You can’t trade bad players just because they’re bad. If baseball were that easy, Padre fans would never have the pleasure of telling the thrilling tales of Mark Bellhorn. You trade players when their perceived value is greater than their actual value.

-Melvin Nieves, 08/11/08

Following Khalil’s MVPadre winning season of 2008, we at The Sac Bunt made the case (cases, really) for why he should be moved. His value was at an all-time high and it wasn’t really representative of his actually production. For all of his power prowess, and Khalil hit 27 home runs that year, his complete inability to draw a walk more than evened things out, leaving him with a wOBA that season of .322. Yet the Padres attempted to sign Khalil to an extension, one that he fortunately turned down, and now he’s working through his problems both on-field and off, in St. Louis.

Lesson learned, right?

In a recent blog entry on Kevin Kouzmanoff, Paul DePodesta aptly quoted Mark Twain, saying, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” DePo was using Twain’s words to discuss Kouzmanoff random success after May 14th, but it might work better if used to talk about the third baseman’s current trade value.

In his discussion, DePo points out the tear Kouzmanoff’s been on since May 14th, which includes 9 home runs in 140 at-bats. Stretched out over a full season, that’s more than 30 home runs, an especially impressive feat playing in Petco. But DePo noticeably fails to mention Kouzmanoff’s 27 strike outs and 5 walks over the same stretch. That’s a BB/K of 0.19, which is consistent with Kouz’s 0.17 mark in 2008. It’s also lower than Khalil’s 0.25 in 2007.

At the time, trading Khalil wasn’t as simple as simply finding a trade partner. There was no one in the system to take his place, so the team would have to go outside to find a replacement. With Kouzmanoff, the same problem does not exist.

As we’ve discussed, Chase Headley has become a bit of an enigma in this organization, though he’s been hot over the past couple of weeks. He’s also a more-than-viable option for this team at third base. And it would seem that a decision is begging to be made, with the outfield becoming suddenly stuffed. Along with Headley, the Padres have the newly unretired Tony Gwynn, Scott Hairston, Brian Giles, Kyle Blanks, and Will Venable. While it seems that the sand in Giles’ Padres hourglass is just about out, there’s no benching an active Hall of Famer or the team’s best non-Adrian hitter. And Towers has also pledged playing time for Venable, while Blanks’ presence demands some as well.

(For our coverage of Blanks’ call-up, search ‘Chase Headley’ in our archives and look for articles from June of last year.)

The best reason to trade Kouzmanoff, though, is because this team isn’t any good. We’re currently 32-41 and something like seven games out of the Wild Card. We also have a Pythagorean of 28-45 and are absent our two best pitchers (although Kevin Correia has really turned it on as of late). While some of the young talent are playing surprisingly well, the aforementioned Tony Gwynn and Everth Cabrera leading the pack, by no means should the team think that this dinner party is going end without someone getting piss drunk and saying something inappropriate about someone else’s wife. Let’s just take it easy, explore what the market for Kouzmanoff is (the Indians recently traded Mark DeRosa for Chris Perez and a PTBNL, for instance), and get ready for 2010 and beyond.

A little more than four years ago to the day, on June 2nd, 2005, Miguel Ojeda started the day’s game in right field. Though he was a backup catcher, Ojeda starting in the outfield wasn’t entirely out of a line, as he had a handful of starts in left earlier that year. The craziness comes in who Ojeda was starting over.

Xavier Nady was drafted by the Padres in the second round of the 2000 draft and was named the Padres number one best prospect by Baseball America in 2003. yet in his three years with the big league club, Nady never received consistent playing time, and was shipped out to New York in 2005 for Mike Cameron. Since then, Nady has jumped to Pittsburgh and then to the Yankees (the other New York team), breaking out last year with a .374 wOBA in 148 games, a career high.

On that fateful June day, Nady sat on the bench and watched Ojeda run out in right and go 0-for-3. And then five months later, he was gone.

Get to the point, Ray

Right.

The Padres have had a tremendous lack of success in developing homegrown talent. Outside of Jake Peavy, the second best player the Padres made for themselves this decade was Khalil Greene, and we all know how that turned out. Most of them busted, but at least Sean Burroughs got a chance. Nady never really got that chance in San Diego, and I’m beginning to worry about how big of a shot Chase Headley’s going to get.

