Archive for Howie Kendrick

Hopefully sometime last week you were able to pull off a Jarrod Washburn for Justin Verlander trade. But even if you stood pat there are still plenty of trade targets and trade bait guys out there for you. So, here are five guys to pick up and five guys to move.

Acquire

Justin Upton – A terrible start to the season, where he opened 0-15, has kept Upton’s overall numbers low. But last week he had five hits, including two home runs. Upton likely won’t contribute much in SB but otherwise he should be a four-category star. Last year he was sidetracked by numerous injuries but when healthy in September he had a .919 OPS in 85 PA, having just turned 21 the previous month.

Francisco Liriano – The electric pitcher from 2006 may never come back. However, Liriano has pitched much better than his 7.06 ERA indicates. He has a 4.96 FIP and a lot of the discrepancy can be explained by his dismal 50.4 percent strand rate. His peripherals are slightly worse than both last year and the pre-season projections. You should not trade for him thinking he is a No. 1-type SP. But if his current owner is disgusted with his early-season poundings, he could be a nice No. 2/3-type SP the rest of the season.

A.J. Burnett – The second time through the order against the Red Sox this past Saturday, Burnett got lit up. But the highly-publicized meltdown is obscuring his three other outings this year, in which he had a 3.20 ERA with 17 strikeouts in 20.2 IP. Burnett gave up eight ER twice last year and his main value is not ERA anyway. He is a wins and strikeouts guy and should provide plenty of both for the remainder of the season.

Howie Kendrick – Okay, he is not going to walk and he is not going to appear on the HR leaderboards. But let’s focus on what he can do. Kendrick’s main asset is an AB-heavy high average. His overall AVG sits at just .258 but, much like Upton, he started off the year in a funk, going 10-51. In 1,011 career at-bats, Kendrick has a .303 average in the majors. His ISO sits at .167 which would be a career best. As always with Kendrick it comes down to health. But I like the breakout potential if he can somehow manage 150 games played.

Jon Lester – The 4.88 ERA is not pretty but the FIP is almost exactly what it was a year ago for Lester at 3.66 so far. He is striking out more batters and walking fewer but his HR rate has nearly doubled. Last year’s HR/9 of 0.60 was unsustainable so we should assume that this year’s 1.13 mark is here to stay. But the .384 BABIP should come down significantly, which should help his other numbers.

Trade

Aramis Ramirez – The five projection systems all agreed on Aramis Ramirez, seeing him before the season basically as a .287 hitter with 28 HR. Right now Ramirez has a robust .358 AVG thanks to a .372 BABIP. All of the projection systems showed Ramirez with a BABIP between .289 and .299 for the year. He is not off to a great HR start. Ramirez could still easily meet his HR projection, but it would be nice for his chances to once again top 30 HR if his hot start included more than three homers.

Kosuke Fukudome – Congratulations if you had Fukudome in your lineup so far! Now do yourself a favor and sell. He simply is not going to have a .273 ISO or a .348 AVG or 15+ RBI months going forward. Last April he had a .327/.436/.480 line in April and those numbers declined each month.

Chris Volstad – In the last three seasons, the highest K/9 in Volstad’s career was the 6.64 he posted in 126 innings in the Hi-A Florida State League. He currently has an 8.49 K/9 without a significant increase in velocity or the addition of a new pitch. Additionally his ERA is a nifty 2.70 but his FIP stands at 4.66 so far. If the strikeouts disappear at the same time the hits start falling in, this could get ugly quick.

Brandon Phillips – Many touted Phillips as a top-3 second baseman heading into the season. So you would think a .172 average at the end of April would qualify him for the “Acquire” part of this list. But Phillips was overrated coming into the year based on his 2007 season. Plus this is getting into Robinson Cano territory from last year where the first month was so bad that the rest of the season could not compensate. Obviously, the .189 BABIP and the .078 ISO will go up significantly in the weeks and months ahead. But now is the time to cut your losses if anyone offers good talent in return.

Matt Cain – The past two seasons have been pretty similar for Cain. In 2007 he had a 3.65 ERA and a 3.78 FIP and last year he had a 3.76 ERA and a 3.91 FIP. This year his FIP checks in at 3.97 yet his ERA stands at 2.08. He is succeeding thanks to an 89.7 percent strand rate, which is likely to come down quite a bit. Also, his velocity is down nearly a full point, from 92.4 to 91.5 and his K/9 has dropped from 7.69 to 6.23.

