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Thursday, September 17, 2009
The arguments AGAINST Mauer
They’re right about Mauer too. He’s the MVP by a million miles. If there’s an honest argument to be made for Derek Jeter over Joe Mauer, I haven’t heard it yet.
1. He has not performed in high leverage situations very well (relatively speaking). His performance, as eye-opening as it looks, if you look at WHEN he performed, has less oomph. Enough to knock out 1 win from what the performance otherwise looks like.
Source: Fangraph’s Clutch, which I helped define. (I think I even invented it, but maybe one of my readers did, and I modified it? I don’t remember any more.)
2. He has, as I write this, 802 innings as a catcher, the equivalent of 89 full games. A good-fielding catcher (+1 win per 162 G above average) gets to add +1.2 wins for his fielding+positional impact if given 89 games. Being a DH for 26 games costs 0.3 wins. So, his overall fielding+position impact is +0.9 wins.
Source: my fielding spectrum gives a catcher a bonus of 1.25 wins per 162 G, and a DH a cost of -1.75 wins per 162 G. So, you take 89/162*1.25 plus 26/162*-1.75 to get his positional adjustment, which is 0.4 wins, and add to that his fielding talent at catcher (+1/162*89), and you end up with +0.9 wins.
So, you can reasonably argue that Mauer’s position, fielding, and clutch all cancel out, so that what you are left with is an average fielding player at a neutral fielding position (somewhere between 3B and RF) with great hitting stats.
3. If you can make the argument that Zobrist, Jeter, or Longoria are such great fielders that they can make up for their gap in hitting compared to Mauer, or, if you can show they’ve been clutch, then you can make the discussion interesting.
However, if you bring clutch into the discussion, all of a sudden, you are introducing Franklin Gutierrez, who has been sensational in the clutch. Or, a good clutch season by Chone Figgins.
You can’t bring in Teix and Youkilis unless you understand the positional impact has on value to a team. It’s huge.
4. Zach Greinke. That’s huge argument against Mauer.
I don’t have a horse in this race. Mauer is not a million miles ahead. Depending what kind of glasses you wear, he’s somewhere between two laps ahead of all the nonpitchers in this marathon to barely ahead, and either tied with Greinke or at least a lap behind Greinke.