FIRE JOE MORGAN

Thanksgiving kind of prevented us from commenting too much on the Torii Hunter signing. I will do so now.

I think Torii Hunter is an excellent baseball player. Wonderful fielder. Super fun to watch. Remember that HR he robbed from Bonds in the ASG? Amazing. Fantastic. Great player.

But.

He's 32, people. 32. His body has taken a pounding from years of playing CF on cement. And thanks to the irreversible one-way-itude of Father Time's relentless arrow, he is not getting any younger. His career OBP of .327 is what the Welsh would call: "terrible." (If they followed baseball.) Before he blew through his 90th percentile PECOTA prediction this year, they had him as an 11-HR, 2.0 WARP player in 2011, at age 35. And this Angels contract will pay him $18m when he's 35. And 36.

It's a really iffy deal. It just is. The Angels have a lot of places they could have upgraded offensively, and they chose to do it very expensively at a position where they already have a very expensive (and kind of bad) player. Torii is better than Gary Matthews, to be sure, but not way better, and -- just to reiterate -- due to the fact that the temporal dimension moves in one direction only, and the corresponding fact that baseball is not played in a tank of cold cæsium with light-amplification lasers, he is not getting any younger.

Anyway. Let's see what Kurt Streeter of the L.A. Times thinks about the signing.

Granted, Hunter doesn't bring monster power to Anaheim. But with him in the line-up, other teams won't be able to dink their way around Vladimir Guerrero, who has been the straw that stirs the drink. If they try, they'll have to deal with Hunter, an RBI machine who hit 31 homers two years ago and 28 last year.

I wouldn't exactly call him an "RBI Machine." He's had more than 100 twice. He's slugged over .500 twice. He averages 93 RBI per 162 games. Now, granted, he had a bunch of low OBP-guys hitting in front of him, but still.

Of course, there's much more to Hunter than his bat. Here's a guy who fits right in with the Angels' philosophy: slash at opposing teams with swift-boat speed.

Swift-boat? Is this some weird anti-Kerry message left over from 2004?

Hunter will pilfer plenty of bases.

Last year he stole 18 of them! (Out of 27 tries.) The year before, though, he pilfered...twelve. Out of eighteen. In 2003, when he was a young swift-boating buck of 27, he stole...six. And was caught seven times. His career high is 23. What does "plenty" mean to you?

He'll hit line drives, and he'll scramble from first to third and rarely get caught.

So this is how he'll "fit in" with the Angels' philosophy. I say: he'll fit in most obviously with his .327 career OBP. The Angels don't get on base, traditionally, (though they were 3rd in the AL last year), and neither does Hunter. The ironic thing here, to me, is that they now have a glut of outfielders, and I've read rumors of them trading Reggie Willits. The one guy (besides Vlad) who really works counts or gets on base. (And don't tell me about Chone and his .393 OBP. Fluke. He didn't walk more than he usually does, and he had a .400 BABIP. Bet you anything he's back down to a ~.350 OBP next year.)

This part is fun:

Close your eyes and imagine this guy in your outfield. There is a reason Hunter is a seven-time Gold Glove winner. Picture Boston in town. Those Red Sox fans and their incessant "Let's go, Red Sox" are making you nuts. Suddenly, Manny Ramirez drives a ball deep into center field.

There it goes, another Manny home run.

Wait, what's that?

It's Torii Hunter flying high above the center-field wall, arm stretched, glove wide.

Home run stolen.

"Let's go, Red Sox"? Put a sock in it.

Two things:

There is about a .008% chance this will happen.

Also, Gary Matthews Jr., the man Torii Hunter is replacing, is most famous for the most spectacular CF-based HR-robbing anyone has ever seen. A HR-robbing that essentially got him $50m from these same Angels.

Then there's Hunter the person. In Minneapolis, fans are in mourning. They know they've just lost a guy who has gone flat out for them for nearly a decade -- on the field and in the community.

I buy this. He seems like a wonderful man. Who has a .327 career OBP.

Hunter is known as a mensch. And he's a spark plug. The Angels are a good group of guys who seem to get along, but their clubhouse feels a little calm. They need some crackle, someone to lighten the moment and generate some spirit to repeat their 2002 World Series run.

Hunter's personality is going to help.

Mensch, sparkplug, clubhouse, crackle, spirit, personality. This is one of my favorite paragraphs ever. And by the way, you know what they actually need to repeat their World Series win? Offense. Home runs. Baserunners. Torii Hunter will add some of these things in decent amounts. Miguel Cabrera, e.g., would add more of them for a longer time.

Don't be surprised if the Angels aren't finished with their off-season upgrades. One or two outfielders might be packaged in a trade for yet another hot bat.

Arte Moreno, be careful. Don't be tempted by Miguel Tejada. I don't like his downward trend.

I hear you, Kurt. Look at this guy's stats. I mean, he's 32, he doesn't walk much, he plays a high-stress position which makes him prone to break down...yikes. Stay away. Stick to Torii Hunter.

And please be leery of the Marlins' cherubic Miguel Cabrera. The guy has a sweet swing, but he's in danger of eating himself off the ball field and onto a fat farm. If you insist on signing him, put more weight incentives in his contract than a breakfast buffet has sausages.

You know, one story got written about how the guy is heavier than he used to be, and now everyone just says "Stay away -- he's fat!"

