Mike Scioscia's tragic illness

History May Not Be on Juan Uribe’s Side In 2012

In the nearly 65 years since Jackie Robinson integrated baseball in 1947, 931 players have managed at least 295 plate appearances in their age-31 season, an average of 14.3 a year. Of those 931 players, 916 managed to post a better OPS+ than the 56 that Juan Uribe put up during his nightmarish 2011 debut season in Los Angeles.

That’s the bad news. Here’s the worse news: only two players in major league history who ever had an age-31 season as poor as Uribe’s or worse ever rebounded to be even a league-average offensive ballplayer again, and you’re not going to like who one of them is. It’s a list that’s littered with catchers and shortstops who could never hit in the first place, like Larry Cox, Kurt Manwaring, Dal Maxvill, and Willy Miranda, and who certainly never turned it around as they continued to age.

The two players who did manage to rebound from such a poor age-31 season both have Dodger connections, but neither inspire a great deal of hope. Mike Devereaux came up with the Dodgers before being dealt to the Orioles in March of 1989, where he enjoyed some success as the Baltimore center fielder for most of the next six seasons. In 1994, he ended his first stint with the O’s by hitting just .203/.256/.332 (48 OPS+) in his age-31 season; the next year, he managed a 108 OPS+ while splitting time between the White Sox and the Braves. It was the last decent year he’d ever have, as he put up just a 62 OPS+ between 1996-98 with the Orioles, Rangers, and Dodgers, and his career ended when he was released by Los Angeles in May of 1998.

The other player who managed something of a bounce-back barely qualifies for the list, because his big comeback was a precisely league-average 100 OPS+, but I particularly don’t enjoy talking about him because he’s my least favorite member of the 2012 Dodgers: Adam Kennedy. After seven mostly productive years in Anaheim, Kennedy joined the Cardinals in 2007, putting up what should have been a career-ending .219/.282/.290 (50 OPS+) line. He was a bit better for St. Louis in 2008, then surprisingly good for Oakland in 2009 (100 OPS+) before being bad in Washington in 2010, worse in Seattle in 2011, and lord knows what in Los Angeles in 2012.

So what does that mean for Uribe? Maybe nothing. Maybe something. It’s fair to say that our study is somewhat arbitrary – age-31 on its face isn’t necessarily all that different from 30 or 32, and 295 PA was chosen only because that’s what Uribe had – and Uribe did have to fight through injuries all season after putting up two decent years in San Francisco. On the other hand, this is a guy who was atrocious for nearly all of his age 25-28 years with the White Sox, and his body type doesn’t exactly lend a lot of confidence that his injury woes were a fluke. (In the BP injury database, he has an impressive fifteen entries for “soreness”, “tightness”, or “stiffness”, dating back to 2004.) In addition, none of the top projection systems like PECOTA (.241/.293/.385), ZIPS (.249/.300/.401), or Bill James (.240/.298/.394) have a whole lot of optimism for Uribe in 2012, and I also haven’t seen a whole lot of analysts who can offer up anything more positive than, “well, he can’t be that bad again, right?”

Unfortunately for the Dodgers, Uribe simply has to be better, because there just aren’t a whole lot of alternatives if he’s not. Kennedy? Jerry Hairston? If Uribe can’t buck history and his own mediocre past, the Dodgers are left with only two 36-year-olds behind him, unless you’re the world’s biggest Russ Mitchell fan – and considering he was just DFA’d and went unclaimed, it doesn’t seem anyone really considers him a big leaguer.

Uribe was perhaps the biggest Dodger disappointment last year, and it might be fair to say that he’s the biggest Dodger question mark for 2012, potentially only behind James Loney. He still has $16m coming to him over the next two years, plus another $1m deferred to 2014, so between that and the lack of third base options, he’s going to get every chance to succeed. To be honest, the bar for success for him isn’t that high, because you expect so little from a guy with a .298 OBP over 11 seasons. He’s not a good hitter, and he’ll never be one. But if he can just get back to his usual ways of decent power (16 or more homers six times) and solid defense, that’s at least something the Dodgers can work with.

