cards05 wrote:Again, I tried really hard to qualify myself in the original post, I'm not suggesting that anyone should take what he did last year and increase it based on at bats. The last sentence of my post makes that clear. But, what I am saying is that his skills supported his crazy speed/power second half and that's the first thing to look for when a player starts playing "over his head." That, to me, makes him among the very best fliers. Playing mostly full time (not in a platoon) over the second half of the season he did the following: 12 HR, .272 BA, 52 runs, 32 RBI and 18 SB in 250 at bats. During this time, he had a freaking 157 PX. Will he keep it up? I very seriously doubt it. But, not many speed guys ever get their PX to that level. Now, maybe he did face an inordinate amount of righties playing full time in the second half, I don't know. If that's true, it's certainly something to consider. GTWMA, what site do you use to view splits? You can't get that data on most sites. What I'd love to find is a site where you can take a random date like July 25 and view the 2007 stats from July 25 to the end of the season.
I use Baseball Reference a lot now for splits, and you can actually do what you ask there now. Click on splits to get a player's splits for career or any year. Go into his gamelog and there are instructions for how to modify the url address to get a player's performance across any range of games you want to specify. ESPN and Yahoo also provide basic one year and three year splits.
Sean Forman rocks my world.
"I don't want to play golf. When I hit a ball, I want someone else to chase it."
Yoda wrote:I like McLouth as a later round/cheaper speed/power guy but be careful of power spikes. He's never shown power in the minors and while his newfound power may be legit, chances are that it was fluky. See Teahen 06, 07.
This is exactly right. Even if he winds up with a starting job, last years power numbers were an abberration and a reasonable HR assumption is 12 @ 600 PAs. His minor league numbers were categorically unimpressive. I would not call him a sleeper and do not see much upside.
In his first spring training game, guess what, he hit a home run against a left handed pitcher. Many in this thread won't even call him a sleeper, but he is. So...Don't invest more than a dollar or two, but please keep him on your radar despite the negatives that you hear here, calling him not a sleeper.
Snakes Gould wrote:do pearce and mccutchen come into play this season?
Pearce looks to be buried two deep on the depth charts right now, behind Nady and Doumit in RF. I think the Pirates want to give him a year to consolidate that progress. Injuries and/or deadline deals and continued improvement could have him there by mid season. McCutchen I think will get the full year in AAA and cuppa coffee, barring extreme circumstances or progress. They are not contending now, so no need to rush him.
"I don't want to play golf. When I hit a ball, I want someone else to chase it."
What are everyone's thoughts on McLouth for the 2nd half?
Fangraphs shows a steady decline in production up until June, which was weak, but he has had a good July so far. He's got no power against lefties, but his BA is a respectable .250.
After this week he certainly isn't a "Buy" any more, considering the price must be up pretty high again. But I was a big supporter before this week, even through his June swoon. Basically, McLouth's contact skills did not suffer (almost identical K/AB numbers), he just got a little less patient and drew fewer walks. His BABIP for the month was ridiculously low, so he was obviously unlucky.
Given that he makes 85% contact and also has legitimate 25-30 HR power in that bat (he hits like 33% GB, so he hits a ton of flies and thus his HR/FB is not completely anomalous, as Ryan Ludwick's was earlier this year), not to mention his career 85+% success rate stealing bases, I'd say that he will finish around .290-28 HR-100 RBI-112 R-20 SB, giving him a second half line of .295-9 HR-35 RBI-44 R-10 SB.
I say 2nd half his power numbers go down and his SB numbers go up.
He probably can't continue on quite the same HR pace, also I've never seen a guy get more doubles in the 1st half of the season....so if he's on 1B more often hopefully he'll have a few more SB's. He stole a bunch in the 2nd half last year. I'd say you may be able to get him for less than you could give up...just make him the thrown in part of a bigger deal.
It's one of those Cliff Lee-type situations where no matter how long he continues to produce, you probably won't get good enough value for him if you traded him. So unless you get some offer that knocks your socks off, I'd stand pat with him because at the very least he should continue to steal some bases and hit for a decent average.
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by GotowarMissAgnes » Wed Feb 27, 2008 10:49 pm 
