Sensible, yet Expensive: A Davis/Trumbo First Base Platoon

One of the major points I made in the 2017/18 Orioles Blueprint finale was that the club should begin the season with a first base platoon of Chris Davis and Mark Trumbo.  This would be a major shift in what was intended when either of these players were signed to their contracts.  Chris Davis still has five years left at 17 MM a season with 6 MM on top of that deferred every year.  From a management perspective, it is difficult to come to the conclusion that your big ticket item, your monetary face of the organization after just two years on his current deal needs to ride the pine against same sided pitching.

When Davis signed, there certainly was some fear here.  Davis has two major things working against him.  One, his hit tool is on the threshold of being unplayable.  His immense power compensates when he is able to put the ball in play, but that depends on him making enough contact and getting power in that contact.  In 2013 and 2015, he made contact and got on base about 15-20% more often than the past two seasons.  It is hard to be productive when you are not getting on base.  Second, his immense .300-some ISO has dropped to a solid .200 ISO, but that still makes it difficult to make up for his lack of contact.

The second aspect that was concerning was that even in his great years, Davis was still rather adequate against left handed pitching.  As the rest of his game has fallen, his performance against left handers has cratered.  It is so poor that it is hard to think that Davis has gotten 365 PA these past two seasons against left handers.  Buck and the Orioles have shown zero interest in protecting him from pitchers that he is unable to handle.

Chris Davis Platoon Splits

Split	PA	BA	OBP	SLG
vs RHP ('16)	464	.223	.341	.487
vs LHP ('16)	201	.216	.313	.398
vs RHP ('17)	360	.218	.317	.468
vs LHP ('17)	164	.208	.293	.326

Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table
Generated 11/1/2017.

In 2017, Chris Davis had a .118 ISO against left handed pitching.  That is bad, but really how bad is it?  Off the 25 first basemen who had more than 125 PA against left handed pitching, Chris Davis second worst.  What is the median value? .205.  Chris Davis' power performance (which is what his value is) is 50% of what the average first baseman does against lefthanded pitching.  Now, let us only consider left handed batters who play first base.  There were 11.  What was that median? .186.  Baltimore has a problem.

If the club can stomach Davis as a first baseman against right handed pitching, then the question comes to who plays first base when Davis sits.  As I noted, Mark Trumbo fits that bill and he is also a problem for the Orioles.  The club signed Trumbo after he found great difficulty in getting decent offers as a free agent.  The Orioles placed a qualifying offer on him and he refused it, thinking he had enough leverage to secure a deal elsewhere.  Instead, he came back to the Orioles at what honestly was a bargain price though the Orioles already had players cluttering up his best defensive positions: 1B and DH.

As I have often mentioned here and on Twitter, Mark Trumbo suffers from playing designated hitter.  Some scoff at the idea that a player could be impacted based on whether or not he plays in the field.  However, this has been shown to be true as a population effect.  The next statement I receive is that 14 points of wOBA are not that much.  Yes, that is correct.  It is not much of a difference even though it is a significant population effect.  One needs to go to the next step though.  The population is full of players who are found to be worse than or better than that average.  No one is that average.

On that spectrum, Mark Trumbo finds himself on the very bad side during his Oriole career:

Mark Trumbo 2016 and 2017
In field 280/338/543, 263 ISO, 133 wRC+
at DH 220/278/413, 193 ISO, 81 wRC+

And even worse last year:

Mark Trumbo 2017
In field 331/366/504, 173 ISO, 132 wRC+
at DH 207/268/368, 161 ISO, 66 wRC+

It is plainly obvious that Trumbo simply does better when he gets to use his glove.  Why?  I do not know.  There certainly are ideas out there to explain it.  For instance, when is the least safe time when you are in a plane?  When the pilot disengages from autopilot.  Having spent up to several hours not flying a plane, that moment where the pilot is suddenly engaged winds up causing significantly more flight errors than at any other point and even when correcting for pilots not using autopilot.  That would seem to suggest that maybe why some batters do worse when riding the pine is that their mind is not engaged.  That playing the field may prime a player for when he steps into the batters box even though that activity is far different from what one does in the field.

