Vlad Guerrero Stumbling to Start 2011
Sometimes a running narrative can really help a player. This offseason, Vladimir Guerrero took advantage of his bounceback 2010 and turned it into a one-year, $8 million contract with the Orioles. It’s a bit less than he sought early in the offseason, but it was a win for the aging DH. Cases in point: Hideki Matsui, who produced similar numbers to Guerrero last year, got just $4.25 million. Jim Thome, better than Vlad last year, got $3 million. But because Vlad’s narrative involved him bouncing back for a pennant-winning team, he ended up commanding far more than his peers. But that deal isn’t looking so swell for the Orioles right now.
Nothing seems to be working for Vlad early in the season. He’s just 19 for 71 (.268), and his BABIP, .281, isn’t too far off his .292 mark from last year, and it’s reasonably close to his .287 xBABIP. That is, it’s not as though he’s hitting the ball hard and finding fielders. He’s swinging at more pitches in general, and specifically more out of the zone. Worse yet, he’s making less contact on those pitches out of the zone, which has led to a spike in his swinging strike and, by extension, strikeout rates. He has, in other words, looked as poorly as he’s performed.
Perhaps the most damning aspect of Guerrero’s season to date is that he has not drawn a single walk. He is, in fact, the only qualified batter who has yet to draw a free pass. Despite his reputation as a free swinger, he actually did take walks at a solid rate during his prime seasons. Pitchers didn’t want to face him, and while he was up there to swing the bat, there wasn’t much he could do to defend against unhittable pitches out of the zone (though he kind of created his own definition of unhittable) and against the intentional walk. But as he started to decline, he saw his walk rate dip. In his down year, 2009, he walked just 4.7% of the time, and even in his bounceback year he walked 5.4% of the time. Those aren’t healthy rates, but if anyone can make it work, it’s Vlad. Unfortunately, not even he can make a 0% walk rate work.
(Aside: Since it’s still early, assigning an “on pace” rate is a mostly futile activity. Clearly, no one expects Vlad to maintain his pace of zero walks this season. But he has certainly eclipsed the 10% mark for plate appearances this season, so we can have some fun with this one. Since 1980 there have been only six players who have qualified for the batting title with 10 or fewer walks on the season. Vlad certainly has a chance to join this illustrious club, which includes the likes of Tony Pena Jr., Ozzie Guillen, Ivan Rodriguez, and especially Shawnon Dunston, who did it twice.)
Looking at Vlad’s splits from last year, it’s pretty clear that his incredible first half helped drive the narrative that defined him as a bounceback player. He hit .319/.364/.554 through the All-Star break, combining with Josh Hamilton to create a 3-4 combo that powered the Rangers to an AL West lead. But in the second half he started to look more like the Vlad of 2009. In fact, he looked quite a bit worse, hitting .278/.322/.426 in 289 PA — and that includes a .311/.351/.491 September performance. The narrative ran strong throughout the playoffs, though which he hit ..220/.242/.271, which played into the contract he received.
It’s no wonder, then, that the Rangers balked when Vlad asked for a two-year contract. It’s not even surprising that they declined his $9 million mutual option and opted to pay him the $1 million buy-out instead. They had clearly seen through the narrative. (For which we shouldn’t give them too much credit, since he was, after all, hurting their team in July and August.) The Orioles, apparently, bought it. Or, at least, they convinced themselves that he’d hit well enough to justify the outlay. To date that hasn’t worked out, and there aren’t many signs that point to an eventual turnaround.
As we saw last year, Vlad certainly has the ability to pick up the pace and produce a decent season for the Orioles. Last year he had two months that were as bad, if not worse, than the April he has produced to date, and he managed to turn in four solid-to-excellent months. The situation becomes a bit more discouraging, though, if you’ve watched a fair number of Orioles games and have watched Vlad at the plate. He truly looks his age, 36. While he can certainly run into one, as he did in last night’s game, he doesn’t look like a guy who will do that often. He’s swinging more often at bad pitches, which says something considering his propensity to do that throughout his career.
Anything can happen in 71 PA (including the complete avoidance of a walk), and with a player such as Guerrero, with such a long track record of success, we can’t completely write him off. But given his early season trends, his appearance at the plate, and his advanced age, betting on his return to productivity would be a mistake. He won’t be this bad all season, but can he even reach 2009 levels? With the way he looks now, I’d say no. There just isn’t enough evidence now, with his second half of 2010 and limping start to 2011, to suggest that it is.
