Go-Go Soak Your Head

When the Twins completed their off-season trade of Johan Santana to the Mets, many local observers were disappointed that the Twins didn't land a clearly marquis player in return, especially given that Red Sox center fielder Jacoby Ellsbury was rumored to be one of the players in the mix. While many grumbled, some decided to take a closer look at the players the Twins did get, specifically center field prospect Carlos Gomez. (Even so, this pre-season poll saw Gomez finish just behind Jason Pridie as the Twinkie Town choice for the club's starting centerfielder.)

Spring training began, and Gomez began to draw some attention to himself. Then the season started, and the bandwagon really started to roll. Gomez quickly became a fan favorite, as well as a frequent subject of local sportswriters.

Others are welcome to go ga-ga over Gomez: I'm not. While I can accept that Gomez, at a baseball age of 22, could conceivably develop into a star, I'm about to argue that right now, in 2008, the Twins are winning not because of Gomez's contributions, but in spite of them.

Offense

Carlos Gomez is not a good offensive player, however you choose to measure it.

Gomez is currently batting .266 with a 671 OPS. This is almost identical to offensive punchline Neifi Perez's career batting numbers (.267 BA, 672 OPS). That's a pretty damning piece of evidence right off the top.

In our previous post, we examined the Twins' offensive improvement from April to June with an eye toward trying to figure out if the improvement was sustainable. We found that some Twins players had shown marked improvement, while ineffective players had been replaced with more effective players. Except for Gomez:

April - .265/651
June - .236/575

Even with all that said, an overall .266/671 line isn't necessarily crippling to a team's offense -- after all, those numbers are close to the AL's overall batting line for #8 hitters (.254/705) and are superior to the AL's overall batting line for #9 hitters (.242/643).

Problem is, Gomez bats leadoff, and has in every game he's started for the Twins.

The AL is the home of the three most sabermetrically-aware clubs in MLB (the A's, Red Sox, and Blue Jays), and as such it's pretty clear that the 'leadoff man should have a good OBP' meme has penetrated the league: the combined OBP of all the AL's leadoff men is .343, which is significantly higher than Gomez's OBP of .301.

The easiest way to see the impact of this difference in OBP is to look at Joe Mauer. As I write this, Mauer is second in the AL in batting average, and has hit behind Gomez all year -- he hit second for the first week of the season, and has hit third in every game he's started since. Mauer has 37 RBI.

Allow me to repeat that: Joe Mauer has 37 RBI. The 'average' major league hitter will also have 37 RBI in 331 plate appearances, according to baseball-reference.com, but the average major league hitter will also have had 207 baserunners aboard during his 331 plate appearances; Mauer has had ten fewer than that. (Note: that link is to Mauer's current 2008 gamelog page, which was as written on July 8.)

The Twins have 38 RBI from their #3 hitter in 2008; that's the second-lowest total in the league, behind the Blue Jays. That's a direct result of Gomez's below-average on-base ability. And yes, I can back that up: you'll remember that Mauer is second in the AL in batting average? He's also second in the AL in on-base percentage. His teammate, Justin Morneau, is leading the team in RBI (and is second in the AL) with 65. The 'average' major league hitter will have just 42 RBI in 379 plate appearances; Morneau has hit with an extra 47 runners on base in his at-bats, many of which have been Joe Mauer.

Let's say you prefer more 'modern' measures of performance and value. OK, then.

According to the Hardball Times, Gomez has 6.1 offensive Win Shares thus far in 2008. This puts him, offensively, between Marcus Thames of Detroit and Ben Francisco of Cleveland, both of whom have hit well. Except...Thames has put up his Win Shares in just 58 games, having missed a chunk of the season due to injury. Same with Francisco -- he's also played in just 58 games. Gomez has nearly the same offensive Win Shares despite having played in 82 games and having about the same number of plate appearances as Thames and Francisco combined. So that's not really a good comparison. A better comparison would be Coco Crisp, who's occasionally led off for the Red Sox when Jacoby Ellsbury hasn't played, but who typically has hit 7th, 8th, or even 9th for the Sox in his 65 games thus far. The two men are very close in Win Share Percentage, which is basically a Hardball Times 'tweak' of Win Shares to take 'rate' into consideration.

How about Win Probability Added? While I'm not a fan of WPA as a value measure, I can accept that WPA does capture, to a degree, what a player does in-game to help his team win (or fails to do which helps cost his team a win) with his offense. According to Fangraphs, Gomez in 2008 has had enough good games to have added 5.81 potential wins with his offense; unfortunately, he's also had enough bad games to have cost the Twins 7.18 potential wins, just with his offense, for a net WPA of -1.37. This is the second-worst total among AL outfielders, trailing only KC's Mark Teahen, and the fourth-worst in all of major league baseball.