Regardless of why, Trumbo has repeatedly struggled as a designated hitter for a long while.  This leaves the club starting off with a lineup against right handed pitchers with Chris Davis at first base and Trey Mancini at designated hitter.  If pinched, Mancini moves to left field, Davis to the designated hitter slot, and Trumbo goes to first base.  Against southpaws, Trumbo starts at first and Mancini once again is the designated hitter.  If pressed, Trumbo stays, Mancini moves into the field and Davis gets the designated hitter slot.  This si what the plan should be on opening day.

If Davis is setting the world on fire, he can press for a full time role.  Against lefties, I think this would likely mean that Mancini gets more time in left field.  Likewise, if Trumbo reflects his 2016 self then that probably means squeezing Davis into more designated hitter time than first base time.  Yes, Davis is a very good first baseman.  Yes, I am ignoring last year.  His average play last year was likely impacted by core injuries that not only limited his acceleration, but also his lateral movement.  From that, I would think he would bounce back in 2018, defensively.  I also think that Trumbo's ability there (rather decent in his youth) is not much of a drop from where Davis is.

So what we are left with is Chris Davis making 17 MM in 2018 and Mark Trumbo tacking on 12.5.  Yes, I am suggesting the Orioles start off with a 29.5 MM first base platoon.  It is not anything that any of us wanted, but it is what we got.  Time to make some lemonade.

David Lough, Starter in Disguise

GIF lifted lovingly from BSR.

David Lough is one of those lightning rods.  Back in the Winter, I criticized the move for Lough if it meant that he was to be the Orioles' starting left fielder.  Simply, it was a matter that defense first 27 year old rookies are rookies at age 27 for a reason.  Plus, defense is a skill that tends to peak in a player's early to mid 20s.  When you go over the history of exceptional, defense-first 26 and older rookies, you are left with success benchmarks of F.P. Santangelo and Wayne Kirby.  That is a very low benchmark and not one a team should plan on trotting out there if they dream of playoff sugar plums.  That kind of player simply is not worth much, which was clear for all to see in that the cost was Danny Valencia.

I received a bit of bitter disagreement with my assessment.  Fingers were pointed toward Lough's gaudy AAA numbers where he toiled many a season without a sniff from the parent club.  On my side, I tried to explain the problems with performance scouting, offensive environments in the PCL, and how a large body of indifference from scouts should usually be accepted as a most likely characterization of the player.  Numbers are not everything.

That all said, I might have been wrong.  No, I was right about his bat being anemic.  Where my fault was in how I was evaluating his defense.  When I look at a player, I first check out the statistics.  Defensive metrics have improved to the level of a graduated litmus test, but they still not are as accurate as a similar sample size of batting data.  You tend to want a few years to figure it all out with any certainty, Lough had some amazing defensive metrics.  At worst, he was probably a +10 player over a full season.  Those are rare.  I severely doubted that he was a +28 player as 835 innings as a Royal.

I then consulted people I know and available scouting reports.  With Lough, he was described as a player with a fringe bat.  He plate discipline was not great, but he made decent contact and showed gap-to-gap power.  His defense was considered solid, but not enough to carry his bat in a corner position.  Additionally, with the emergence of high offense producing bats in center field, his wares were thought a poor fit.  Weighted all together, the general view was that he was a fourth outfielder who would be shuttled back and forth between the Majors and Minors while occasionally getting on hot streaks.  The cost being Danny Valencia, that assessment made sense.

How Lough has been deployed by the Orioles also makes sense with respect to the numbers as well as to the scouting.  After experiencing some struggles at the plate, Lough has been largely removed from the field and his place of shame, the batter's box.  He also might find himself as this club's 23rd, 24th, or 25th man.  All of those positions are likely up in the air.  This is particularly true with Nolan Reimold pushing the active roster.  Added to the equation, Lough cannot be optioned to Norfolk.