If not? Well, contract or not, a repeat of his 2011 could have him on the bench by July and out of town by October, dooming us to 400 plate appearances from Kennedy. Juan Uribe, eternal conundrum.

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Be sure to check out Razzball this morning, where I answered five questions for Grey about Jerry Sands, Andre Ethier, Dee Gordon, and Javy Guerra.

Juan Uribe Will No Longer Haunt Your Dreams

…at least for the last month of 2011, anyway.

Surgeries are planned for Casey Blake and Juan Uribe in the coming weeks, with Blake scheduled for a neck operation on Tuesday and Uribe receiving a second opinion before undergoing a procedure to repair a sports hernia.

Whereas Conte described Blake’s surgery as inevitable, Uribe’s was something the Dodgers wanted to avoid.

“We think there is a slight tear and a nerve entrapped there,” Conte said. “There were two ways to go about this. One was to inject the area, see if it would heal, rest it and progressively get him back.”

That course of treatment appeared to be working — until Monday, when Uribe felt pain when sprinting.

“That told us the conservative approach was probably not going to work,” Conte said. “We suggested he get surgery.”

Conte said Uribe is on board with the plan.

“He would have a normal off-season,” Conte said.

Uribe ends his first season as a Dodger with a horrifically disappointing .204/.264/.294 line and nearly as many stints on the disabled list (two) as homers (four). The resulting .204 TAv is ahead of only Paul Janish, Alexis Rios, and Chone Figgins – that’s right, even worse than Adam Dunn – among the 233 big leaguers with as many plate appearances as Uribe had. (For the record, wOBA agrees, tying him for fourth with Rios, though also putting him ahead of Franklin Gutierrez.) It’s almost like you shouldn’t have given $21m to a 31-year-old coming off two one-year contracts totaling $4.2m, right?

No matter how you slice it, Uribe’s Dodger debut was an absolute disaster – but hey, at least he’s still got $15m more coming to him over the next two years plus a $1m bonus in 2014. It’s not even fun to apply actual analysis to Uribe’s season, so let’s instead delve into hilarious facts that exist concerning him:

1) Nearly eight years ago, he was traded straight-up for current teammate Aaron Miles. No, really.

2) The most Uribe-related fun we had this entire season was with a never-true-and-quickly-refuted rumor that the Giants might actually have been interested in taking him back in July.

3) There’s an entire Tumblr dedicated to how sad Juan Uribe makes everyone.

4) The best part of Uribe’s baseball-reference Similarity Score list is not that it’s a who’s-who of mediocre middle infielders over the last 20 years (Robby Thompson, Jeff Blauser, Jose Hernandez, Felipe Lopez, etc.) but that both Alex Gonzalezes make the list.

Don’t come back, Juan. We won’t miss you. Still, the fact that Uribe and Blake officially admit defeat on the same day does serve as a poetic reminder of what really had the most damaging effect on this club – that the original starting infield of James Loney, Uribe, Rafael Furcal, and Blake started just two games together, both in April.

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One of my favorite Twitter feeds is that of Matthew Kaminski, aka @BravesOrganist, who plays the keys in Atlanta. He’s often coming up with clever songs to play for opposing players as they walk up to the plate, and with the Dodgers in town this weekend, he needs our help:

#Braves vs. #Dodgers – any song ideas for the Dodgers’ players?

Hit him up on Twitter or leave your best ideas here. The Mighty Mouse theme for Miles? “Cryin’” for Andre Ethier? The possibilities are endless.

Juan Uribe Should Probably Stop Helping Pitchers Get Him Out

Juan Uribe, you may have noticed, is awful. He can’t hit lefties (.521 OPS) or righties (.585 OPS). He can’t hit when the pressure is on (.593 in high leverage situations), when it’s off (.614 in low leverage), or when the pressure is just about right, Goldilocks (.495 in medium leverage). He can’t hit during the day (.614), and he can’t hit at night (.555). He can’t hit at Dodger Stadium (.674 OPS), and he really can’t hit anywhere else (.438).  He hit a little in April (.723), but not at all in May (.496) or June (.488). He can’t hit as a second baseman (.609) or a third baseman (.548). He can’t hit with the bases empty (.622), and he can’t hit with men on (.509). He can’t hit when he comes up with zero outs (.541), one out (.577), or two outs (.595). He can’t hit pitchers known for their flyball tendencies (.533), but nor can he hit those who keep the ball on the ground (.511).