Earlier today, we examined the man who anchors the keystone for the Angels, Howie Kendrick. As an awfully liberal swinger, the 25 year-old is an interesting study. A reader brought up what I find to be a fascinating bit of information regarding Kendrick’s BABIP splits: he has a significantly higher BABIP on flyballs than the average hitter.

Ordinarily, BABIP tends to be higher on groundballs than it is for flyballs. Take a look at the American League batting splits over the past three seasons, via Baseball-Reference:

2006
Groundballs: .247/.247/.271
Flyballs: .232/.226/.618

2007
Groundballs: .246/.246/.266
Flyballs: .218/.212/.572

2008
Groundballs: .243/.243/.263
Flyballs: .218/.212/.565

Nothing is especially surprising here- BABIP is higher on grounders than it is for flyballs, but flyballs do a lot more damage (those grounders go for singles while the flyballs that aren’t caught are almost always a double or a triple).

Now, take a look at Kendrick’s career marks:

GB: .261/.261/.280
FB: .333/.323/.658

Granted, Kendrick has a total of 997 career plate appearances, so we’re dealing with a small amount of data here. But his flyball BABIP is way, way above that of the AL average. What could be causing that?

Perhaps the answer lies in how a ball put into play is classified. Fellow Fan Graphs author Brian Cartwright wrote a very interesting piece on line drive rates by stadium, noting that there is a wide disparity between parks in terms of how often a ball put in play is classified as a line drive. From Brian’s article, here’s the chart (ballpark name and line drive factor in bold):

PARK_NAME First Last PAw LDf
Veterans Stadium 2003 2003 4768 1.23
Ballpark Arlington 2003 2008 26850 1.18
Tokyo Dome 2004 2008 283 1.13
Great American 2003 2008 28827 1.11
Coors Field 2003 2008 29158 1.10
Busch Stadium III 2006 2008 13967 1.09
Kauffman Stadium 2003 2008 27530 1.09
Nationals Park 2008 2008 4790 1.09
Rogers Centre 2003 2008 27513 1.08
Phone Co Park 2003 2008 29439 1.07
Stade Olympique 2003 2004 7684 1.07
Busch Stadium II 2003 2005 14280 1.06
Tropicana Field 2003 2008 27830 1.06
Comerica Park 2003 2008 28008 1.06
Citizens Bank Park 2004 2008 24640 1.06
Miller Park 2003 2008 29354 1.06
RFK Stadium 2005 2007 14885 1.05
Oakland Coliseum 2003 2008 26719 1.03
Safeco Field 2003 2008 26683 1.01
Comiskey Park II 2003 2008 28644 1.00
Yankee Stadium 2003 2008 28722 1.00
Dolphin Stadium 2003 2008 29849 1.00
Jacobs Field 2003 2008 28136 0.99
Camden Yards 2003 2008 29103 0.99
P.N.C. Park 2003 2008 27652 0.98
Bank One Ballpark 2003 2008 28810 0.98
Hiram Bithorn 2003 2004 2598 0.98
Jack Murphy 2003 2003 4943 0.98
Dodger Stadium 2003 2008 29555 0.98
Wrigley Field 2003 2008 28663 0.96
PetCo Park 2004 2008 24432 0.95
Shea Stadium 2003 2008 29299 0.92
Fenway Park 2003 2008 28311 0.86
Turner Field 2003 2008 29016 0.86
Anaheim Stadium 2003 2008 26490 0.86
Minute Maid Park 2003 2008 28271 0.82
Metrodome 2003 2008 28048 0.80

As you can see, Anaheim has a Line Drive Factor of 0.86- a batted ball is 14% less likely to be coded as a line drive in Angel Stadium. Why that is, I can’t say with any degree of certainty. A confluence of factors, such as scoring bias, ballpark environment and talent level of the batter play a part.

Perhaps the reason why Kendrick has such a high BABIP on flyballs (and a relatively low line drive percentage) is that should-be line-drives are being classified as flyballs instead, thus inflating his flyball BABIP and depressing his line drive rate. Overall, Angels hitters posted a .226 BABIP on flyballs in 2008, above the aforementioned .218 AL average. This is not a one-year trend, either: LAA hitters had a .228 BABIP on flyballs in 2007 (.218 AL average) and a .253 BABIP on flyballs in 2006 (.232 AL average).

