Mariner middle infield PMRs
We’re finally getting our 2008 advanced defensive metrics! Yayyyy!
PMR second base, 2008
PMR shortstop, 2008
(Explanation of PMR, PMR conversion into runs)
Surprise! Lopez runs in the middle of the pack, which is interesting, since even up to mid-season you could see him anchor advanced defensive metrics.
Yuni is near the bottom of all shortstops. Considering that offensively he was also in the bottom third of shortstops, I’d like to reiterate our call for improvement at shortstop. And depending on what we see from other evaluations, we may be moving Lopez way down the priority list. Like off.
Now of course, all defensive stats are rough, you need a huge sample to make definitive explanations, please use as much data as you can get, and so on and so forth.
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It’s crazy to see Omar up there. Go Little O!
We’ve actually had advanced 2008 fielding data all year long. BillJamesOnline publishes the +/- ratings, and since PMR is based on the exact same data, they’re going to be very similar. I’d argue that +/- is probably even a bit better.
IMHO, Lopez isn’t even close to the worst problem this team has. He’s young, he’s cheap, he hits a little, and his defense isn’t awful. SS, 1b, and LF are all much bigger problems.
The shortstop results puzzle me. Not Betancourt, who makes sense, but some of the others who can’t hit and carry a spot only for their glove. Adam Everett and John McDonald both got mediocre or even bad results.
So does this kill any chances we have to ship Yuni out?
Now we know why Toronto declared they’d use Scutaro at SS next season.
PMR just measures range. +/- measures fielding more fully. Isn’t that the case (David Pinto seems to be making that assertion in one of his comments)?
Unless I’m hugely mistaken, BillJamesOnline costs money, so I can’t send people there to go look at +/-
Maybe I should have said “freely available”.
Also, I really want 2008 UZRs to compare these too.
BJO is $3 a month, so, yes, it’s not free, but it’s not exactly an arm and a leg either.
MGL has posted 2008 UZRs for all the gold glove winners over on The Book blog in the last few days. It’s something, at least.
Fun fact: Jose Lopez is younger than Jeff Clement.
See, this is why I’ve not been willing to toss Lopez off the team lightly; the guy is an above-average MLB hitter at age 24 (and that’s above-average overall, not for his position). You simply don’t run these kinds of players off your team unless you’re getting significant talent back.
Also, I was susprised that Yuni’s OBP and SLG for 2008 weren’t far off his career numbers. Given that his defense has tanked and his DPs are up, you have to wonder if he’s really much more of a problem than Lopez.
Almost every discussion I see talks about trading yuni. That is indeed something we need to do, but who is going to replace him. Within our own organization we have no replacements at short that will be ready next year, other than maybe Tug, and he would not be an improvement from what I have seen. As far as free agent/trade acquisitions for SS unless we want to spend some serious money or give up a lot of talent, we are not going to get the type of long term SS we want. Currently it looks to me that the best thing to do is hope we draft someone like green who will arrive by the time we are ready for contention. I keep hearing about getting a stopgap SS, but what is wrong with yuni as a stopgap, he is cheap and we don’t need an amazing SS while we are rebuilding for the next couple of years.
So pretty much uh….J.J. Hardy please?
Adam Everett and John McDonald both got mediocre or even bad results.
Not sure about McDonald, but Everett had a shoulder injury this year that really, really hurt his arm strength.
See, this is why I’ve not been willing to toss Lopez off the team lightly; the guy is an above-average MLB hitter at age 24…
That’s a crazy thing to say. Lopez’s RV/600 by season:
-14, -11, -5, -24, +4
So, we’ve got bad, bad, slightly below average, awful, and slightly above average. From that, you’re concluding that he’s an above average hitter?
Can we stop focusing on 2008 exclusively, please? He’s been an above average major league hitter once in five years, and he was one of the worst hitters in baseball two years ago.