That all said, this is what Lough has accomplished this season:

PA	AVG	OBP	SLG	oRuns	Innings	UZR
126	.182	.262	.282	-2.2	300.2	5.3

I converted oWAR into oRuns just to put it on the same scale as UZR.  I also included the positional adjustment in that value instead of placing it in with defense.  Basically, playing about 30 games of innings, Lough has put up 3.1 runs over a replacement player.  Over a full season, that would be worth about 1.8 WAR.  That is an average quality player even though he has been horrible with the bat.

Of course, the problem is that so much is dependent on the admittedly scant sample size for measuring defense.  You really would want something like 2000 innings to feel comfortable about Lough's ability.  In his career, he has played 1136.1 innings (about a season's worth of innings) and consistently has a rate of about 25 runs saved above average, which would make him the second or third best defensive outfielder in baseball.

Yes, the sample size is small, but it appears to be relatively consistent in over three years of play.  To me, that suggests that it likely is a real performance level and that performance level alone is worthy of starting.  More so, it is hard to see his hitting getting worse.  Over the rest of the season, we could expect a line like this:

	PA	AVG	OBP	SLG	oRuns	Innings	UZR
ZIPS	270	.227	.281	.342	1.4	600	10.6
Continued	270	.182	.262	.282	-4.7

The above is the updated projection of what ZIPS thinks Lough should do the rest of the season looking at his career statistics to date.  The expectation as a full time player is that he will be worth about 12 runs above replacement or roughly 1.2 WAR.  If he continues to hit as poorly as he is hitting, we would expect 5.9 runs above replacement or roughly 0.6 WAR.  To think of that as full season WAR, it would project to a player between 1.6 and 2.9 WAR.

That is rather solid, but we can probably make this even more solid.  What if we replaced Lough with Delmon Young as a leadoff hitter in away games against left handed pitcher?  Any successful hit, Lough would come in as a pinch runner.  Any unsuccessful appearance and Lough will simply jog out to left field in the bottom of the inning.  Here is how that would look:

	PA	AVG	OBP	SLG	oRuns	Innings	UZR
Lough Z	250	0.227	0.281	0.342	1.3	600	10.6
Lough C	250	0.182	0.262	0.282	-4.4
Young	20	0.285	0.321	0.471	1.2

For Delmon Young, I only considered ZIPS adjusted for left handed pitchers, which expects Young not to keep up his current pace.  In other words, this might be considered a conservative estimate.  Using ZIPS also for Lough and taking away 20 plate appearances, Lough's value decreases by 0.1 runs to 11.9 runs above replacement while Young adds 1.2 runs.  In other words, the effort changes from 12 runs above replacement to 13.1 runs, a difference of about a tenth of a win.  In the continued performance scenario for Lough, his value is 6.2 runs above replacement, an improvement of 0.3 runs.  Put on Young, this improves it by another 1.2 runs or 1.5 runs total.  If we were talking about a full season, we would be talking about an improvement of almost a whole win.  Yes, it would take a pinch hitter away from you in about 50 games, but how often are pinch hitters really used?

Of course, all of this ignores who really is now patrolling in left field.  That essentially is a 50/50 mix of Steve Pearce and Nelson Cruz.  Lough and Lough / Young should be compared not with a vacuum, but against this other mix.  While patrolling left, ZIPS sees Cruz as worth 0.6 WAR while it sees Pearce as 0.7 WAR for a grand total of 1.3 WAR.  That is equivalent to what Lough is worth out there, meaning that there currently is no reason to put Lough out there even though he appears to be in the neighborhood of an average starter to fringe All Star player simply due to his defense.

Going forward, that is incredibly important to know.  If those metrics are accurately describing Lough's performance level, then there is no total dropoff between him and the current group of starters.  That is depth.  It also suggests that Pearce or Young could be available for use as complementary pieces in a trade.  Lough is an important piece of the club and could potentially have good value next year if the team has difficulty finding elite performance in left.  All in all, those cries for designating Lough for assignment sounds like a pretty bad idea.

Platoon Prospects and Matt Wieters

Platoons are not one of the incredibly interesting or attractive things in baseball.  Recently, it has been a meme that Billy Beane is rearing the mystique of Moneyball again.  This time it will surely confuse the already confused as Moneyball is not about on base percentage.  It really has not been for a while.  That boat left the dock around 2002.  From there, Moneyball went to defense, then speed, and now sits somewhere around homeruns and platooning.  However, it is likely Moneyball will soon be shifting away from platooning if it hasn't already done so.