Kevin Towers went on XX Radio last night for his weekly call-in. The topic of Headley, and why he’s been sitting so much, came up. Among other things, Towers said that he thinks Headley’s confidence level is down, that the strike outs are a concern, and that the team is out there trying to win games. He also said that it’s up to a player to make adjustments in game, and that maybe Headley should go back and look at video from the minors to see what’s changed.

Let’s start at the beginning: the team is out there trying to win games. Towers brought this up to explain why Headley’s sitting for Scott Hairston, but it begs the question: What are Kevin Kouzmanoff and Brian Giles doing in the lineup night-in and night-out?

Now, Giles has run into a hot streak, posting an .899 OPS in the past two weeks, which has raised his season mark up to .568. That’s an OPS+ of 52. He’s also played in 50 of the team’s 53 games. Kouzmanoff, meanwhile, has an OPS of .503 over the past two weeks, with a season OPS of .612, or an OPS+ of 63. He’s played in 51 games.

Giles’ recent hot streak and Kouzmanoff’s hot defense are two valid reasons for why these guys are still in the lineup, but I wonder why it comes at the expense of Chase Headley.

Like Nady, Headley is a former number one prospect, taking the title in 2008. And he’s also only 148 games into his major league career, but confidence in him already seems to be dwindling. In yesterday’s Union-Tribune, Headley was quoted as saying:

I’ve never had so few at-bats over a month. Since I hurt my shoulder, I haven’t played every day. I haven’t been given a chance to battle through this.

For a good number of my at-bats in May, I was fighting to get through the weakness in my shoulder. It was really weak. I had to change my stance because I couldn’t hold my hands in the same position.

Headley returns after Hairston hurt

Headley is referring to a shoulder injury he sustained in early May when he ran into the wall in L.A. This knocked him out for a couple of games, but based on Headley’s use of the past-tense, it doesn’t seem to still be bothering him. Surely not as much the position he’s found himself in.

He goes on to say:

It’s frustrating, the circumstance I’m in right now. I didn’t forget how to hit. I feel I have the capability. I think that in any capacity, I can help this team out. But this wouldn’t be the capacity I would choose.

That doesn’t sound to me like a player whose confidence is down.

Why is the team sitting on Chase Headley?

Headley’s supposed to be one of the young cornerstones of this franchise, but he’s sitting in favor of a 38-year-old in the last year of his contract. I hear Towers say that Headley’s strike outs are of concern, but more so than Kouzmanoff’s inability to draw a walk? Headley may be striking out 30% of the time, but his BB/K is still well above Kouzmanoff’s. Headley’s been the superior player of the three all year, but I don’t expect to hear the front office say so.

Finally, with Hairston on the DL, a spot in the outfield opened up. But last night, the newly recalled Will Venable got the start in left field over Headley, going 0-for-4 with an error.

One can only assume that Henry Blanco forgot his outfield glove at home.

You know what is fun, edgy, hilarious, and entertaining? You’re absolutely right, it’s roster construction. So get yourself a beer, a Sparks engery drink, a party hat, a kazoo, and whatever else kids these days use to have a good time, and lets get constructin’!

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned in my years of life and learning, it’s that even  seemingly innocuous decisions have crazy, unfathomable complications that arise when trying to figure stuff out by just looking at them. Call this an unfair generalization if you must, but intuition is no good at everything.

It seems like whenever I hear people talk about roster construction, they generally glance at the players available, look at the number of roster spots, and use intuition to try to reason their way through the decisions. Or, as I like to call this process “making it up as you go along.”

Usually when the rosters come out and a move is made, we hear mostly vague and unhelpful generalities from team brass. “We’re carrying 12 pitchers, ‘caus pitching wins championships and is teh awesome.” I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a rundown of the best way to construct a roster from an analytical perspective. Until today. Because I am teh awesome.

Mitchel Lichtman, or MGL to those of use who are cool with him like that, goes into detail explaining how he would best construct a roster. He does admit that this type of analysis isn’t usually his forte, but frankly I’ve never seen much else to go on. MGL consults with an MLB team, has written a well regarded book on baseball analysis, and frankly is a smart dude. I’ll take that over the glorified guesswork that usually gets thrown around.

