Chad Moriyama Dodgers, Sabermetrics, Scouting
Why hasn’t Dee Gordon emerged as a useful MLB player yet, right?
Well one play from yesterday’s game sort of summed up why he’s having so much difficulty.
On a clean single to left-center from Carl Crawford (yes, really), Dee freezes like it’s hit to the shortstop or something, then completely turns his left shoulder to look at the ball and identify the center fielder, which is something the runner should be doing before the pitch is thrown.
Thanks to the combination of his late jump and outstanding speed though, he’s sent home and is basically dead to rights at the plate, when he does whatever this is:
A hilarious, bumbling tackle/slide/dive fall into Miguel Montero‘s glove somehow works, and he gets the Dodgers a run.
Notice how after the fact he just lies there prone without touching the plate until Elian Herrera yells at him and points out that hey, maybe he should touch home.
The intangibles are off the charts, folks.
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All jokes aside, that’s Dee Gordon in a nutshell.
His tools allow him to be sent in the first place and give us a glimpse into the 3-4 WAR potential player that scouts see (used to see?), while his lack of awareness and knowledge (of the rules?) on the play show why he’s a -2 WAR player in reality.
On the plus side, Gordon has a .405 OBP this spring, with eight walks and five strikeouts, plus seven stolen bases against no caught stealings. On the negative side, he’s hitting .241 with a .241 slugging for a grand OPS of .647.
Not that it really matters anyway, since he went .379/.446/.485/.931 last Spring Training, making the conversation before the 2012 season primarily about how many All-Star teams he was gonna make, not whether he can ever have any utility in the MLB like it is now.
Fun with small sample sizes: Dee’s official Cactus league stats don’t include his 2-for-2 with a double effort in the exhibition against Mexico or his double against the Reds that was rained out. Those 3 ABs would raise his spring line to .313/.450/.406, an OPS of .856. Add in another couple of stolen bases, and that’s an extremely dangerous player.
So much talent, so little consistency. The defense is the same – he’ll get to a ball deep on the hole or WAY behind the bag that no one else can get to, make a lightening quick, laser throw to nail the runner, and then boot the ones right at him. So frustrating.
I guess my point in citing those ST stats is that they don’t matter.
The thing about his rawness is something I saw back in A-ball. He would make a diving stop in the hole and then throw away a routine grounder. Nothing has changed, just like his weight.
hilarious.
yet another example of how ned colletti screwed us. why didn’t the team go out and get a stop gap “Proven Veteran”™©® to play SS last year so gordon could continue to learn the game at AAA.
Still had to pay Pierre, Schmidt, Guerrier, Andruw, and Uribe.
Ugh. Don’t remind me.
I did find it weird that after he blocked all the prospects who were ready and performed at AA/AAA, he hands the job to the one guy in recent years that everybody knew was raw as fuck.
Ned Colletti: Secret Agent Man.