Peabody: Life, Friends Baseball

This is an expected turn of events as neither are major league players at this point in their baseball lives. Offensively, Kawasaki is just about the worst hitter in the American league by any measurements of full and part time players. For players with 300 plate appearances or more in the past American League season he had the worst hitting year amongst regular catchers and was ninth worse overall with a .620 OPS, above Brendan Ryan with a .555 and just below Dustin Ackley at .622.

In the announcement in the Times blog, Geoff Baker opines that the Olivo will get another shot due to his defensive strengths. His throwout percentage being at 30.9%, above Jaso at 20.6%. We’ve opined previously about how misleading that stat is and how teams tried to run more often on a per game basis on Olivo than Jaso and that between passed balls and so called wild pitches he’s the worst catcher on the team. Further though if there were a count of dropped balls, he would lead on that too.

Mr. Baker went on to say that Wedge was uncomfortable having Jaso or Montero catch more than two days in a row, which goes to our earlier work about the primacy point for catching being catching the ball and getting strikes and that next Kenji Johjima as being the bench mark for worst receiver ever, Olivo is right behind that point.

Assuming that accurate reporting is going on, then the opinions of Wedge presumably are startling.

Mike Zunino’s performance in the Arizona Fall League has been to show an .848 OPS with a .348 on bag and .500 slug. This is a much higher range of competition and his offense works. It looks as if they want him to make the team out of spring training.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 25th, 2012 at 10:13 am by terrybenish and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.