In fact, Beane was discussing the platooning situation a year ago.  Mind you, two things tend to dictate the value of a front office: (1) the ability to collect and utilize data and (2) the ability not to share anything with anyone.  On the latter point, knowledge is power.  It is one of those things that can separate teams.  If you are openly telling the public what the new black is, it likely is no longer the new black.  You are probably simply letting people know something they should have already figured out and that the surplus value there really is not there anymore.  Which is really what Moneyball is, finding a part of the market that is being overlooked or, more popularly phrased, finding the inefficiencies in the market.

Now, platooning is not a new idea.  Earl Weaver was a king of platoons when it fit what he needed.  You will often find kernals of the sabermetric movement in ideas that came up convergently with Weaver.  That said, Weaver had his forebears with front office men like Branch Rickey and the originator of the box score Henry Chadwick.  I often find it humorous when people mention how the folks today are playing make believe games using all of these advanced metrics when they subscribe to simply a different set of numbers.  A rose is a rose is a rose, sometimes.

Going Yard | photo by Keith Allison

However, I wish to move back toward something a little more concrete and a lot more directed to the Orioles.  That item is going to focus on the batting splits of Matt Wieters who some have now christened as the Switch Hitting False Messiah (previously he was known in some local circuits as Switch Hitting Jesus due to the inaccurate Davenport Translations affecting his astronomical PECOTA projection before his rookie year).  Anyway, here are Wieters' wOBA (from Fangraphs) over his career by split and year.

	vs L	vs R
2009	.301	.350
2010	.246	.326
2011	.474	.291
2012	.393	.310
2013	.371	.272

As you can see, Wieters is an absolutely beast when facing left handed pitchers these past three years (as opposed to the completely opposite platoon he showed his first two seasons), but shrinks to a wall flower against right handers.  This past season was particularly exceptional in how poor he was batting left handed.  He struggled so much that it would have been a good idea to give him rest against righties simply because he showed little aptitude in hitting them.  Previously, I wrote about this and wondered whether it was a single year fluke because the batted ball distribution seemed different this year as compared to latter years and whether it was a conscious attempt by him to beat the shift.  Although 2013's split was atrocious, one should not make a habit always to think the future is based solely on the past year.  In other words, a forced platoon might be a bit much here to set Wieters in.  However, it might be a good idea to choose to sit him against right handers who may be more difficult for him to hit.  I think that was in part Dan Duquette's idea when he acquired Steve Clevenger who has shown an aptitude to hitting right handers (2013 AAA numbers: .386 R wOBA in 95 PA and .435 L wOBA in 44 PA).

Are there others out there who need a platoon partner or perhaps could be good platoon partners?

Southpaw Maulers

Derek Norris | photo by Keith Allison

One thing not readily found in catchers are guys who maul lefties.  This seems kind of strange to me at first because catchers, being right handed, are for the most part natural right handed batters and should have a platoon tendency against lefties.  However, that seems not to be the case.  Maybe it is something that will show up time and time again as we move through the positions.  Anyway, here are a list of lefties whose MLB wOBA is 10% better than average (.339 vs. .308) and at least 120 PA against lefties (120 PA is used because that is the fewest amount of PAs to result in something meaningful for offense, which in this case is walk rate) in 2013:

	Age	Team	L wOBA	R wOBA
MLB
Derek Norris	24	Oakland	.431	.221
Buster Posey	26	San Francisco	.411	.368
Wilin Rosario	24	Colorado	.396	.337
Carlos Santana	27	Cleveland	.396	.362
Joe Mauer	30	Minnesota	.390	.391
Matt Wieters	27	Baltimore	.380	.284
Jonathan Lucroy	27	Milwaukee	.373	.360
Chris Iannetta	30	LAAA	.357	.318
Salvador Perez	23	Kansas City	.342	.319
A.J. Pierzynski	37	Texas	.339	.332	FA

Of these players who performed noticeably better than the average catcher against lefties, only A.J. Pierzynski is a free agent.  Further illustrating the scarcity, no AAA catcher showed up in this analysis.  For MiL catcher, I noted a 20% increase to be something newsworthy.  Of the players above, only Baltimore's own Matt Wieters and Beane's Derek Norris look like catchers in need of a mate who can tee off of right handed pitchers.  The others displayed above average bats no matter the pitcher's handedness.

