Jeff Fletcher | March 25, 2011

Every spring there is lots of debate about who will win jobs and roster spots on opening day. Really, though, we shouldn’t care so much.

It’s just one day out of 183 days of the season, and the roster can change 183 times. Does it matter who is on the roster in the first game? Nope.

Let’s look back a year at the Giants opening day 2010 roster. (I have to snicker at the fact that Dan Brown, who filled in for Baggs that day, actually used the phrase “final roster.” Yes, it was the “final” opening day roster, which means it was etched in stone for one entire game.) Anyway, if you look at that, you’ll see that John Bowker was there, as the starting right fielder no less.  You’ll see Waldis Joaquin and Brandon Medders were there in the bullpen. Eugenio Velez was there. Mark DeRosa was there. Freddy Sanchez (injured), Madison Bumgarner, Buster Posey and Pat Burrell weren’t there.

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Jeff Fletcher | March 24, 2011

Cody Ross’ injury has sparked a whole new batch of people calling for Brandon Belt to be on the Giants on opening day. I still don’t think the Giants should bring him if they don’t think he’s ready, and it still sounds like that’s where they are leaning, based on what Brian Sabean told the writers in Arizona.

In the interest of balanced coverage, though, I wanted to point out something a lot of folks may be forgetting about the Super Two issue, which some folks think is the only reason not to have Belt in the bigs.

The collective bargaining agreement expires in December. I don’t know if the Super Two system is going to be revisited, but it very well may be. The players don’t like this manipulation, and the clubs certainly don’t like a situation that rewards them for keeping guys out of the majors.

So, if I’m the Giants and I’m sure Belt is ready, I would not keep him down on the basis of a system that may not exist in eight months. I don’t think they would either. You’ll recall Tim Lincecum was a Super Two and Buster Posey will be.

I really don’t think the money will be an overriding factor. I think the biggest factor is that they shouldn’t overreact to spring training. Let Belt do something in real Triple-A games that count.

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Jeff Fletcher | March 24, 2011

Yeah, I’ve been gone for a bit, but I have a good excuse. Anyway, while I’ve been out I’ve spent a lot of time following what’s been happening with the A’s, Giants and our old friend Barry Bonds. So, here go a few thoughts:

SI’s Joe Posnanski, one of the best writers in the country, wrote a great piece on how he feels about this Bonds trial. His point, with which I agree 100 percent, is that this is a bad bad thing because we aren’t going to happy with either result. Either baseball’s all-time home run king is going to be convicted of perjury, and officially proven to have knowingly cheated the game, or the federal government is to going to lose and show that they’ve pretty much wasted a lot of time and money over the past seven years. Seven years!

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Jeff Fletcher | March 14, 2011

Watched much of the A’s game on TV yesterday. It was good to see a real, full big league lineup for any team in spring training, and even more interesting for the A’s, since their lineup is supposed to be so much better. During the game, Glen Kuiper and Ray Fosse referred to Hideki Matsui as a real “run producer,” and they mentioned his prowess hitting with runners in scoring position.

I’ve always been quite skeptical of this. It’s my understanding that the numbers just don’t support the idea that “clutch hitting” is a skill. This is not really news to the saber-minded among you, I realize. For the rest of you, the research indicates that hitters will hit at roughly the same rates over all their plate appearances regardless of whether there are runners in scoring position, if given a big enough sample. The small sample sizes of at-bats with runners in scoring position will have a natural variance, just the same way as a guy may hit better on Tuesdays for an entire year. It doesn’t make him a “good Tuesday hitter.”

But I wanted to see if maybe there is something to all this with Matsui. I’ve been hearing the clutch stuff about him for years. So I looked up his annual averages with RISP, compared with his overall averages. Why such a 20th century stat as batting average, instead of OBP, SLG or OPS? Well, when the reason it’s called “scoring position” is because runners can score on most any hit. So the batter just needs to get a hit to get the run in. In this case, a double is not necessarily better than a single and a walk is not as good as a single (unless the bases are loaded, of course). So, for our purposes here, old fashioned BA is good.

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Jeff Fletcher | March 11, 2011

Just finished up a profile of Josh Willingham for the A’s magazine. I didn’t put it in the story, because I didn’t think the A’s would want any more references to the Giants than necessary, but it occurred to me as I was writing it that Willingham comes to the A’s with a similar back story as Aubrey Huff’s from a year ago.

Both had spent their entire careers playing for bad teams, and therefore not really getting the proper attention for their performance. Both also carry a red flag. With Huff it was his inconsistency, and with Willingham it’s injuries. Huff was 33 last season, and Willingham is 32 this season.

Their overall performances are somewhat similar, too. Willingham has played in much worse hitters parks throughout his career. Adjusting for that, his career OPS+ is 121. Huff’s OPS+ before last year was 113.

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Jeff Fletcher | March 9, 2011

The Brandon Belt bandwagon certainly has gained a lot of momentum over the past couple weeks, so I figured I’d throw a little cold water on it.

From all I’ve seen and heard from people who know, I believe Belt will be a quality major leaguer, and he will be one sometime in 2011, but I don’t think he is ready now.

For starters, Brandon Belt is not Buster Posey, circa 2010. Posey was the Golden Spikes winner, as college baseball’s best player. He was the No. 5 overall pick. In his previous full season, he had played 35 games at Triple-A. Belt was a fifth-round pick who didn’t even make the Giants top 30 prospects list prior to 2010 (partly because he hadn’t played yet, but he was still eligible for the list based on his tools). In his one full season he did have a 1.075 OPS, but that included only 13 games at Triple-A.

Baseball America ranked Posey 7th last year, and Belt 23rd this year. ESPN’s Keith Law ranked Posey 4th, Belt 17th. FanHouse’s Frankie Piliere had Posey 7th, Belt 20th.

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Jeff Fletcher | March 8, 2011

A few people who read my proposed multi-year deal for Buster Posey think I short-changed the guy in his arbitration years. Just wanted to clarify something, because I believe a lot of Giants fans are seeing arbitration through the Tim Lincecum example, which was very rare.

I explain it thoroughly here (but it’s an AOL link, so I really don’t care if you click it or not), but here’s the basic point: Players in arbitration have to compare themselves only to other players of similar service time unless there are “special accomplishments” involved. That’s been interpreted to mostly mean winning the Cy Young or MVP.

Because Lincecum won the Cy Young just before becoming arbitration eligible, he was able to compare himself to any other Cy Young pitcher, which is how he and his agents came up with their $13-million asking price. If Lincecum had the exact same performance in 2008, but he’d finished second in the Cy Young race, he’d have only been able to compare himself to other first-time arbitration-eligible pitchers. That would have been guys like Justin Verlander ($3.65M), Roy Oswalt ($3.25M), Dontrelle Willis ($4.35), Felix Hernandez ($3.8M) and Cole Hamels ($4.35M).

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