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Thursday, August 07, 2008
Does it really matter if Juan Pierre plays every game?
I will let you decide. Analysts (or wannabe analysts, I should probably say) love to hate Juan Pierre. And they hate him even more when he bats leadoff.
The fact of the matter is that there are many worse ball players. And the fact of the matter is, just as lineup order does not matter much, it doesn’t really matter whether Pierre bats first or last. (While it would be pretty bad to bat a slow, terrible hitter first, you can easily get away with batting a fast, poor hitter first - and Pierre is by no means that poor of a hitter overall - he is a little worse than an average CF’er.)
I put in Pierre and Kemp, Pierre and Ethier, and Kemp and Ethier (with Kemp playing CF), versus a RHP, into my sim to see how many runs they would score and allow.
With Pierre, the Dodgers score around .15 runs per game less than with Kemp and Ethier and no Pierre. My sim assumes that Pierre is the better fielder (because I have him with a better projected UZR in CF), which I think he is (despite his poor arm). (The sim also uses arm ratings, so it “knows” about Pierre’s bad arm.) The sim has the opponent scoring only around .03 runs less with Pierre in the OF. So the net for Pierre is a loss of .12 runs per game. If Pierre plays 40 games rather than 10, that costs the Dodgers a little more than a 1/3 of a win for the rest of the season.
As I said, I will leave it to you to decide if that is worth getting all worked up over, as well as what the chances are that a 1/3 of a win will be the difference between them making the post-season or not (I’ll give you a hint - it won’t make much of a difference).
The bottom line is that platooning Pierrre and Kemp in CF is a no brainer, if you are going to use Pierre at all. I assume that even Torre will do that.
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