Marcel has him at .279/.320/.416 for 2009, a not-so-nifty .320 wOBA, which makes him about 12 runs worse than an average hitter. And Marcel factors in aging curves, so let’s lay off the “he’s just 24” stuff, okay?
Jose Lopez isn’t very good. Trading him now is the smart move.
Mike Snow:
I’m puzzled too by this roster of players under Betancourt:
Troy Tulowitzki (injured, which explains some)
Edgar Renteria (getting old, but I thought he was competent)
Jose Reyes (I didn’t know he was bad with the glove)
Khalil Greene (him neither)
Brendan Harris (didn’t Tampa grab him to improve their defense?)
Perhaps it’s just my ignorance, but I’m surprised that ANY of these guys plays worse than the hefty Cuban “anchoring” the middle of the Mariners’ infield.
Is Tui even a potential option for some innings at SS? He started there. I realize he’s not a prototypical, but would he be disastrous?
Also, Valbuena, same question.
Maybe its a blessing in disguise that we miss out on Strasburg but the projected #2 pick is a solid shortstop coming out of college.
Just a thought. . .
Brendan Harris (didn’t Tampa grab him to improve their defense?)
Tampa got rid of Harris to improve their defense. Harris has always rated as a horrific defender. Eventually MLB will run out of teams thinking that they can improve his defense at SS.
Tampa got Jason Bartlett, and while he took a step back this year by most metrics I’ve seen (not terribly surprising considering his age), he was still loads better defensively than Harris.
2B vs catcher?
Edgar Renteria (getting old, but I thought he was competent)
PMR’s Ratio for Renteria by year:
97.9 — 2005
100.1 — 2006
98.9 — 2007
95.2 — 2008
So he’s off by about 12 plays from what he’s been the last three years. I would say that 32 is significantly old if we’re talking about the defensive abilities of a middle infielder. Hitters generally peak around 26-28, but fielders tend to peak earlier than that by 2-3 years.
Dave-
How old was Jose Lopez each of those seasons? Can you find other similar age players who put up similiarly near league average stats at the same age?
I think the outlying in the data set is not the 2008 season, but the 2007 season. If you take out the 2007 season, his improvement becomes steady and almost linear.
2004: -14
2005: -11 (+3 improvment)
2006: -5 (+6 improvment)
2007: -24 (outlyer)
2008: +4 (+9 improvment [2YR] from 2006)
If you look at his monthly tOPS+ splits for 2007, you can see where the death in the family occured and it can be argued that he didn’t play the same for the rest of the season. From his Wikipedia entry:
“Before the team’s game on June 13, 2007, López was informed that his brother Gabriel had died in a motorcycle accident in Venezuela.”
tOPS+ (from Baseball-reference):
154 – April/March
113 – May
133 – June
45 – July
94 – August
72 – Sept/Oct
I just don’t see how Lopez isn’t more valuable to the team than Yuni. He’s two years younger, still developing as a hitter, and plays league average defense. I feel at times that I’ve been one of the few defending him against the many calling for his head, but as people say with Ichiro!/Beltre, when making a list with the M’s problems, 2nd Base should not be anywhere in the top 20 problems.
OH god… not the brother argument again.
The death of Jose Lopez’s brother is of course tragic. However, neither you nor I can know with any confidence whether the death affected Lopez at the plate. I can just as easily make the argument that April-June was random variation. In fact, the only definite in this entire discussion is that Jose Lopez was not a good hitter in 2007.
So the argument is that if you ignore the time when Lopez has been horrible, then he’s average? That’s true about everyone.
You can’t throw out 2007. It’s a data point. It counts.
He’s been an above average major league hitter once in five years, and he was one of the worst hitters in baseball two years ago.
First off, the only reason Lopez was playing in 2004-2005 was that the Mariners tanked those years, and figured “what the hell, play the kids”. If Lopez had been an above-average hitter at age 20-21 when he first came up, we’d likely be thinking that he AND King Felix were potential HOFers about now.
