Cubs Nab Nady

Chicago Cubs signed OF Xavier Nady to a one-year, $3.3 million contract with $2.05 million in possible incentives.

Nady, 31, missed nearly the entire 2009 season after undergoing Tommy John surgery on his right elbow in mid-April. It was the second time he has had the procedure: Nady was Tommy John’d back when he was a Padres prospect in 2002. His pact with the Cubs won’t become official until he passes a physical later this week, and a source in the MLB.com article by Adam McCalvy notes that it’s “not a foregone conclusion” that Nady will get a clean bill of health.

In 2008, Nady posted a career-best 131 wRC+, meaning his offense was 31 percent better than average once league and park factors are factored in. However, Nady’s .205 Isolated Power was nearly 30 points about his career average, and his .337 BABIP was 20 points above his career norm.

Because of those factors, most projection systems have Nady regressing back near his career 112 wRC+. Here are his 2010 forecasts:

CHONE: 106 wRC+
Bill James: 112 wRC+
The Fans: 113 wRC+
Marcel (weighted three-year average, with regression factored in): 114 wRC+

An aggressive batter, Nady has a 5.8 percent career walk rate, with an outside swing percentage around 30-31 percent from 2006-2008 (25% MLB average). You might hear a lot about Xavier’s platoon split, with his hitting against lefties trumping his numbers against same-side pitching. But, as Mitchel G. Lichtman reminds us, the spread in platoon splits among big league hitters isn’t massive. How a batter performs overall gives us a better indication of how he’ll perform in the future against both lefties and righties:

How a batter does against RH pitchers informs us on how he will likely do against LH pitchers and vice versa. Why? Because there is not much of a spread in true platoon splits among ML baseball players yet there is a large spread in overall true hitting talent among ML baseball players. So if we see a large platoon split, like for a player like Howard, it is likely a fluke. If a player does really well versus RH pitchers but terrible against LH pitchers, both the “really well” and the “terrible” numbers are likely fluky and the “truth” is somewhere in between.

Nady’s career path bears this out. Baseball-Reference offers a stat called sOPS+, which compares a batter’s performance in a given split to the league average. One-hundred is average, while anything over 100 means the batter did better than average. Nady compiled a 123 sOPS+ vs. righties from 2006-2008, slightly better than his 120 SOPS+ against left-handers.

With the Cubs, Nady will be the fourth outfielder behind Alfonso Soriano, Marlon Byrd and Kosuke Fukudome. He’s not draft-worthy right now, but Nady could see a decent amount of playing time if Soriano’s aching knees continue to hinder him.