So who can hit right handers?

Joe Mauer | Photo by Keith Allison

Using the same guidelines as above (120 PA vs. RHP, .339 wOBA), here is the complementary platoon list:

	Age	Team	L wOBA	R wOBA
MLB
Joe Mauer	30	Minnesota	.390	.391
Brayan Pena	31	Detroit	.268	.386	FA
Jason Castro	26	Houston	.328	.380
John Jaso	30	Oakland	.209	.377
Yadier Molina	31	St. Louis	.382	.372
Buster Posey	26	San Francisco	.411	.368
Yan Gomes	26	Cleveland	.398	.363
J. Saltalamacchia	28	Boston	.298	.362	FA
Carlos Santana	27	Cleveland	.396	.362
Jonathan Lucroy	27	Milwaukee	.373	.360
Jose Lobaton	29	Tampa Bay	.287	.359
Wilson Ramos	26	Washington	.310	.357
Welington Castillo	26	Chicago	.316	.354
Russell Martin	30	Pittsburgh	.282	.348
Dioner Navarro	29	Chicago	.478	.341	FA
Hank Conger	25	LAAA	.292	.339
Wilin Rosario	24	Colorado	.396	.337
Miguel Montero	30	Arizona	.226	.333
A.J. Pierzynski	37	Texas	.339	.332	FA

If one is looking for a partner to pair with Wieters, you are going to have to cross off Salty and Pierzynski.  They obviously will get the lion's share of any battery duty behind the plate.  Dioner Navarro had a stellar season in limited at bats and can probably find himself a situation where he will find more playing time than he would with the stalwart Wieters in tandem.  Brayan Pena could be a player to target.  I believe he came into the Tigers camp as a Minor League free agent with an invite.  He has also really picked them up while Avila was struggling.  If the Tigers value him or he carries that playoff mystique, he may not be available on the cheap and be out of the Orioles range of salary they would feel comfortable with for a backup catcher.

There are also several minor league options available:

	Age	Team	L wOBA	R wOBA
MiL
Josh Phegley	25	Chicago	.409	.421
Matt McBride	28	Colorado	.450	.416
Josh Thole	27	Toronto	.378	.396
Stephen Vogt	27	Oakland	.345	.395
Bryan Anderson	27	Chicago	.172	.372
Tony Sanchez	25	Pittsburgh	.416	.372
Johnny Monell	27	San Francisco	.331	.366
Robinzon Diaz	30	Milwaukee	.338	.362
Brett Hayes	29	Kansas City	.197	.361
Kris Watts	29	Washington	.192	.359

I would not think about giving any of these players the key to the castle (aka a 40 man contract).  However, I would be very interested in what scouts would think of guys like Bryan Anderson, Robinzon Diaz, Brett Hayes, and Kris Watts.  All four of those players stand a good chance of being Minor League free agents this off season.  The other names would be good ones to remember if there is an existing deal and the team wants to broaden out their risk probability.  Phegley and Sanchez still have some shine to them, but the others stand as second or third tier prospects.

Conclusion

Steve Clevenger (far right) | Photo by Keith Allison

For the Orioles, I would hold onto Clevenger and have him compete for the backup catcher position.  I would also look to sign as a MiL Free Agent someone on the above list who winds up qualifying as such as competition.  It may well be that Wieters' weakness against right handers may be largely the result of a certain plus pitch (i.e., fastball, off speed, breaking ball) and perhaps his rest could be positioned around those kinds of pitchers.  It may be that a platoon worthy AAAA catcher stands little chance improving upon what Wieters can do from his weak side, but it may not be that much of a difference.  It might even improve his confidence against righties that he matches up better against because he would not face as many events where he fails.  Of course, this could be a one year blips and he bounces back to being average against righties.