Not being an above average MLB hitter at those ages isn’t a strike against you as a good player a few years down the road- almost nobody is. Derek Jeter wasn’t an above-average hitter at those ages.
OK, 2006, he showed some growth, and then… Lopez basically tanked the second half of 2007 after finding out a close relative died. And yes, he was terrible that second half. No doubt about it.
I’m willing to call 2007 a mulligan, given that he did in 2008 exactly what you’d expect him to do (and as I recall, this was called out as one of the keys to the M’s 2008 season, on this very site)- develop on his skills. You aren’t, and I would see why this would skew projection models into thinking 2008 was a fluke (which apparently Marcels does).
I don’t- his numbers this year are very much in line with what he’s done in the minors at earlier ages: flash decent power, not strike out a lot, not walk a lot, hit for decent average. I think the next step for him is to see if he walks a bit more once pitchers stop throwing him strikes he can hit for distance.
My rejoinder to “well, if he’s good, why did he suck in 2007?” is it’s just not that unusual to see young players struggle- even if they’ve had what seems to be a ton of MLB time. Jose Guillen is sort of the classic case- did nothing for about 6 years while he bounced through organizations, then suddenly began to hit at 27.
I admit you’re a better analyst than I am. Hell, you probably have a better argument than I do. The nice thing is we’ll get to see who is right, whether or not Lopez stays a Mariner. I expect him to hit during his career. You apparently don’t.
No, my arguement is that if you ignore a the 2nd half of the 2007 season and treat it as the outlyer it appears to be, the rest of Lopez’s career has been the steady increase in offensive production we would expect. But for whatever reason you refuse to look at the longer trend and instead have decided that 2008 is the fluke.
At this point I think Jose Lopez is going to be the next Carlos Guillen; talented young player who the M’s give up on too soon for a number of reasons and ends up as a very productive MLB player. He’s still improving, both offensively and defensively, according to most metrics and is 24. Yuni is 26 and I think we can all agree that barring him losing 20-30 pounds, that we have seen his ceiling.
If we keep one and trade the other (assuming the M’s get a new SS and would play whoever they keep between Yuni and Jose at 2nd), let’s keep the 24 year old who is still improving and ship out the 26 year old who has topped out.
Yuni for Bulter/Nelson/whoever we can get.
Stags,
Statistical analysis requires that you look at the entirety of the sample to find patterns in the chaos. You can’t just remove the parts you don’t like, even if they seem like outliers, because they are as much a part of the whole as the rest.
To expound, you can’t just nix the “post brother stress disorder” months while keeping all of 2008 and proclaim he’s improved. You can’t do that anymore then you can proclaim that Raul’s 2007 was great just because he went bonkers in August. I see what you’re trying to get at, but I’m afraid what you’re doing is abusing stats to make your point.
Stat analysis is all or nothing.
No, my arguement is that if you ignore a the 2nd half of the 2007 season and treat it as the outlyer it appears to be, the rest of Lopez’s career has been the steady increase in offensive production we would expect.
You regress outliers, not ignore them.
Cut CMC and eponymous some slack. You can’t count the second half of 2007 as a data point…but not the rest of his career, too. So isn’t the following ‘pure stat analysis’?: in the four years since his baseline -14, he’s up a net 18. That averages to a yearly increase of 4.5. Thus, why should we not predict him at +8.5 next year…and then +13 the year after that?
I assume the central argument against this is that given 2007, it’s illogical to assume a steady rise. But if so, isn’t that considering 2007 the outlier…just as you said is not acceptable?
And at his age, I don’t know how you can conclude that he can’t be the next Carlos Guillen.
You regress outliers, not ignore them
UMMMM no.
If you have reason to believe that outlier is from a different population you can exclude it. I know it supports your argument if you say you HAVE to regress outliers, but I am sorry, you don’t.
