Without Them, You’d Have Passed Balls
Posted by Steve L. on May 18th, 2012 · Comments (1)
Have the Yankees ever had a dynasty run without a home-grown All-Star caliber catcher?
In any event, Russell Martin is trending towards Girardi or Molina territory with the bat this season.
| Rk | Player | AB | PA | Year | Age | Tm | G | R | H | 2B | HR | RBI | BB | SO | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | Jose Molina | 51 | 268 | 297 | 2008 | 33 | NYY | 100 | 32 | 58 | 17 | 3 | 18 | 12 | 52 | .216 | .263 | .313 |
| 6 | Joe Girardi | 60 | 209 | 229 | 1999 | 34 | NYY | 65 | 23 | 50 | 16 | 2 | 27 | 10 | 26 | .239 | .271 | .354 |
| 8 | Russell Martin | 67 | 96 | 118 | 2012 | 29 | NYY | 33 | 10 | 16 | 3 | 3 | 9 | 18 | 23 | .167 | .322 | .292 |
.
Can the Yankees afford that?
Steve L. wrote:
Joe Girardi wasn’t homegrown, right? But he won three rings from 1996-1999 with the Dynasty Yankees of that era.
Martin is suffering from an ungodly low BABIP right now. Granted, we don’t know much about the effects of a low BABIP at only 118 PA (usually need around 500 PA to know what’s going on) but even with the small sample size we can see that his swings are resulting in weak contact (career high GB%, career low LD%) and lousy luck (.186 BABIP). His BB% (15.3%) and K% (19.5%) are also at career hights right now but the BB/K ratio is in line with the rest of his career so nothing noteworthy about this.
Can the Yankees afford it? Not if the rest of the lineup is also sucking it up. There’s no harm in having a .292 wOBA at the bottom of the lineup. The problem is having too many guys with woeful wOBA’s in the same lineup.