Minimal Risk in Drafting Dunn
I was involved in a 15-team keeper league auction the other day and after staring at Adam Dunn in my queue for what seemed like and eternity, I finally made a move on him. It wasn’t until very late in the draft and I had held back some extra cash but when I ended up shelling out $14 for him, I questioned whether or not I overpaid. Did I not think that Dunn was worth that kind of money so late in an auction or was it simply just a temporary case of buyer’s remorse after strapping myself for cash with another few roster spots left to fill? Then I remembered my rationale after taking him in the 13th round of the KFFL Baseball Analysis Draft & Experts League and Mike Axisa’s 10 Bold Predictions and mental order was restored. Dunn is headed for a big rebound this year and if you can get him on the cheap (and yes, $14 for 40 HR certainly qualifies as cheap), then you make that move.
Maybe it’s not very FanGraphy of me, but I’m almost willing to throw away the data from the last two seasons. I’ll keep the numbers in the back of my mind, of course, but I tend to think there were mitigating circumstances that drove the numbers to where they were. Indulge me for a moment, if you will…
Dunn spends eight and a half seasons with the Reds, gets traded to the Diamondbacks midway through the season to be a rental and hits 40 home runs for the fifth consecutive year. He then signs a 2-year, $20M contract (not overly pricey in relative terms) and though he hits only 38 bombs, his walk and strikeout rates stay within his career range while he enjoys a career high in batting average and his highest OBP since 2002.
Unfortunately though, Dunn spent a good portion of that season enduring trade rumors and questions about his impending free agency. Despite the proclamations of GM Mike Rizzo that Dunn wasn’t going anywhere, most pundits assumed his days in D.C. were numbered. Not that we’re talking about some uncommon distraction here, but a distraction nonetheless.
So Dunn walked into the 2010 season not only expecting to be dealt somewhere by August at the latest, but also with an immense pressure he put on himself to return to his 40-HR ways and prove his worth on the free agent market. He had some nice moments, like his 3-HR game just before the All Star break, but overall, he saw a career-worst in both walk rate and strikeout percentage and he failed to muster up two more dingers by the end of it all to clear the 40-homer barrier. There was nothing out of the ordinary with respect to his batted ball data and it wasn’t like pitchers were throwing to him differently. A Swing% of 45.0% with an O-Swing% of 28.5% — both career highs — were all the evidence that you needed to see that he was up there hacking away, trying to do too much.
The White Sox then came calling with a 4-year, $56M contract and while you’d think the security of a multi-year deal would have calmed things down, it only got worse for Dunn. Pressure to live up to the money and an early season appendectomy were certainly contributors to his slow start, but dealing with Ozzie Guillen and his volatile ways had to have added another element that likely stayed behind the scenes; atleast until Guillen started running his mouth about how he told hitting coach Greg Walker that there was a problem with Dunn’s swing shortly after his [Guillen's] departure from Chicago.
When he failed…and miserably, at that…it became a near impossibility to recover. The press was all over him, the fans were all over him and suddenly he went from being everyone’s lovable, big country, free-swinging, home run hitting hero to a beaten down, beleaguered, truculent bust of a player. He was doomed from the start and it only got worse as the season progressed.
But we have a new beginning here in 2012 and whole new breed of excitement. Yes, he looks both strong and a little slimmed down, but we’ll forgo the usual “best shape of his life” cliches. Save for a bit of a stiff neck recently, Dunn is healthy and ready to move on with his career. There’s no Ozzie in town and he sounds like he’s doing everything he can to put last year behind him. He’s having a reasonably good spring with two home runs and half a dozen RBI, but what’s even better is that in 23 plate appearances, Dunn owns a 7.00 BB/K ratio. Sure, the sample size is small and it’s only spring, but it’s a start.
Recent ADP reports on Mock Draft Central have Dunn’s ADP at 234.87 and on Yahoo it’s 246.90, so he’s not costing an arm and a leg. Heck, he’s not even costing a finger if you’re playing in a 12-team mixed league. You can look at the statistical trends, stick a metaphorical fork in him and avoid him altogether or you can follow the less empirical path and understand the more human side of the ballplayer and take a shot on him. The downside is that you drop a low round draft choice a month into the season. The upside is mammoth power. I’ll take the upside, thank you.
The problem with Dunn is that he has to hit 40 HR to be valuable in most roto leagues. If he hits .230 with 30 HR and 0 SB, he’s more or less Carlos Pena/replacement level. And if he’s any worse than that, he’s a net negative.
But if you can get him at the bottom of a draft or a low dollar price the cost is basically zero – many of those picks are going to end up on the wire at some point anyway.
But I can’t support paying $14 for him in a standard auction. That’s around Carl Crawford/Madison Bumgarner money based on Yahoo averages. The risk is just too high, and as you said even 30HR is not enough to make up for his lack of other skills.
Yeah, the $14 was high for me, but I had 4 spots to fill (Util and 3 P), had some $1 relievers on my radar and out of 15 teams, 6 of them still had a decent chunk of money left. In fact, atleast 4 teams finished the auction with money still in hand.
I don’t think I would have gone that high had it been earlier in the draft.
The Dunn situtaion isn’t complicated. Teams see the 40 HR, the BBs and the SO’s and think “if he put the ball in play more he’d hit 50 HR and bat .270.” Unfortunately, Adam Dunn has already figured out his optimum strategy given his talents. The man is a very poor contact hitter with awesome power. He succeeds by only swinging at the limited selection of pitches he can hit well and taking the rest. Luckily, he’s got a pretty good eye and pitchers know the risk of coming at him, so he takes a good number of walks in the process.