I don’t know if any of you have played 80+ baseball games after your brother died, but how can you say it wouldn’t affect you? I know my grades would probably take a hit if one of my siblings died. The second half of 2007 very well could have been from a different population.
Didn’t Lopez have outstanding minor league stats, given his age and hitting environments? Are those considered to be relevant at this point? Intuitively, it seems like they would at least retain some relevance.
I’d be really interested in hearing thoughts on that. Nonetheless, I guess that — at least if the idea is to move YuBet to 2B — the question is not really how good J-Lo is per se, but whether (J-Lo trade value minus YuBet trade value) is greater than (J-Lo actual value minus YuBet actual value once moved to 2B).
Yeah, but isn’t 2008 a truer indication of where Lopez is today as a hitter than the 2007 datapoint? And why think that a 24-year old has hit his ceiling and is likely to regress next year?
I’m willing to give Lopez another year. Betancourt can be traded tomorrow as far as I’m concerned.
If you have reason to believe that outlier is from a different population…
You don’t. We didn’t mix in some Willie Bloomquist at-bats with Jose Lopez at-bats. We know those were Jose Lopez at-bats.
You really don’t get to throw out numbers that don’t agree with your premise and pretend that you’re doing analysis.
So, we see from the PMRs that Lopez is ‘middle of the pack’ as a fielder. Not bad enough so that people in his fielding ‘neighborhood’…like Roberts, Cano, A. Ramirez, Pedroia and Kinsler are also seen as being expendable.
OK, so it’s about his offense. Yes, top ten in OPS doesn’t make him an all-star, but didn’t I read somewhere that doubles are a decent signal toward future HR power? At #3 in doubles with 41, shouldn’t that give us some hope? At #3 with 89 RBI (and look at the team OBP of those trying to get on base in front of him), shouldn’t that be worth something statistically?
I understand the temptation to lump Yuni and Lopez together as some joint liability, but are they really the same player?
I think we have greater concerns.
Yuni’s better.
We know those were Jose Lopez at-bats.
Maybe they were Pepe Lopez at-bats?
So, Dave, back in February you wrote:
It’s not always been evident the past two years, but Jose Lopez is a talented player. He has enough range to play a quality defensive second base while possessing enough power and contact ability to be an asset at the plate. His .252/.289/.355 performance from 2007 isn’t his true talent level, and at age 24, he still needs to be considered a player with significant potential.
The projections from yesterday had Lopez at a .305 wOBA, which translated to +1.26 wins above replacement. If we look at an optimistic projection for Lopez that is still within the realm of possibility given his skillset, it’d probably be something like .300/.340/.440. That’d be a modest improvement from his 2006 performance, but wouldn’t require a huge change in skills – he’d just have to translate some of his power into more more doubles and home runs.
If Lopez hits .300/.340/.440, that would give him something like a .348 wOBA, which translates to +2.8 wins for a second baseman. The .305 wOBA gave him +0.7 wins, so a breakout from Jose Lopez could be worth about two wins to the final tally.
Seems to me Lopez got pretty close to what you asked for (.297/.322/.443), and the defensive metrics don’t indicate he’s a terrible player at 2B- so what’s changed between February and now to turn him from “being an asset” to “isn’t very good”? Or were you just wrong back then?
Didn’t Lopez have outstanding minor league stats, given his age and hitting environments?
Outstanding? Here are the numbers. You be the judge.
2001 SSA Everett BA: .256 .309/.329/.638
2002 A San Bernadino BA: .324 .360/.464/.824
2003 AA San Antonio BA: .258 .303/.403/.706
2004 AAA Tacoma BA: .295 .342/.505/.847
_________________________________________________
[Use COURIER to restore the columns.]
Looks like two above-average seasons and two below-average seasons. (One of those above-average seasons was in that collection of launching pads called the CALIFORNIA LEAGUE.)
[Lopez skipped Low-A (Wisconsin).]
