Again, I am also late to this party but I wanted to make a note about Theriot’s minor-league numbers that you overlook — and its the difference between looking at pure numbers versus having seen the guy play and being familiar with his bio.

As a minor leaguer, the Cubs were trying to train Theriot, a natural righty, to become a switch hitter. He took a lot of at bats from the “wrong” side of the plate. By the time he worked his way up to AA, he finally had a talk with the coaches and told them he was not really comfortable hitting as a lefty, and they let him hit exclusively as a right-handed hitter.

Hitting from the “correct” side (for him), his average spiked and he eventually emerged as an everyday big-league player. I can’t find his LH/RH minor-league hitting splits (granted, I haven’t looked that hard) but I know he started hitting from the right-hand side pretty exclusively in AAA, where he was a .304 BA / .367 OBP guy in 312 PA.

Long story short, I think your projection of him as a .270-ish hitter is inaccurate because you took into account all those left-handed at-bats. Theriot is not a left-handed hitter or a switch hitter, he is a natural RH hitter, and has demonstrated that he can hit in the .285-.295 range when batting as a righty.

In nearly 1600 big-league at bats, certainly a legitimate sample size, he’s a career .289 hitter. That seems about right to me.

If a batters LD% jumps from 21.0% to 23.2% and their GB% jumps from 48.6% to 56.6% and their FB% rate drops from 30.5% to 20.2% how can their xBABIP drop from .311 to .291.

That makes absolutely zero sense to me. If he increased the two things with the higher BABIP and lowered the one with a lower BABIP wouldnt his xBABIP raise not lower?

I thought the 2008 Theriot was the Theriot we would see on a regular basis not the 2007 based on 2007′s BABIP. Maybe I am missing something, but if anyone could clarify that would be super.

More times than not jumps in BABIP are just random fluctuations and fantasy baseball is all about playing the percentages so the original article doesn’t have anything wrong with it. Also the mention of how poor Theriot is at stealing has a lot of merit since they won’t keep sending him if he is that bad again next year.

Models are good an all, but as you mentioned in your original post, some guys just don’t fit. Theriot seems to be one of those guys. I’d guess one reason is that Theriot gets dinged for being retarded on the bases.

I also didn’t mean to imply that there wasn’t a change in Lee’s approach. I caught a a Cubs game on ESPN in 2005 where he credited that year’s success to an opening of his stance that allowed him to see the ball better, which is the only reason I was even aware of it.

And yes, the fact that there are constant adjustments and counter-adjustments is exactly the point that I clumsily tried to make. Batters and pitchers make changes all the time that lead to short term successes but don’t necessarily augur continued success in the future. “I make adjustments to you and then you make adjustments to me and now we’re back to where we started from” is the long and short of it.

You know, if you had just quoted Miles and Brenley in the first place, we could have avoided this whole situation.

What I wrote was this: “When you think of Ryan Theriot, think of Mark Grace or Brian Giles with no power, because that’s the kind of hitter Ryan Theriot is trying to be.”

I made the point that Theriot has no power and they do have something in common.

Here are the top five hitters in terms of cantact percentage:
1. Brian Giles, 92.8%
2. Placido Polanco, 92.7%
3. Dustin Padroia, 92.3%
4. Ryan Theriot, 91.9%
5. Marco Scutaro, 92.5%

Theriot is the 26th best in MLB at not swinging at pitches outside the zone, only swinging at pitches outside of the zone 19.4% of the time.

Of those players who were better at making contact with the baseball than Theriot (Giles, Polanco, Padroia) only one of them swung at pitches outside of the zone less than Theriot, Brian Giles at 17.4%.

As for the other, Matt said Giles *without* the power, which actually isn’t a bad comparison at all. Neither chase too many balls out of the zone and their Z-Swing, O-Contact and Z-Contact are all rather similar. The only major difference aside from O-Swing is that since Theriot won’t hurt you with power, pitchers are able to pound the strike zone against him, depressing his walk rate.