.320/.401/.565
.326 EqA
Consecutive seasons of above-150 OPS+: 3
Age in human years: 24

He can be as fat as he wants if he's going to do that for my team. The man is 24. He's not a great defensive 3B, but...he's 24. Twenty-four years young. Here is his baseball-reference.com "Most Similar By Age" breakdown:

21: Hank Aaron
22: Hank Aaron
23: Hank Aaron
24: Hank Aaron

Yeah. Stay away from that guy. Get the 32 year-old astroturf-riddled CF with the .327 OBP. And pay him $90m until he's 37. And enjoy your team's excellent performance next year, when you win like one more game than you did this year. (Or ten fewer, depending on your pitching.)

One more thing, Arte. Please don't forget that getting Hunter was only half smart. The other half was who you didn't get.

Alex Rodriguez, for example.

Amen, brother. Who the hell wants to lock up the best or second-best hitter in all of baseball? That would be insane. How would ARod protect Vlad in the line-up, what with all his post-season choking and therapy-going? Fuck that. Take Torii Hunter and his .327 OBP, and his 28 HR in a career/walk-year, and protect your line-up that way. You don't need ARod and his like 54 HR and .994 EqA and 108 walk-off HR and 3.456 SLG and runaway-wins in MVP voting. You need a moderately good hitter who never ever walks, and who missed more games in 2005 than ARod has this entire millennium, and whose career high in HR is a decent All-Star-Break total for ARod, and whose 37 year-old hitting totals are going to make you long for the days of this guy. Only Hunter's speed will be gone, too.

ARod? A-no-thanks, if you get my drift. I want to win baseball games, not "win baseball games."

As I wrote toward the end of last season, A-Rod is a marvelous player, but bringing him to Anaheim would have been a mistake. He would have hit home runs, but he also would have upset the dynamic of a carefully constructed team with his gigantic salary and ego.

No. No he would not have. He would have hit 50 HR and driven in 140 and had a .340 EqA and he and Vlad would have terrorized the AL West.

Besides, when has he ever won a championship?

Can you fucking believe this?

Other players cited in Kurt Streeter's article about how awesome Torii Hunter is who have never won a championship:

1. Torii Hunter

My suggestion back then was to go after Torii Hunter instead. I'm glad you did.

Good. So when he goes .271/.309/.418 with 11 HR in 2011, we'll know whom to blame.

Labels: arod, food metaphors, kurt streeter, miguel cabrera, miguel tejada, torii hunter

If Miguel Tejada were actually tall and white, how over-the-top would the coverage of him being the next Cal Ripken be?

The newspaper articles, the guys yelling on "Around the Horn," the interviews with Cal asking him what he thought of young Michael Tiled trying to take his place in Baltimore ...

I think we're very lucky that scenario didn't arise.

Labels: cal ripken, miguel tejada

The largely sociological post made by dak below led to a discussion of how similar Cal Ripken, Jr. and Miguel Tejada were, and whether Ripken was "head and shoulders" better than Tejada.

I tried to answer the latter question in the comments section. I'm posting it here because I wanted people to read something that wasted like ten minutes of my life.

Dear mattymatty and dak,

My first impulse was to say that no, Cal Ripken was not in fact head and shoulders above Miguel Tejada, at the very least offensively. This reaction was likely based in a) my belief that Tejada is pretty damn great and b) my belief that Cal Ripken gets ball-washed quite a bit, and perhaps is a tiny bit overrated.

But -- and I think you'll appreciate this, dak -- let's really look at the numbers. dak's done some of the work for us, but as he admits, Ripken played in a vastly different offensive era. How will that factor compete with Tejada's "canyon of a ballpark" in Oakland?

Fortunately, we don't have to make hand-waving arguments either way. OPS+ is both era- and park-adjusted. I took Tejada's first seven full seasons and Ripken's first seven full seasons and came up with the following:

Tejada OPS+: 109
Ripken OPS+: 126

What can we draw from this? Up to this point in their respective careers, Cal Ripken was significantly better on offense than Miguel Tejada relative to his peers. Surprising, at least to me.

As a point of comparison, Ripken's average OPS+ over this period is coincidentally equal to Tejada's during the 2004 season, when he was a monster. Tejada's, meanwhile, is close to Juan Uribe's 2004 season, which was very good (an OPS+ of 107; he hit 23 homers and batted .283). But Juan Uribe was no Miguel Tejada last year.

As a side note, I'm pretty suspicious of the baseball-reference.com Similar Batters lists. The metric they use was developed by Bill James, but if you look carefully at what it constitutes, it is NOT era- or park-adjusted. Meaning Tejada's inflated batting average and power totals (due to this recent hitters' era) are compared directly to Ripken's numbers during a much lower-scoring period. So the Similar Batters lists are interesting, but not exactly rigorous.

Which is not to say that it's not the best, quickest, and dirtiest method we have. I'm certainly never going to develop a better way of comparing players across eras because I am too lazy and stupid.

In sum, from what we know so far, Ripken was clearly the better hitter than Tejada through this point in their careers. Head and shoulders better? Maybe. Could Tejada do some things over the next few years that might change how these two stack up? Definitely.

But his numbers will have to be really insane if all the other major league baseball players continue to hit as they have.

Labels: cal ripken, miguel tejada