What I said is that excluding the latter half of 2007 as an outlier is bad analysis. I didn’t say anything about ignoring the rest of his career, so I don’t really understand what you mean.
Take the entire sample and do your analysis, not part of the sample and do your analysis. That’s it.
While that’s theoretically possible, you’re using past results to project future performance, and that’s also bad analysis. Trend analysis doesn’t really fly in baseball unless you have a much larger sample to draw comparisons from. IE: the trend of age curves is based on historical data from thousands of players over the last 100 years. Lopez improved this season, for sure, and he improved within the realm of possibility based on his skill sets. ZIPS, PECOTA, Marcel, CHONE, and other methods use all kinds of factors to try to predict future performance, with varying and surprisingly accurate results. Their methods are not so simplistic as simple trend analysis of a player’s annual stat improvements.
Are you arguing with me or with Stags? I was deliberately saying you HAVE to include the outliers are part of the whole. If the outlier season, which is still part of Lopez’s career stats, knocks someone’s theory for a loop, you can’t just say “well that sucks, let’s not include it and my theory will be fine”. That’s just horrible analysis.
Well, putting aside that this is a fine example of an irrelevant conclusion fallacy (because nothing you’ve said in this entire post has anything to do with Carlos Guillen until now), what evidence does anybody have that he will be the next Carlos Guillen?
I believe what we’re seeing here is “gunshy paranoia”. We’ve seen, or think we’ve seen, our players leave us as “bad” players and become “good” players elsewhere, so we believe we should just hang onto whatever we’ve got regardless of what the stat analysis or scouting reports tell us. Nevermind the fact that there’s also a lot of our players who left bad and stayed bad…
Well, that’s why we do these things. We analyze and find out as much fact (not truth) as we can so we can make the best decisions. Or, at least, we would HOPE that’s what the people in charge do. It’s understandable that after a string of bad decisions made by bad people in charge, we’re cynical about any decision, but that doesn’t mean we have to start gnawing our own legs off when all we’re doing is DISCUSSING the possibility of moving someone around who may be a weak link to the team.
This is supposed to be fun, guys. =)
TIF
I don’t know that I’m arguing with you specifically. I’m just trying to figure out, along with a couple others on this thread, why it’s a no-brainer to get rid of Lopez.
There may be reasons that escape some of us, but this response, I admit, is baffling…
Isn’t that what this site is all about? Looking at a player’s history to try to determine future performance, rather that ‘trusting your gut’ or deferring to the assertion that someone ‘is a good clubhouse leader’?
The basic point I was trying to make in the last post was to say that essentially I agree with you and Dave in the sense that you can’t throw out data that doesn’t agree with your premise…but that seems to be what the Lopez detractors are doing. In other words, looking at his entire career path, with last year logically the most relevant, where does that leave us? More specifically, given his age, why is there not reason to assume further progression?
I didn’t pull this out of the air…I was referring to eponymous’ statement earlier in the thread.
Man, this is a fantastic exchange, the sort of thing I wish would happen in the Mariners front office. So far, CMC and eponymous are winning me over, even though I usually take Dave’s analysis as gospel truth.
I think it’s unfair for any of us to say “you’re just ignoring data to support your premise,” because that’s presuming motive and inferring willful ignorance.
CMC’s argument is not ignoring 2007, it’s discounting it by examining quantifiable data and the personal story we know. Sure, we can’t be certain that Lopez’s personal tragedy had anything to do with his collapse (can we agree that 2007 2nd half was a collapse?), but neither can we categorically declare that deaths in the family do not cause offensive slumps. CMC is not saying they always do, therefore we must discount 2007; he’s saying the family death might have been a non-skill-related reason for the 2007 collapse.
That’s relevant, and I don’t see anyone arguing the contrary, that Lopez messed with his swing, got eye surgery, returned to his minor league hacking, or any other such explanation that would point to why his 2007 collapse was skill-related. Essentially, the counterargument has been “deaths in the family don’t cause hitting slumps.” Is that so? Then prove it.