I hope the Vlad Guerrero that will hack at forehead-level pitches and still hit a double makes a return, just because it’s so fun to watch.
I doubt it’ll happen, though.
4-9 with 4runs 2hrs 4rbi over his last two.
wait are you quoting a 9 PA sample size on fangraphs?
first, no i’m not. second, look at the very next comment that calls 71 AB too small of a sample size to be significant, and you are defending a sample size of 9 PA? seriously?
this is one instance I wouldn’t use a sample size argument. 2 more homers for the season at this stage certainly does a fair amount in righting the ship.
eesh. zero walks in 75 ABs?
Really? It’s April 21 and he has 71 ABs. Does the “small sample size” mantra not apply here?
Of course it does, but that doesn’t preclude us from making observations, checking the data, and forming an opinion. Vlad looked pretty poor in the second half of last year, and looks slow and lost to start this year.
He looked slow and lost in the first few months of 2009, too, but he came back strong. We, as people who follow lots of games, often look at these slow stretches and try to extrapolate them for more than they are. Maybe Vlad is in severe decline at this point. But based on his past, I’m not sure these 70 at bats are anywhere near enough of a sample to extrapolate such a thing.
Over such a small sample size, there’s a good chance that this could all be confirmation bias.
Not saying that it is, but it certainly seems likely that we’d be more willing to ascribe value to this start that confirms the narrative than we would be if he was scorching the ball (we’d probably be waiting for him to return to earth).
The signs are there, but we really can’t tell anything more from 70 PA than swing percentage, which is up 8% from last year, and 9% above his career average. Unfortunately, that doesn’t tell us a whole lot about how well he’ll perform over the rest of the year.
Pretty bad timing for this to come out
Exactly, this is a good time to revisit pizza cutter’s piece re-released here yesterday — http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/525600-minutes-how-do-you-measure-a-player-in-a-year/ — all we can really talk about after 71 PA are swing rates. We can try to cut up last years season to make it a larger sample but I don’t know why we would use just one half rather than the entire year, hasn’t FanGraphs been openly critical about monthly and half splits, or am I missing something?
3 million of his 8 million dollar contract was deferred far into the future so the present value is more like 6-7 million. The O’s knew they were giving him a slight premium to his peers and I think Reimold should be playing everyday to see what he is but it is one year fairly low risk proposition hardly worth much consternation. Posada is getting paid far more to strictly DH this year and has horrible numbers at the moment made somewhat less horrible by the fact that 62.5% of his hits have been home runs which is probably an unsustainable pace wouldn’t you say?
Noboby thought Vlad was going to be MVP or anything this year and he does have to walk some but he can still put up a solid .800-.825 OPS which is certainly better than any other offensive alternative (though Pie’s defense would have mitigated this greatly).
Yes, FanGraphs authors have been critical of monthly and half splits. And, it turns out that Vlad’s 2nd half last year wasn’t entirely terrible anyway; what I found most interesting about this article was that Vlad hit .311/.351/.491 last September. So, actually, his 2009 was dragged down by 2 terrible months, July and August.
Maybe it happens again this year, maybe it doesn’t. I get that he’s swinging at more pitches out of the zone, but this is Vlad Guerrero we’re talking about. It’s like saying the sun came up.
Fangraphs loves to crap on the Orioles.
Unfortunately, Vlad is starting to get hot with 4 hits, including 2 homers, in his last 2 games. And that’s not to mention another near-HR that Span made a great catch on to rob him of an XBH.
Where’s Matt Klaassen? I’m sure he still thinks Nolan Reimold (.200/.308/.333 at AAA) will put up a better season than a washed-up Hall of Famer like Vlad.
Mr. Pawlikowski is a smart guy but he is an unapologetic Yankee lover who by extension does not like any other team in the division. Look at the first paragraph.
1. Jim Thome only got 3 million – Jim Thome will be 41 years old during the season (which is the reason he got lowballed) and Jim Thome is currently making Vlad look like Barry Bonds in his prime.
2. Jorge Posada makes 13 million this year and last I checked was strictly DHing. But the Yankees aren’t held to the same standards as other teams.
