Daric Barton falls off a Cliff Pennington

I've already slightly touched on my sentiment of Daric Barton my last post, but truth be told I really do love the guy. I mean come on...who else do you know that owns a Daric Barton shirt?* Anyways, cute title puns aside, my beloved Oakland A's cannot win with a first basemen who hits like a shortstop. Actually, Pennington has a higher wOBA at .293 than Barton's putrid .275. Kansas City's all glove-no bat short stop, Alcides Escobar, currently sports a wOBA of .274. Hows that for some peer persepctive? Due to this offensive futility as well as Barton's usually above average defense also taking a dive, the A's have been forced to option Barton down to AAA. Given the small sample size of this year, the question isn't it IF it was the right thing to to do, but exactly how justified was the move? Now that's to say that it's acceptable to have wRC+ of 75 at first base, but lets take a bit of a deeper look at his numbers

*I also have an Eric Chavez, Kurt Suzuki, and I've ordered a Craig Breslow one. Random players, I know. But hey, my fandom knows no bounds.

Coming from the trade with St. Louis that sent Mark Mulder out of town, Barton has never projected as a power hitting first basemen. His ceiling was always that of a 40 doubles, .400 OPB kind of guy. And if only prospects would reach their ceiling, what a wonderful land this would be. Anywho, when a player offensive numbers hit the fan like so, my first instinct is to check for any glaring abnormalities in his BABIP, LD%, BB%, K%, and finally O-swing% to see if he is pressing too much and therefore chasing pitches.

	Career	2011
BABIP	0.294	0.260
LD%	20.5	19.4
BB%	14.2	13.9
K%	19.3	19.9
O-Sw%	16.2	17.6

Now, I haven't yet decided to do a heat map of his pitch recognition or anything to like, and now I don't really see the need to. To be honest, I think we can safely say that our friend Daric Barton has simply been a victim of bad luck. Would it be great if he learned how to ISO .250 over night? Of course. But we know that won't happen. BABIP takes a long time to normalize, sometimes even a full baseball season isn't a long enough time. The A's made the right choice in the demoting Barton, however I would expect him to be back up sooner rather than later. His approach appears to be fine and unchanged. Simply put, the BABIP gods decided to toy with his emotions thus far this year. He'll be back.

WAR, and why to be WARY of it...get it?

See what I did up there? WAR, Wins Above Replacement, and wary, you know, cautious, careful...hey shut up. If you want your 0.00 back for reading this, then be my guest.

Now, if you're reading this, you should know that I am probably the biggest fan of FanGraphs for at least a 200 mile radius. I love everything they do. I love their writers, especially Dave Cameron, Jonah Keri and possibly my favorite, Carson Cistulli.

Anyways, FanGraphs has a beautiful Library that will serve you far more than my words here can describe WAR. Long story short, WAR tries to quantify the value of a player, any player, regardless of league, team or position compared to the AAA or bench player. Hence, the exact wording Wins Above Replacement (player). I won't get into the fWAR vs rWAR debate and differences here, as again, it can be found in much more clearly yet much less words at the FanGraphs site. Just go to it already. I'm going to keep plugging it until you do.

Anyways, the point of this post was inspired by this article. What I'm most intrigued by here is how the author cites WAR, notes UZR and then Total Zone metrics. He then goes on to explain the lack possibility of each system recording different findings, and then how MLB teams have their own systems, which could even further dilute, or clear, the muddled waters of defensive metrics.

I have no issue with Bill Barnwell, in fact I loved his article and look forward to many more, I just have an issue with WAR and UZR being noted in a publication and not noting the sheer volatility that can accompany each statistic.

Daric Barton was a 5.1 WAR player last year. To put that into some sort of perspective, Chase Utley was at 5.4 WAR, Jay Bruce at 5.3, Brandon Phillips at 4.3, David Wright at 4.0 WAR

Anything wrong with that picture? Lets move on for now.

In 2009 Franklin Gutierrez was an alien.

He had to be. He put up a 6.3 WAR. Six wins! SIX! That's the difference between playoffs and couch-sitting come October for a lot of teams. A 6 WAR season is impressive to say the least. How did he do that? He must have mashed, at least as far as one can mash in the SafeCo. Except he didn't really hit that well. Sure, a CF with a wRC+ of 105 in a full season is nothing to scoff at, but that cannot explain his value jump. And it doesn't. Gutierrez's massive jump in value, came from a huge up-shoot in his UZR, which reflected upon his WAR. In 2009, he was estimated to save 28.9 runs above replacement before you calculate what he did at the plate. The word you're looking for here isn't astronomical. That word wouldn't do his numbers justice that year. The word you want to use is assassin, because whenever Gutierrez was in CF, fly balls were sent there to die. In seasons accumulating over 400 PA Gutierrez's WAR is 2.3, 6.3, 1.9. Which one of these is not like the other?

Now that we've seen how a single season of UZR data can be absolutely distort that season's WAR, lets go back and look at 2010 Barton a little differently. He had a .3589 wOBA, wRC+ of 127. Well above league average on both accounts. Unfortunately, his WAR was also falsely inflated by saving 12 runs above average on defense. Unless Keith Hernandez died and was reincarnated as another first basemen, this time with even less power, then I think we've found our 5 WAR season outlier.

I'm not ripping on Barnwell, FanGraphs, numbers or anything like that. I just hate when a writer fails to convey the thought that even though it's a long baseball season, one year of UZR data, and by extension one year of WAR, is taken as gospel. I believe in the numbers, I really do. I'm just a little wary of them.

Whats for dinner? Crow? Sounds great

OOF! Thats the sound I make when I realize I am wrong. Sometimes its a little heavier on the OOO, but I digress...

Yeah, so about that last post. Totally kidding. I probably should have waited for a few more stats to normalize before I started spouting off about my beloved A's. We now sit a full 8 games back and have 9 of our last 10. I don't think the bubble burst, I think I dropped the bottle of suds before I even had a chance to have fun. The rotation is in shambles, with Anderson out a minimum of 6 weeks, Braden done for the year, and McCarthy still on the DL. The (lack of) offense is tied with the non-mashers up in Seattle for the fewest runs scored in the AL, at 244. The best news lately that we've heard is that Anderson doesn't need TJS,and Bailey is back from the DL. Oh yeah, one more thing...

BEST MAN BOB IS GONE!!!

Yep, "Mr. I can't work a bullpen correctly to save my life" is finally gone! Now I don't want to celebrate the firing of a human being from the job, but when one shows utterly incredible failures in 3 straight seasons, loses the respect of a major bullpen arm and voice in Fuentes, and according to the papers, lost the Clubhouse as well, then it is certainly time to move on. He's been replaced on an interim basis by Bob Melvin.

Personally, I think managing a MLB baseball team is relatively easy. This is how I see the job description of my manager in no particular order:

-Navigate the media
-Communicate with your players
-Construct the ideal lineup, preferably with some solid reasoning behind it, or dare I say, even something like this:
-Set the rotation
-Juggle the starters and bench players to keep everyone sharp and fresh
-Manage the bullpen

Now I'm sure I'm missing some things here, but that has to cover at least 80% of the job. Call me a minimalist here, but come on, what else is there? Whatevs. I meant to post this like a week ago as soon as the news broke that we got Melvin. Whatevs.

*sigh*

Really, the only point of this post is to mock myself and my blind faith of my last post. Heres to the playoffs...next...decade?