I’m mostly ‘meh’ on Jose Lopez. His most similar comps through age 24 from baseball-reference. Tim McCarver, Gregg Jefferies and Lou Boudreau are the top three.
I remember Jefferies as a small cult hero in my youth. Looking back, he was never as good as the hype.
Interestingly, Yuni is his #9 comp for ‘most similar batters’.
Looking at his comps we can maybe expect him to be a league average hitter (OPS+ wise) for his career. Jose’s apparent dislike of the walk coupled with the tendancy of batting average to vary wildly from one year to the next will probably make for a rollercoaster career.
That said, I’m not opposed to having him play another season with the M’s. But, with the season he just had, his youth and and relatively cheap contract, Lopez could be moved for more useful pieces to the team for a 2010 or so.
I wouldn’t call him the next Carlos Guillen per se; Guillen walked a lot more before his career took off, and he started blossoming considerably later (28). Also. Dave isn’t advocating trading Lopez for garbage for the purposes of getting him off the team, the same way we dumped Guillen.
The thought’s the same (that Lopez’s skill set as a hitter has a bit more room to grow), but Guillen is a more extreme case of that.
Sorry, I guess I got confused since you quoted something I said and kept going. I figured the whole post was directed at me.
Regarding the second point, Dave mentioned it was “smart” to trade Jose Lopez and there’s a lot of reasons why. He’s not advocating dumping him for nothing, but to listen to offers and if someone makes you a good one, you shouldn’t shy away from it. Lopez is signed to a manageable contract, is apparently a near average defender, and has the skill sets to hover around the league average mark for hitting. There is some value to him and we have a replacement part in Luis Valbuena. But, Dave mentions in this article that if Lopez’s defensive woes have been greatly exaggerated, then he should be a lower priority to replace then, say, shortstop.
Not quite. We can use results in a couple of productive ways, especially if the results someone put up don’t match his skill sets, but when looking to future performance projections using results based analysis doesn’t work. If it were that simple, Brady Anderson would have always been projected to hit 50+ home runs after one monster season of results. That’s an extreme case, but you get the point. What has happened doesn’t always mean it will happen again.
Why is last year logically the most relevant? It’s the most recent, but it should not be weighed more heavily into your calculations then 2004, 2005, 2006, or 2007. What Dave is trying to say is that only once has Lopez shown himself to be an above league average hitter (2008), and while that’s encouraging, there is nothing set in stone that provides evidence that the improvement trend will continue. Lopez has the skills to repeat 2008’s performance just like he has the skills to repeat 2007’s performance. Neither one, and both must be considered outliers at this point since one is the extreme bottom and the other is the current extreme top, is more important then the others and the remainder of the data we have on him.
And I think he answered this one below, so I wont reply on this subject.
Dave makes great arguments and is extremely knowledgeable, but nobody’s analysis should be taken as the gospel truth. I would think that Dave appreciates people liking and understanding his work, but even he has to admit he’s not always right. But, remember, accuracy and being “right” are two completely different things. Like “fact” and “truth”, they get exchanged a lot as if they mean the same things.
Well, if you are on a long city street and pass through 5 signals, and afterward someone points out that one of them was a red light and you say “meh”, what would you infer from that? I’m grossly oversimplifying (another fallacy of logic), but I’m trying to make something clear. If someone is going to ignore data, especially intentionally because they consider it irrelevant, isn’t that willful ignorance?
This is the argumentum ad ingorantiam fallacy.
“You can’t prove God doesn’t exist, so God exists.”
and / or
“You can’t prove God does exist, so God doesn’t exist.”
No, we have no evidence of it one way or the other. Unless you want to go start randomly causing the deaths of baseball player’s family members at various intervals and test their results afterward, then we’ll never know. If you don’t want a criminal record, we can go check the 100+ years of baseball history to see if anybody else had this problem. I’m not sure there will be enough evidence, but it’s worth a shot.