3. He knew Vlad got deferred money but it is referred to as 8 million which is considered an incredible mistake by the O’s when it is only one year and they had no better options
I like Reimold and would have just let him play left personally but 6-7 mill is chump change even for the O’s. They haven’t done anything to damage the long term direction of the franchise and Vlad will put more people in the seats than they would have had otherwise which will recoup some of the money. I agree on Vlad not walking, he obviously has to improve on that but no reason to think he won’t (at least this early) and it is highly unlikely he ends the season with a sub .800 OPS which is a huge improvement on the alternatives.
I couldn’t disagree more with your first line. FanGraphs has been touting the Orioles at every opportunity for the last few months. #15 org? Give me a break!
haha–i remember jack moore wrote EXACTLY THE SAME ARTICLE last year, right before Vlad went on the destroy AL pitching for the next four months.
i think jack’s great, but he made the same small sample size mistake with this little gem, written after 17 games last year.
http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/vladimir-guerreros-lack-of-power/
no one consistently makes the small sample size mistake here more than albert liu, though. seriously, we should name a prize after him.
I didn’t realize how poor his BABIP was the past couple of years. I want to dump him but can’t trade him at this point.
“Clearly, no one expects Vlad to maintain his pace of zero walks this season.”
Clearly, you have not watched Vlad play. He’s awful.
71 ABs. This is frustrating because Fangraphs knows better. Also, you can carve up the season however you want, Vlad hit .300/.345/.496 last year. Stop making your sample size smaller.
Don’t forget, too, that Vlad’s stated age is 36, but I suspect he’s closer to 38 or 39. The O’s F.O. must surely have been aware of this potential discrepancy, which only makes the dough they offered Vlad, deferred or not, all the more difficult to understand.
To every complaining about a small sample size, it’s April! The entire article is written with an underlying caveat that it’s too early to really tell what’s going on. What do you want fangraphs to do, not publish any stats or make an observations until August? It would be a pretty boring site if they did that.
It just takes some creativity, I think.
Vladdy heating up.
Vlad had a relatively poor 2nd half with the Rangers, and an awful post season. If you look past his great 1st half, he looked a lot like the guy the Angels walked away from.
He fumbled to close 2010.
While Vlad’s overall numbers fell in the 2nd half, he had an .888 OPS in September.
I interviewed Matt Klaassen of FanGraphs recently (4/18) and he still thinks Guerrero will post a Slugging % over .460 for the year.
http://orioleshangout.com/blog/chris-corner/196/qa-w-matt-klaassen-fangraphs–beyond-the-boxscore
For all of the people bitching, I think that he did a good job of qualifying the article and saying it is all based on a small sample size. People act like this article is the same as the drivel written at ESPN, or locally for me at least, in the Chicago media. But this article goes out on a limb and makes a prediction that, while not backed up by a huge sample size, admits to that fact, and also points out interesting evidence to support their thesis. What more can you ask.
I read this sight everyday and am shocked by how much people bitch about the writing. Go ahead and write a blog yourself. It will probably be all in binary.
I hope he heats up. After finding his roto auction price too rich for my blood year after year, I got him for $12 in my very deep league. His 2009 would earn it back, his 2010 would be pure profit. And he is exactly the kind of player I will hold onto even as he kills me month after month (which was absolutely the right call in 2009, and my nefarious plot to swoop in and get him for pennies was foiled when he heated up that year), so if he truly has fallen off a cliff, I will be right next to him screaming and flailing, like Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam (“air brakes”).
While the Rangers were smart not to resign Vlad at his demands, he had a much better year than Matsui last season. One guy hit .303, 29 bombs, and drove in 115. The other hit .274, hit 21 homeruns, and had 84 RBI. Guess which guy got paid a lot more.
Thome is 40 years old… he’s obviously going to get paid less.
Basically Vlad deserved more than the other two for many reasons(last season he had a much better year, first ballot hall of famer, he’s the youngest, and for his career is a .319 hitter.) So far they’ve all had slow starts, but Vlad is hitting .266 and has 3 homeruns instead of 2 like the other guys. He’s still playing better than Matsui or Thome, and basically chose the wrong team for monetary reasons. He’s also the type of guy who doesn’t look done, he just looks like he’s playing for a crappy team and wishes he weren’t.
I think it’s about time for an update article on Vlad, no?