If all of this fails to convince you that Gomez isn't a good offensive ballplayer in 2008, I don't see how you can be convinced.

Defense

On the other hand, Gomez has an excellent defensive reputation, if a bit spotty given that his youthful exuberance leads him to try to make some plays which are simply unmakeable. The numbers seem to back him up as well: Gomez has more putouts, plays in zone, and plays out of zone than any other centerfielder in the AL, and his Zone Rating trails only Baltimore's Adam Jones. Pretty impressive, right?

Well, not as much as you might think. I'm also not a great fan of Zone Rating as a defensive measure, because one of the things it doesn't do is adjust for groundball/flyball tendencies among the team's pitching staff.**

For instance, the Twins have had seven different men start ballgames for them in 2008:

Nick Blackburn - GB% = 44.2
Livan Hernandez - GB% = 44.0
Francisco Liriano - GB% = 42.9
Boof Bonser - GB% = 38.9
Glen Perkins - GB% = 34.4
Scott Baker - GB% = 33.9
Kevin Slowey - GB% = 33.2

Over the past few years, the Twins developed a reputation for being a groundball staff, thanks largely to the efforts of sinkerballer Carlos Silva; since Silva's departure, however, the Twins starters are much more of a flyball-oriented staff. The lowest GB% among AL starters qualified for the ERA title is Javier Vasquez of the White Sox at 34.4%; the Twins have gotten over 220 innings of pitching from guys with an even lower groundball percentage than Vasquez. Blackburn and Hernandez, the Twins' leaders in GB% among their starters, are right around the middle of the pack when compared to other starters in the AL.

So the Twins have a flyball starting staff, which means that they give up more flies than grounders, which means that Gomez gets more chances than other AL centerfielders, not based on talent, but based on opportunity. Saying that Gomez's total chances makes him one of the best centerfielders in the AL would be like saying that Casey Blake is one of the best defensive third-basemen in the AL just because the Indian's starting staff (before yesterday, anyway) had more southpaws than righthanders.

** - On the other hand, I can see why ZR doesn't adjust for GB/FB; how do you actually do it? We know the GB%s for the Twins starters, so we can probably figure out how many 'extra' flyballs they give up as opposed to a more typical rotation, but how then do you apply that to the fielders? Once you figure that out, how do you adjust the 'plays'; remove only plays in zone? Plays in zone and plays made in zone? Most perversely of all, if you use the player's existing ZR as a weighting factor to determine what percentage of plays to remove, then there's no point in actually making this adjustment -- the ZR you get after the adjustment will be almost exactly the same as the ZR you had before, which defeats the purpose of even trying to make an adjustment.

This is one of the big reasons I'm down on ZR as a defensive metric; there are obvious flaws with the stat, but those flaws are almost impossible to eliminate or compensate for.

Gomez is also said to have a strong throwing arm, and his six outfield assists seem to support that idea. Except...looking at the Hardball Times data, each of those six assists have come on a double-play; it's not that Gomez is cutting down baserunners attempting to advance, he's throwing out baserunners trying to get back to second after a liner. Even more to the point, Gomez is among the AL leaders in errors for centerfielders, and four of his errors have been throwing errors, where he's sailed a ball to the wrong base or over the head of the cutoff man and allowed an opponent to take an extra base as a result.

Delmon Young, who does have a powerful throwing arm, has eight outfield assists, only two of which have been on double plays, and has just two throwing errors. Michael Cuddyer, who also has a strong throwing arm, has six outfield assists and no throwing errors. If you watch the games, you can see why; Young and Cuddyer can plant and make a strong throw from a standing position, whereas Gomez's strong throws all seem to come from running starts. This doesn't mean that Gomez has a rag arm, but it does mean that some of his reputation for being a strong thrower is coming from his speed, not his arm.

Despite all this, I'm not going to argue that Gomez is a poor defensive centerfielder; he's more limited than his defenders are willing to admit, but he's still pretty good when he avoids panicked rookie mode. With that said, he's far from a great defender: his 1.8 defensive Win Shares matches Gary Matthews Jr of the Angels, and trails Nick Swisher (whom most observers claim is out of position in center), Coco Crisp (who himself trails Jacoby Ellsbury), and the Twins' former centerfielder, Torii Hunter.

As I noted at the top of this essay, it's certainly possible that Gomez could develop into a star. And even I'll admit it's worth a chuckle to see Gomez get on the nerves of his opponents. But, no, I have no man-crush on Carlos Gomez right now, because he's just not good enough to deserve one.