Asdrubal Cabrera: I Believe In You
I’m ready.
It took me ~230 plate appearances, but I’m ready. Like most of you I was skeptical in the beginning. That’s evident in the lack of articles written about Cabrera’s amazing start. There’s only been one and it was written 12 days into the season, and it wasn’t on RotoGraphs. That’s my fault. I cover shortstops for this site, but up until now I wasn’t sure how to properly address the situation.
When looking at this peripheral statistics nothing substantial jumps out at you. The only major change you see is a drop in his line drive rate and an uptick in fly balls. Other that there’s no radical change in his batted ball data and no wild fluctuations in his plate discipline. Yet, he’s crushing the ball. That’s the major difference between this season and his 2009 campaign. I’m not including his 2010 season in this post because I buy into the fact that he wasn’t fully recovered from a forearm injury and that’s what was mainly accountable for his sub par performance. Here are his 2009 and 2011 seasons for comparison:
| 2009 | 2011 | |
| LD% | 22 | 16 |
| GB% | 48 | 46.3 |
| FB% | 30 | 37.7 |
| O-Swing% | 23.9 | 26.9 |
| Z-Swing% | 67.1 | 65.6 |
| Contact% | 85.2 | 86.3 |
| O-Contact% | 68.7 | 74.2 |
He’s swinging at a few more pitches outside of the strike zone as well, and making contact on more of them, but nothing to suggest a .96 point jump in ISO. I searched for anything I could find regarding a change Cabrera may have made in his swing this season and found an article from April 11th from Ohio.com. In that piece the author says:
“At the suggestion of Orlando Cabrera, Asdrubal is taking bigger hacks at certain pitches. Moreover, he no longer chokes up on the bat unless he has two strikes on him.”
As Joe Pawl wrote in his April 12th piece on Cabrera, this sounds awfully familiar to the approach Ben Zobrist took in his breakout season of 2009. If it took Orlando Cabrera being Asdrubal’s personal bat whisperer to unleash this power then so be it. Our ZiPS projection isn’t a believer, forecasting him to hit 9 more homers with 47 RBI over the rest of the season. Even if Cabrera does exactly that he’d finish with 19 home runs, 82 RBI and an average in the .290-.300 range. He also already has seven steals, putting him in the 15-20 range for the season. That type of production is outstanding in this weak crop of shortstops.
Considering where Cabrera was drafted he’s one of the biggest steals of the season. If you’re not a believer, I understand. It’s hard to believe someone who has never done it before will sustain this type of success over the course of a full season. The aforementioned Ben Zobrist did it. So did Jose Bautista. I’m not directly comparing Cabrera to those two players; there’s no way I think he’ll be one of the best players in the game. But they kept doing it and doing it until people finally bought in. Cabrera is beginning to do the same for me. There’s no reason Cabrera couldn’t finish the season as one of the top 3-5 shortstops in fantasy. That’s not something I could have believed myself saying on April 1st. I do now.
I like it as I have Ascab for $1 in my dynasty league. And I like the article. I don’t know how to read or interpit the data but I’d bet he has a very big hr/fb outlier compared to his past. How long until the data tells us this is him and not small sample? Our trade deadline is early and coming up. I’m considering selling hi to assist me better this year. The guy with Hamilton has offered me Ham and Anibal Sanchez who are not holdovers.
he is called AstroCab in Cleve by some. I like the sound of that better than “Ascab”
I don’t buy it yet. If you look at his hit tracker data he has 6 out of 10 home runs that are Just Enough or Lucky. That is the sign of someone hitting over their head.
They should build a monument to Bill Bavasi in Cleveland.
(Also in Baltimore, Atlanta, Detroit, the South Side of Chicago….)
I have always liked this kid, and have owned him the past two years before this, thinking he would get me 15 homers and 10-15 steals at shortstop for a dollar on draft day. This year he is giving me much more than anticipated for the dollar i snagged him at. I wouldn’t sell high on him, he was high on their prospect list and is finally living up and surpassing their expectations of him.
But as the previous poster stated, if you could get Josh Hamilton for him and your middle infield is set, then by all means make that trade.
14.7% HR/FB in 2011 vs 4.7% and 3.0% the previous two years. If Cabrera is swinging for more power we may be expect him to post a higher rate than what he’s shown in prior seasons, but that YTD number is in Uggla/Longoria range. I just don’t believe Asdrubal has that kind of pop.
The ZiPS ROS projection seems pretty accurate to me. He will still wind up having value, just not like it’s been so far.
4/5 tonight, wow
There doesn’t seem to be a lot of helium regarding Asdrubal yet this year. But even if he has a solid rest of the season I expect him to be way overdrafted next season. But I targeted him with a 10HR/20SB/.280BA upside and I’m happy I did. He’ll exceed the HR’s obviously this year but I’m not sure he’s more than a 10 HR hitter in the future (partially supported by the just enough/lucky data from hittrackeronline).
I also targeted Yunel this year and he is quietly having a very nice season that nobody is noticing. What I like most is that it’s completely sustainable.
Yeah, if he doesn’t drop off a cliff he could be a second or third rounder next year. That’s when Bautista went in my league this year. There are never any guarantees, but I wouldn’t reach for him there just yet. If he finishes with a really strong August/September, I may change my mind.
I also targeted Yunel, and I didn’t get him and I got “stuck” with Asdrubal. Not mad at that, but Yunel is good and he is definitely having a nice season in Tor.