Juan Uribe simply can’t hit anything right now.

With the exception of some decent defense, there is almost nothing that Uribe is doing at the moment that is of major league quality. If he had enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title, his .258 wOBA would be the third-worst in baseball, ahead of only Alexis Rios and the much-reviled Yuniesky Betancourt.

That Uribe isn’t a very good baseball player should come as no surprise; after all, this is the same guy who spent his age 25-28 seasons (theoretically, at or near a player’s prime) putting up a .241/.284/.409 mark for the White Sox. Unsurprisingly, they then cut him loose and the Giants picked him up for only a non-roster invite on a minor league deal. He had a surprisingly nice 2009 in San Francisco, which earned him a one-year deal for 2010, in which he regressed in nearly every offensive area with the exception of homers and completely meaningless RBI. That, somehow, earned him a three-year, $21m contract with the Dodgers, a pact we’re likely to be regretting through 2013.

But the point of today’s post isn’t to bash Ned Colletti about the contract. Just about everyone knew it was a horrible deal to give three guaranteed years to a player with a long track record of mediocrity or worse. (Everyone, it seemed, except for the Dodgers and the Giants, who reportedly had offered a deal close to or equal to the LA offer). We knew it was a bad idea at the time. We know it’s a bad idea now. That hasn’t changed.

Yet what we couldn’t have expected was just how bad Uribe would be in 2011, because if you remember, I actually advocated signing him in my 2011 plan. At the time, I said I’d be willing to offer him one year with a player option on a second to come play second base on this year’s club, figuring that even though his low OBP wouldn’t be ideal, his power and defense would be a good short-term improvement on Ryan Theriot. In retrospect, I clearly underestimated the market, though I will add that I wrote that before the 2010 San Francisco playoff run, in which he hit two home runs on the big stage despite not doing much else.

So the question then becomes, why is he so awful this year? We’ve heard all the usual bits about a player pressing in a new home and trying to live up to the expectations of a large contract, and perhaps there’s some truth to that. He’s had to fight through some nagging injuries, and there might have been some impact there, though it’s hard to pin his entire disappointing season on that alone.

Let’s compare some of his numbers to his two years in San Francisco. My first thought, just based on watching him flail, was that he was swinging at far too many first pitches, yet surprisingly that ratio (31%) is down from 39% and 33% in his two years as a Giant. It may still be too high, but it’s not the sole culprit here. (It does play a factor, though; more on that in a second.) He’s striking out (20.1%) a bit more than he did in his quality 2009 (19.0%), though he is actually drawing a few more walks this year (6.1%) than that year (5.8%). His BABIP (.246) is far down from that year’s .325, though since his number in 2010 was .256 and since 2009 was the only year in the past seven in which that number climbed over .287, it seems that his 2009 success was more fluky good than 2011 is fluky bad.

No, what appears to be happening is that opposing pitchers are adjusting, and Uribe is failing to adjust with them. Uribe is swinging at about the same percentage of pitches he always has, with this year’s 53.4% swing rate falling comfortably within the 50-55% range he’s had nearly every year of his career. And his 78.5% contact rate is actually very slightly better than his career average of 77.9% and is higher than in either of his two decent years in the Bay Area.

So Uribe hasn’t really started to swing at more balls than usual, appearances aside, and he’s not missing more balls than usual. Unfortunately for him, pitchers have simply stopped throwing him strikes this year, perhaps knowing that he’s not going to be able to lay off. With one exception, Uribe has always seen first-pitch strikes in the 60-61% range, every year of his career. This year? That number has gone from 60.9% in each of the last two years to 53.2%, nearly 8% less. Pitchers are starting him off with strikes far less than they ever have before, but as I noted above, he’s been unable to adjust since he’s only swinging at 2% fewer first pitches.

