcel?
Can anyone explain why detroit would do this? Give up a great catcher for an inconsistent reliever? This seems like a really dumb move. Even if Pudge doesn’t resign you can still get draft picks from him and the draft picks should be more valuable than Farnsworth. Just a little disapointed because I was looking forward to the Rays making the playoffs and the yankees staying home