Perhaps no hitter in the National League is more likely to pull a ball on the ground than Kevin Plawecki. He hits a grounder in 61% of his ABs and he has a 57.6 Pull%. Both numbers are top 10 marks in the league and guys who do one don’t necessarily do the other.
It’s maddening when he combines those two and hits into a double play. But perhaps the worst thing about it is when he does hit the ball in the air, he has had good results this year. According to Baseball-Reference, the average NL player hits .208 with an .848 OPS when he hits a fly ball. Plawecki has a .308 AVG and a 1.158 OPS on flies. But he has just 13 FB among his 59 balls in play.
You know with Olney(https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2018/07/olneys-latest-mets-blue-jays-tribe-bosox-braves-phillies.html), joining Martino and Lennon in saying that the new gm is likely to come outside the organization I’m starting to think that may be the case but the problem is that an incompetent boob like Omar is said to play a big part in choosing the gm, which is scary.
I’d like to see a guy like Cherington get an interview while he made some terrible signing he did do a masterful job restocking the Sox farm system and those guys are either core guys or were used in a trade to get Sale. I would also like to see them look at young hungry exec from top teams like the Astros and Dodgers, but with Omar in charge of hiring that’s unlikely.
Ten days ago I mentioned that the Angels would make sense for Cabrera or Frazier well now the Angels have collapsed and are ten plus games out of a wild card so there goes that. Brewers Might make sense for Cabby maybe the Dodgers? Don’t see many landing spots for him or Frazier right now, ugh.
Not at all surprised and I’d say Frazier gives him a good run for his money. Any idea what his ground ball and pull numbers are?
Frazier has very similar GB/FB/LD rates and he’s twice as likely to hit a ball up the middle as he is to pull the ball.
You can find all this information at Frazier’s split page at B-R
https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/split.fcgi?id=frazito01&year=2018&t=b
Many thanks.
Interesting stuff on Plawecki I thought he got away from the ground ball heavy stuff the last month of last year. Kev has regressed back to his old way even with that his wRC+ is over 100, but he could be better.
Since Lagares has his new swing and has nothing better to do, maybe he can teach it to Plawecki.
Lagares’ fly ball rate went down this year and hit with no power so didn’t work.
Today is the first day to sign international free agents. The Mets grabbed two of the top 30 and neither one was a middle infielder! They signed C Francisco Alvarez from Venezuela and OF Freddy Valdez from the Dominican Republic.
BA had Alvarez #9 and Valdez #25 while MLBPipeline had Alvarez #13 and Valdez #25
So that’s probably like a 4th rounder + 10th rounder.
My opinion is that comparing the international signings to the MLB Draft is a fool’s errand.
No one thinks we have ranking guys in this country drafted out of college at age 21-22 down to a science. Why should they think we have ranking 15-16 year olds from Latin America, who still have plenty of maturing left to do anything remotely like that? Then throw in a language barrier and then having to wonder how they’ll handle playing in a different country and they’re not remotely compatible.
But, if we have to compare, let’s try to do it monetarily.
Reports have the Mets spending $2.9 million on the catcher Alvarez. Their total int’l pool money was $4,983,500. So they spent nearly 60 percent of their allotment on Valdez. In the MLB Draft, they spent $4.5 million of their $9,580,900 pool (for the first 10 picks) on Kelenic. That’s about 47%
But again, it’s not a good comparison because theoretically, the Mets could have signed whoever they wanted while there were five guys in the draft who were not available to them. The int’l market depends on building relationships and it looks like this administration had finally done that. And we may be back to square one with that depending on who the new GM is.
Plawecki just pulls everything. Not a wise thing for a guy who has no power or speed.
I had high hopes based upon his August and September, but he has really been one of the biggest disappointments this year.
He has a wRC+ of 115 for the year that’s good.
I continue to believe in Plawecki…and it continues to lack any reason.
He just looks like he should be a good catcher.
Brian, my first instinct when I saw this stat was to look up the numbers for former Mets catcher Brian Schneider, who was basically Plawecki from the left side. He seemingly hit into a double play every time the opportunity presented itself. His pull numbers were even worse than Plawecki over his career but his ground ball rate wasn’t quite as bad. In just 6 seasons of 300+ ABs, he had five seasons of 10+ GDPs. His personal best was 15 in just over 400 ABs. Mike Piazza holds the team record with 27 GDPs in 1999.
Albert Pujols is the career leader in GDPs, but the crown belongs to Jim Rice. In his 30s, when the Red Sox slugger could still hit but had no legs left, he hit into an astounding 71 DPs over a two year span from 1984-85.
Joe Torre hit into 4 DPs in one game with the Mets. Afterwards he jokingly blamed it on Felix Millan for always getting on base. And that’s the explanation for Rice 100X more than bad legs. He had the great fortune of batting behind Wade Boggs and Dwight Evans. Those two combined to get on base 552 times in 1986.
If Corey Oswalt wants to be taken seriously, he’ll need to have a good outing tonight. He gets a semi-pass for his first start, having just been called up. But he’s been here now and he’s on regular rest. He needs to give the team a reason to keep Lugo in the pen and move Vargas there once Syndergaard comes back.
If you want to be sick to your stomach, check this out:
https://www.mlb.com/news/javier-baez-steals-home-against-tigers/c-284233606
It will bring back memories, not good ones though.
speed, athleticism, scoring by any means. Sure its a rotten memory, and yet the hope of what might soon be.