What does this all mean? Well, it could have an effect on how we evaluate Angels hitters, and hitters in ballparks where a significantly lower or higher amount of line drives are classified. It has become a rather common practice to estimate a player’s expected BABIP by using primarily his line drive rate. Intuitively, it makes sense: a line drive is by far the most likely batted ball to fall for a hit (.730 BABIP in the AL in 2008).

However, given the great fluctuations in how often line drives are coded, we have to ask ourselves how much predictive value that measure really has. Kendrick has a career 17 LD%- how much of that is due to his propensity to hit line drives, and how much of that is due to a decision made by the scorer (which, in the case of Angels hitters, would mean fewer line drives coded and a lower LD%)? Line drive percentage is certainly worth looking at, but at the end of the day, it’s a subjective measure determined by the official scorer.

Howie Kendrick just doesn’t do the whole.. base on balls thing. The Angels’ second baseman, known for prodigious hand-eye coordination, is a product of the Vladimir Guerrero school of “swing-at-anything close.” Kendrick’s ultra-aggressive style served him very well in the minors: he laced one line-drive after another on his way to a career .360/.398/.571 line. With a low whiff rate (about 13%), lightning-quick lumber and some extra-base sock, Kendrick was labeled by many as a batting champion waiting to happen.

The big league results for the 10th-round pick in the 2002 draft have been fairly promising to this point, if not quite up to the very high expectations bestowed upon him. With a little less than 1,000 career plate appearances, Kendrick owns a .330 wOBA, with a .306/.333/.430 line. For a player who turned 25 last July, that’s nothing to be ashamed of in the least. However, it seems as though our would-be hitting champ has stagnated since making his major league debut back in 2006:

2006: 283 PA, .285/.314/.416, 3.3 BB%, 16.5 K%, .131 ISO
2007: 353 PA, .322/.347/.450, 2.6 BB%, 18.0 K%, .127 ISO
2008: 361 PA, .306/.333/.421, 3.4 BB%, 17.1 K%, .115 ISO

It’s certainly possible that Kendrick’s offensive plateau is at least in part due to an unfortunate rash of injuries, particularly a troublesome hamstring nearing chronic status that shelved him twice during the 2008 season (that after a broken bone in his finger during the ’07 campaign). One has to imagine that being in and out of the lineup with such frequency would make it difficult to improve pitch recognition.

With a .300 skill-set at the plate, Kendrick does not need to be a walk machine to provide a significant deal of value to the Angels and fantasy owners. However, as noted with Robinson Cano earlier this offseason, players of Kendrick’s ilk are often anchored to that batting average. It’s not out of the realm of possibility for a guy with a .300 talent level to run into some poor luck on balls in play and end up at .270, at which point the player transforms into something less than an asset. Is Kendrick perhaps a bit too aggressive?

Kendrick’s Outside Swing Percentages and Outside Contact Percentages, 2006-2008

2006: 34.9 O-Swing%, 52.8 O-Contact%
2007: 40.1 O-Swing%, 56.7 O-Contact%
2008: 36.6 O-Swing%, 49.1 O-Contact%

(The league averages are about 25% for O-Swing and 60% for O-Contact%)

It’s should come as no surprise to see that Kendrick ventures outside of the strike zone on a regular basis. Among hitters with at least 300 PA, Kendrick ranked 8th in O-Swing% in 2007 and 11th in 2008. However, he is making contact on such pitches at a rate that’s below the league average. It’s difficult to say for certain, but perhaps Kendrick’s willingness to chase so many offerings out of the zone has lead to a high groundball rate and subsequent mild power displays:

2006: 1.6 GB/FB, 52.2 GB%
2007: 1.83 GB/FB, 54.3 GB%
2008: 2.08 GB/FB, 54 GB%

Kendrick’s 2008 GB/FB ratio ranked among the 20 highest in the majors. Suffice it to say, chopping the ball into the infield grass is not a strategy conducive to feats of offensive strength: the list also features the Pierres, Gathrights and Luis Castillo’s of the world, and the highest slugging percentage in the group is a tie between San Francisco’s Fred Lewis and Washington’s Christian Guzman (huh?) at .440.

Howie Kendrick is an exceptionally gifted young player, and I am in no way advocating some major shift in batting strategy; trying to force a player to adhere to a certain style when his talents suggest he could be successful at his own game is foolish. However, Howie could stand to benefit by laying off just a few more outside pitches. More than anything, though, Kendrick just needs to stay on the field for an extended period of time.