But years of listening to Marty Brenneman and then new management finally convinced him that he needed to cut down on his strikeouts and make more contact and that the way to do this was to swing more. So he did. He started swinging at more pitches, pitches that by definition are ones he’s not naturally comfortable swinging at. The contact rate actually went down, not up, and he started getting a higher proportion of weak contact. Pitchers, seeing his new willingness to chase, gave him even less to hit. And the viscous cycle continued. Consequently, he struck out more, walked less and hit for less power.
His first year in DC, he basically continued to do his thing. But then they really put on the pressure to swing more and he relented. In 2010 & 2011, Dunn’s Z-Swing shot up from a career rate of ~17% to 28%. His SwStr % jumped from 11% to 13%. The percentage of strikes he saw, which has been steadily declining from 52% in 2004 to 46% in 2009 dropped to 41% in 2010 and 40% in 2011.
If the Sox would just shut up, let him take and rake and live with the strikeouts, there’s every reason to believe he’d go back to the .240/.380/.520 beast he was as a Red. But so long as they want him to be something he’s not, he’s going to struggle.
I’ll never understand why so many teams seem to think that the solution to get a poor contact hitter to strikeout less is to swing more. It’s like telling a slap hitting middle infielder to start muscling up and pull the ball. It’s sad that Dunn will likely end his career as a perceived failure because the teams he played for didn’t know how to use his talents.
Got him for $6 in a H2H points league. Even if he returns to his 2010 levels, he becomes a monster in that league’s format.
& if the same guy from last year shows up, you’re basically out 6 bucks. It works both ways..
He doesn’t make or break my team though. If he’s good, I can slot him to 1B and move Miggy to 3B. If he sucks i just drop him. I though he was a better investment than the Ghost of Ryan Howard who went for $2 more and may not be back until the all-star break.
Let me get this right.Dunn will have the greatest comeback season in the history of baseball. This supported by a group of cobbled perceptions.It seems nobody wants to project Dunn somewhere in middle .
If this was a standard $260 auction budget, then $14 seems like a lot of risk to me … That certainly doesn’t translate to what we should expect to pay for a player being picked in the low 200′s in a snake draft.
Agreed, but see above for my explanation.
The majority of people who care are giving him the benefit of the doubt. It’s just so hard to believe that a horological wonder like Dunn can suddenly break permanently. He’ll have to show me again before I write him off completely. I’d consider anything around 30+HR to be a successful bounce back, and he should have extra value in leagues that don’t use average.
I don’t know, the slip in his BB rate in 2010 is the type of thing that happens when old guys start to lose it. The fact he followed it up with such a miserable year makes it hard for me to believe he goes back to 40 HR. He doesn’t really have that much more upside to me than someone like Wells or Soriano or any other old guy with mediocre skills that go late in drafts. Worth a late round flier sure but I’m not spending anything important on him that’s for sure.
It’s also the kind of thing that happens when a guy has a 50% increase in his O-Swing (from 19% to 28%). His overall contact rate dropped and pitchers gave him even less to hit. The walk rate dropped because the K rate jumped. I guess it comes down to your explanation for why he expanded his zone. Was he cheating more often to make up for a loss of bat speed and thus ended up chasing? Or was he consciously choosing to go after more pitches that he used to lay off.
He was cheating, but the thought that a lot of people following the team are thinking was that he came back too early from the appendectomy, and obviously when your core is screwed up, you start doing things differently mechanically (swinging more with your arms, etc). Eventually it healed but by then the guy was buried.
He has a fresh start with Ventura, and after another good day today against King Felix (1-2 with 2 BB), he now has 9 walks on the spring and 1 strikeout. Spring training stats are of course meaningless, but the guy couldn’t even make contact last year, so not striking out at all and hitting a few homers off legit pitchers (Feliz/Walden) look pretty good. Would not be a surprise at all to see him return to form.
There is a surprising lack of tragically dead pitcher jokes in this thread.
They are still letting you write for this website, Bender??
Embarrassing.
Move along Bo. I responded to you in the last thread. You are tragically misinformed. If you would like confirmation, please refer to Eno Sarris and he will be able to help you.
I’m going into a 10 team all MLB snake draft planning on punting batting average (and thus using my early picks on ace pitchers), I’m guessing you think I should grab Dunn?
C Arenciba
1st Goldschmidt
2nd Uggla
3rd Reynolds
SS Gordon/Hardy
MI Johnson/Espinosa
CI Pena/Dunn
OFKemp
OFGranderson
OFYoung
OFGardner
OFWillingham
UT plenty of options
and then 5 or 6 stud starting pitchers
Thoughts?
your lineup would be a hitting coach’s worst nightmare.
OK, I think I’ve got it. Because you put yourself in the unenviable position of having too much money late in the auction and no talent to spend it on, at that point drafting Dunn was a ‘minimal risk’ to you.
To those of us with auctions to come, however, counting on Dunn to fill a 1B or CI slot is a huge risk. We need solid stats at those spots; messing around with a guy who is likely to put up negative value is not a good idea.
I actually had $9 budgeted to him in case relievers like Holland and Pestano cost me more than $1 which they didn’t. I was also keeping tabs on a few teams with more money than I had and still had a corner infield spot to fill, so I don’t feel like I had too much money at the end of the draft.
I definitely don’t see using Dunn as a CI as a huge risk. Maybe if you think the likelihood of him repeating last year’s travesty as a strong possibility, but, obviously, I do not. Give me the choice between a $14 Dunn and a $5 Valencia (the next CI off the board), I’ll spend the money on Dunn every time.
I am surprised no one mentioned the DH factor. Dunn was very vocal about not wanting to be one until he caved for the money. Clearly he was right, as it seems quite likely that he can’t hit cold off the bench as is the case with many others…