It’s not just first pitches, either. Only 41.7% of all pitches he sees are in the strike zone, which not only a career low but is a shocking drop when you consider that the number was between 48.4% and 56.6% each year from 2003-2009. Despite seeing far fewer pitches in the zone, his swing rate has remained steady – i.e., more of his swings are at balls outside the zone. Since he’s not missing more, his contact rate on balls thrown outside the zone has risen to a career-high 61.0%.

Unless you’re Vladimir Guerrero, that’s a problem, because if you’re swinging at and connecting on balls outside the strike zone, chances are you’re not swinging at the right pitches. Uribe is indeed fouling off pitches at the highest rate of his career, which is what happens when you’re chasing crappy pitches.

It stands to reason that by laying off more of the balls outside the zone, only good things can happen. He’d get more walks, obviously. He’d stop helping the pitcher by making weak outs on the pitches he wants Uribe to hit. Keep it up long enough, and he’d get better pitches to hit.

Even if he doesn’t, taking balls rather than fouling away a strike will put Uribe in the one situation where he can hit: when he’s ahead in the count, Juan Uribe has a line of .317/.430/.476. We’ve long wanted to be rid of watching Uribe up at the plate hacking away; now there’s real reason to do so.

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I’ve added entry #53 to the McCourt sin list. Well, it’s actually #11, since the list is roughly chronological and it happened so long ago, but still. The way things are going today with all of the bankruptcy court garbage going back and forth, it won’t be too long before we have even more to add.

Let’s Indulge In a Fantasy About Juan Uribe Being Gone

The alternate title for this post was going to be “Things That Are Never F***ing Going to Happen”, but I thought that was a little on the nose. I almost didn’t even want to post it, because it’s just going to get hopes up… but what the hell. Let’s have some fun. We deserve it.

Giants beat writer Andrew Baggarly:

This information comes to me secondhand, but there’s talk among industry folks that the Dodgers and Giants have discussed a trade that would bring Juan Uribe back to San Francisco.

Uribe has been a bust with the Dodgers thus far, hitting .206 with four home runs in 214 at-bats after signing a three-year, $21 million contract. It’s worth remembering that the Giants were offering very similar numbers and willing to go to a third year before Uribe accepted the Dodgers’ take-it-or-leave-it contract.

Now, of course, the Dodgers are baseball’s biggest mess and owner/charlatan Frank McCourt might not be able to make payroll.

The Giants need an experienced second baseman with Freddy Sanchez’s health situation still up in the air. Although a determination will be made after a couple more weeks of rest and rehab, the Giants have to plan as if Sanchez won’t play again this season.

Mike Fontenot, a left-handed hitter, is coming back soon. But it doesn’t look as if management has much confidence in Bill Hall to form the right-handed portion of a platoon at second base.

Would Uribe be worth the $8 million he’s owed in 2012, and the $7 million he’ll get in 2013? Would the Dodgers defray some of the cost? All good questions. But I have to imagine the Dodgers aren’t in position to demand much in the way of talent in return.

It’s lovely to think about, isn’t it? Unfortunately, it’s not going to happen, friends. It’s just not, for about 20 different reasons. Still… a man can dream. A man can dream.

Update. So, that was quick.. not that this was ever going to happen anyway, but Baggarly has updated his post:

UPDATE: GM Brian Sabean just called up to the press box to shoot down this rumor. He told PR man Jim Moorehead to relay to me that he has not talked to Dodgers GM Ned Colletti in weeks. As I wrote, the information came through an indirect channel. I suspect the Dodgers likely were calling teams to shop Uribe, but that’s obviously much different than Colletti and Sabean talking about a deal. Anyway, all those cards are on the table.

Still, there’s something interesting hidden in there. Whether it’s the Giants or not, the idea that the Dodgers *could* be calling teams trying to dump Uribe would be a massive admission that signing him really was the mistake we all knew it was.