“I loved the peek at the wall, that’s the part that really turned me on”

Who Said It? Was it:

a)  a 13-year old seeing the 1981 movie “Porky’s” for the first time?

or

b) Tampa Bay Manager Joe Maddon talking about B.J. Upton’s over-the-shoulder catch on Monday night?

Well, this is a baseball blog. So. Um, yeah.

I’m all for recognizing true defensive excellence in baseball. Far too often, we the fans ignore the runs that were prevented in favor of runs that were scored. Which is why I felt that Tampa Bay’s acquisition of Jason Bartlett from the Minnesota Twins back in November was a pretty good one. Not only were they able to get Matt Garza as well in that trade that sent Delmon Young to Minnesota, but Bartlett was a pretty good defensive shortstop in 2007. His 67 Out of Zone plays was good enough for fourth in MLB among shortstops, which helped make up some for his below average Revised Zone Rating (.804).

But this is 2008, and Bartlett hasn’t been as good this year. His RZR has remained consistent (.808), but even with the 100 fewer innings in the field, his OOZ is just 44, a 35% decrease. His Range Factor is also down from 4.67 last year to 4.22. And with an Adjusted OPS of 83, I really don’t think that he’s helping the team all that much.

So you can imagine my surprise to see that the Tampa Bay chapter of the Baseball Writers Association of America has voted Bartlett as the team MVP this season. Cue the confusion.

While it’s true that he’s still an improvement defensively over Brendan Harris who manned the position last year (which really isn’t saying much, by the way), it’s difficult to understand the logic here. What Bartlett has over Harris with the glove is canceled out by his deficiency with the bat. Harris had 13 Win Shares in 2007. Bartlett has 10 so far this year.

I do think that the BBWAA is on the right track in crediting the Rays’ W-L improvement over the past year to their defense. But I give just as much credit, if not more, to rookie third baseman Evan Longoria’s work at the hot corner. And BJ Upton’s markedly improved performance in center field deserves commending as well. And you know what? Longoria and Upton’s offensive contributions blow Bartlett’s out of those warm Tampa waters (full disclosure – I have no idea if Tampa’s waters are warm. I digress). It’s not even close.

I understand the tendency to point to free agent signings or trades rather than internal moves when we see vast improvements in a team’s performance. We look for what that “missing piece” was for success. And Bartlett fits the bill, I suppose, in that sense. But in the case of the Tampa Bay Rays, it was more Upton gaining experience and the performance of Longoria that we ought to be crediting.

This morning, a source emailed me the following screen capture:

Poor Justin Upton. Like younger siblings everywhere, you will always, apparently, be stuck in the shadow of your older brother. Even though you are a highly touted prospect on one of the youngest, most overperforming teams in the majors, and big bro BJ is centerfielder on the young, but perennially sucky Devil Rays.

Upton the Younger:

The fact is that he was the best hitting prospect in the minors before being called up, and he’s also been the best prospect for his age ever since age 12, according to Baseball America.

Upton the Elder: Either having a breakout year or a statistical anomaly, he’s hitting over .300 in his third year in the majors after hitting under .260 the previous two years.

Thanks to my anonymous source {aka Steve Carpenter} for the tip!

I’m a big believer in the utility of batting average on balls put in play, or BA/BIP, as a means of determining which players are likely to improve or decline over the rest of the season. The theory is that pitchers can only consistently control four things – home runs allowed, walks allowed, strikeouts recorded, and ground ball to flyball ratio. These four statistics show a strong correlation from year to year.

While pitchers can control the number of balls that are put into play (by striking out a lot of guys, or not), what pitchers cannot control is the batting average they allow on balls that are put into play. Similarly, hitters can only control how often they put the ball into play (by not striking out), as well as how many homers, walks, and flyballs vs. groundballs they hit, but not the batting average on those balls they put into play.

This makes sense intuitively, as we often suggest that it was not a pitcher’s fault if ground balls happen to find holes or little flares happen to drop in, just as we sympathize with a hitter who hits laser beams but they just happen to be hit right at a fielder.

Thus using BA/BIP, we can quickly decide which players have been extraordinarily lucky or unlucky with balls falling in or happening to be hit straight at someone. This was how we could tell last year that even though Andre Ethier was leading all major leaguers with a .393 batting average last July, he was not exactly the second coming of Ted Williams, because his batting average on balls put into play was the second best in baseball at the time, which suggested that he was getting extraordinarily luckly with balls dropping in for hits.

Conversely, if a player is doing extremely well or extremely poorly but his BA/BIP is not extra ordinarily high or low, we can assume that he is actually just that good or just that bad.

Looking at some of this year’s performances so far, we can see that Daisuke Matsuzaka has been extremely unlucky. Not only did he come into last night’s game with his team putting up a league low 1.2 runs of support behind him, but he also is in the bottom 10 pitchers in the batting average on balls put in play against him, yielding a .333 average any time an opponent doesn’t strikeout or hit a home run (.290 is about average). It is fortunate that Daisuke gets as many strikeouts as he does or his bad luck so far would have translated into an extremely high ERA.

Similarly, looking at batters, we can see that Gary Sheffield (currently batting .119) is very likely to improve in the near future as he has a second-worst in-the-AL .140 batting average on balls put into play, whereas BJ Upton (.340 avg)  has been extremely lucky, with a staggering, major-league-leading BA/BIP of .536, which means his performance is very likely to decline in the near future.