Today's New York Times asks about Leyland's use of Raburn....hmmm.....
bats.blogs.nytimes.com
Did the Tigers Have the Right Man at Second Base?
Ryan Raburn is a useful spare part on a major league baseball club. He’s been a slightly above-average hitter over his career and plays a fine outfield. He can also fill in at second or third base, although not particularly well. According to the defensive statistics compiled from video records at fangraphs.com, Raburn’s fielding has cost the Tigers 14 runs compared to an average second baseman over the 778 innings he has manned the keystone in his major league career. (He has performed even worse at third).
There are plenty of situations where such flexibility would come in handy: extra innings, a double switch in a National League ballpark, or an injury to a starter. The starting lineup of Game 1 of the A.L. Division Series, however, does not figure on that list. Jim Leyland’s decision to put a right fielder at second base may well have cost him the game.
Even though Friday night’s rain forced both teams to remove their ace starters after an inning and a half, Game 1 seemed to be shaping up as a pitchers’ duel when it resumed last night. Through five and a half innings, the Yankees led, 2-1. Raburn had performed adequately, ranging to his left to field an inning-ending grounder in the first and handling a routine chance from Robinson Cano in the third. He did fail to snag Jorge Posada’s liner over his head in the second, but only a star defender playing fairly deep could have hoped to make that play.
Mark Teixeira led off the bottom of the sixth with a double to left. After a strikeout and a walk, Russell Martin grounded to shortstop to move the runners over. Doug Fister, the Tigers’ starter, quickly got the count to 0-2 count on Brett Gardner, the Yankees’ ninth-place hitter, putting him one pitch away from getting out of the jam. Fister hung a curveball up and out over the plate, the type of pitch many Yankees hitters would deposit in the second deck.
Fortunately for Detroit, the punchless Gardner pulled the meatball on the ground to the right side of second base. Unfortunately for Detroit, Ryan Raburn was playing second. He took a few choppy steps to his right and didn’t even try to get his glove down, as the ball had clearly beaten him. Teixeira and Posada came around to score, and Detroit’s likelihood of winning the game fell to 10 percent from 25 percent. Had Raburn made the play, the Tigers’ probability of victory would have been 30 percent.Gardner’s grounder was by no means an easy out. But the Tigers’ other option at second base, Ramón Santiago, is a recently converted shortstop and a rather good one at that. There’s certainly a strong chance that Santiago would have made the play.
Of course, the Yankees didn’t win the game just because of Gardner’s single. Derek Jeter, whose inside-out swing makes him an archetypal opposite-field right-handed hitter, followed up with another groundball single — hit right to Raburn’s spot, which he had vacated to cover second on a steal attempt that could just as easily have been handled by the shortstop. A walk and a moonshot grand slam by Cano later, Game 1 was effectively over.
But if Gardner had been thrown out at first, Jeter would have come up with the bases empty to lead off the seventh, meaning that his grounder would have been a routine out. In that case, Cano would have come up with one man on and one out in the seventh, in which case Leyland probably would not have summoned Al Alburquerque from the bullpen to face him, in which case … who knows.
Leyland wasn’t crazy to start Raburn in Game 1, when the Yankees’ original starter was the southpaw C.C. Sabathia. Raburn has shown a fairly big platoon split in his career, with combined on-base and slugging percentages (O.P.S.) of .847 versus left-handers and just .731 against right-handers. But it was still probably an inadvisable decision.
Platoon splits for right-handed batters are quite unreliable. Applying research by Tom Tango in “The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball,” Raburn should be expected to post an .816 O.P.S. against lefties. Santiago, a switch-hitter, projects to around a .690 O.P.S. An offensive gap of that size equates to about 20 runs a season. And the defensive difference between putting a shortstop at second base and an outfielder there is quite probably bigger than that. Moreover, starting Santiago would have enabled Leyland to pinch-hit with Raburn in a pressure situation late in the game. The less time Raburn puts on an infielder’s glove, the more likely the Tigers are to win. |
