Diamondbacks Bullpen

[shoewizard]

I made the following post in the Chris Young thread at Baseball Think Factory, where Levski had linked Nick's article on Young and I'm too lazy to rewrite it for a slightly different context. So I am just going to repost it in full here:


Selective and arbitrary begin and end points alert:

Through Aug 14th 439 PA 27 BB 88 K's .229/.283/.425
Aug 15th-Sept 23 162 PA 15 BB 45 K's .269/.340/.628

The walk % the last 6 weeks has improved from 6.15% to 9.25%. Nothing earth shattering, as the K/BB ratio has only improved from 3.29 to 3.00....but he IS making progress. Right now just from watching it appears that teams are pitching around him more due to his power surge in the second half, rather than him being so much more selective.

Still if Young can maintain a walk rate 9.25% over 650 PA next year, that would be about 60 walks, which certainly would make him a more well rounded offensive force. I think he has pretty much already achieved his "Mike Cameron comp" that has been quite popular and many of us have bandied about. If he can improve his walk rate another 3% up to 12% , that translates to 78 walks in 650 PA. With his power and the other aspects of his game, (high SB %, rangy centerfielder) that makes him a Carlos Beltran clone, provided he does a little better on BABIP going forward.

The one perplexing thing is that he is ranking a little below average in Zone rating, according to both THT (BIS) and ESPN (Stats Inc). Part of that may be Eric Byrnes, who ranks at the top in LF ZR, taking some fly balls in the gap that on other teams the Centerfielder would be taking. And also Hudson running out to the outfield to take popups that outfielders usually take might be coming into play here as well. You know, all that proven veteran goodness.

However earlier in the season Young was making a lot of errors, and seemed to be coming up short of making the "great play" quite a bit. Lately he has been much steadier, and definitely has improved. Still.....he tries to shoe string a lot of sinking liners, and has been missing some of them, which brings me to what I believe is the REAL reason that ZR is low:

There is a clear positioning element that may be affecting his ZR. Last year when he came up, Young played a shallow centerfield. However this year, ALL the Arizona outfielders are playing a deep deep outfield....usually a good two full steps behind where visiting team outfielders play. Something like that clearly seems to have come from the front office stat mavens working under Josh Byrnes. Either it has to do with the types of pitchers they have, or the ballpark, or both. Anyway, last year the D backs OF allowed 325 doubles and 49 triples, and this year they have allowed just 275 doubles and 33 triples. The extra base hit total has dropped a whopping 66 with just 6 games to play. The players out there are much faster than previous years and that accounts for a lot of that drop of course, but so does positioning. They have made a conscious choice to allow more singles and take away extra base hits in Chase Field.

I don't know how well the fielding metrics are going to capture that in regards to Chris Young. Intuitively, it stands to reason this would affect the Centerfielder more than the corner outfielders because there is that much more "extra" room to cover for CF.

[moviegeekjn]