All we have to go on is the information provided to us. Raul’s 2007, for example, was apparently heavily influenced by a back issue that he didn’t tell anybody about. Before we knew that, the speculation was that, at his age, he’d finally hit the decline phase and was plummeting like Mo Vaughn after ingesting a six-pack of Vidro. I do not recall if Lopez publicly complained about his family loss having an impact on his season. If he did, that might be something.
Already mentioned this above, but you can’t take this illogical stance.
TIF,
It seems like the heart of this argument is the ‘ignoring data’ issue. I agree that you can’t discount what happened in the second half of 2007, no matter what it’s cause, because we just don’t know the reasons and probably never will. It happened, so consider it.
But it seems like some people knocking Lopez are doing the same thing in disregarding his production in 2008. Being third among all second basemen in both doubles and RBIs at his age is worthy of considering. It has to cut both ways, doesn’t it?
Also, I can’t see how using an example like Brady Anderson’s 50HR year is honestly relevant. He was 32 years old that season, and nothing previously indicated that could happen.
On the other hand, I think a more compelling case could be made that Lopez, over the course of his career, is improving as a hitter.
And of course, all of this is contextual. Whatever his value, if indeed we see the departures of Beltre and Raul, do we know if there’s anyone else better suited right now to hit in the middle of the order? Which was my original point…we have a lot more serious problems to worry about.
Precisely.
The “knocking” of Lopez is less a knocking of Lopez and more of an attempt to curb the enthusiasm some folks are having for him. Kind of a “Lopez had a good season, but let’s not go bonkers for the guy just yet” kind of approach. The supporters seem to think Lopez is ready to turn the corner and become a premiere offensive weapon and they are actually the ones taking 2008’s production to lengths that are strained.
Before the defensive metrics provided evidence that Lopez, at worst, is an average defender, his offensive production was not seen as anything but a mitigation of loss. Now he’s seen as less of a concern and with more value, a potential trading piece. So far that’s what I’m gathering from Dave’s comments, and my own stance is fairly in line with his.
Exactly… results can’t provide a good indicator of future performance. Brady before that season wasn’t even close to thought of as a power hitter and Brady afterward shouldn’t have been so overly hyped as he was. Folks were taking results and running with them, ignoring all other facts.
I don’t think anybody’s arguing against that last point, especially not the authors here at USSM.
The supporters seem to think Lopez is ready to turn the corner and become a premiere offensive weapon and they are actually the ones taking 2008’s production to lengths that are strained.
Well, Lopez’s 2008 was well within what Dave HIMSELF thought was Lopez’s skill set, about 9 months ago.
Also, I don’t think Lopez is going to be a truly “premiere” offensive weapon (like, say, Vladimir Guererro)- the best case is Lopez turns into something like Carlos Lee, maybe. That’s only a “premiere” offensive weapon if he stays at 2B, because 2B as a class hit so poorly- if he moves to a corner position, that’s a good player but not “premiere”, and Carlos Lee kinds of players are the ones who are most often overpaid for on the FA market (as such, you really want to grow your own if you can, and have them during the “team control” years).
I dunno- the guy I saw through Lopez’s career in the minors is a guy who, when he finally shows up hits .290-.300, has decent doubles/HR power, doesn’t walk a ton but has decent plate coverage. That’s the guy who seemed to show up in 2008.
The other thing I noticed, while idly going through Lopez’s hit charts for 2008, is his power is still pull/LF- even though his home/road splits were heavily biased towards Safeco, which might make you think “oh, he’s learned to hit the other way”. I suspect that were Lopez to go somewhere where LF wasn’t a complete bastard to a RHB, he’d have numbers that would look even better (not that it would change his skills and actual worth- he’d just be in an environment where they would shine more).