Here’s how the roster looks at the moment, courtesy of Padres.com:

One Tool In The Shed

I don’t see any problem with a player who functions only as a pinch runner and late inning defender (I think that you at least want both). I would think that you would want your pinch runner to be a good basestealer as well. Not all fast runners are good basestealers of course, especially young ones.

MGL’s first paragraph gets the Padres off to a good start, as it addresses and confirms the team’s most debatable roster construction choice. That is, giving Everth Cabrera, with no experience above A ball, a spot on the team. He has the speed to serve as a pinch runner, and hopefully his 73 stolen bases last season signify an ability to do so beyond just fast running. His defensive game saw mixed reviews over spring training, though he does have experience at both second and shortstop.

Scott Hairston serves as a solid defensive backup in the outfield as well, as he’s capable of passable defense in center.

The Good News Doesn’t Last Long

That being said, an NL team definitely needs more bench players than an AL team. No question about it. As we have said many times, teams do not pinch hit for the pitcher nearly enough. To do that, you need plenty of pinch hitters.

I also don’t think that any team needs 13 pitches, which you don’t normally see anyway. I doubt many teams need 12 pitchers either. I would probably carry 11 pitchers in the NL and 12 in the AL.

Well, shit. So much for the successful start. The Padres are currently using 13 pitchers on the roster, though I think that will change when Cliff Floyd comes off the DL.

Who Needs The Backup?

You really want to tailor your pinch hitters and bench players to your starting lineup. By that, I mean if you have a particularly bad defender in your starting lineup, it makes sense to have a good defender who can come in the late innings when you need to preserve a lead. If you have several weak hitting lefties in your lineup, it makes sense to have a strong right-handed hitting PH or two. Etc.

The team is constructed well enough in terms of platoons at the plate. They don’t have a capable left handed bench bat at the moment, but again I think that will change when Floyd returns. The outfield is manned by two capable lefty bats, plus two capable righty bats and Floyd. I suppose left handers up the middle would be nice, but so would bringing back brown uniforms, so I’ll pick my battles.

It bears mentioning that Chase Headley’s switch hitting ability and positional versatility leaves a lot of options. A backup third baseman isn’t needed, so there’s room to stock up on a myriad of middle infielders to throw against a wall and see what sticks.

Southpaw Middle Children

It also does not make sense to have fewer than 2 lefties in your pen. There are really only 3 reasons to make pitching changes in a game: One, to get the platoon advantage. For that, you want at least 2 RHRP and 2 LHRP. Having 1 LH and 6 RH relievers makes no sense at all. Anyway, the second reason for a pitching change is to pinch hit for the pitcher in the NL. The third reason is to bring in a better or worse reliever as the leverage of the game changes.

Raspberries. Not much commentary necessary here, the team has no lefties in the pen. MGL puts a heavy emphasis on platoon advantage, the Padres graduated from Screw The Pooch College on this one.

Allow Me To Preach Some More

Only occasionally will you need to remove a reliever because he is tired. Managers making pitching changes based on a pitcher getting “lit up” for an inning or two is generally a waste of time, although some people would disagree with me there.

Not much to do with the topic at hand, I’m only including this because it bugs me, and complaining about things on the Internet is the American way.

There’s no reason to think that just because a reliever gives up a couple hits in one inning that he is somehow rendered incompetent for that entire outing. Never in the history of mathematics has there been a smaller sample size than this situation. The dude is fine, unless you have a reason to change relievers, leave him in.

It’s All In Their Heads

Even with the bullpen, you need to tailor it to your team. By that, I mostly mean the number of relievers. If you play in a hitters park and/or your starters tend not to go deep in games, either because they are bad, they are not durable, or both, then you obviously need more relievers. In fact, on second thought, I might suggest that a team with good/durable relievers and/or that plays in a pitcher’s park, carry 11 pitchers, and the rest of the teams carry 12.

MGL, stop rubbing in the heartbreak! I hadn’t considered it before, but it makes total sense for a team in an outrageously pitching centered ballpark to carry more hitters on the bench. Someone should send Towers a fax, or a telegram on this one.

Mothers’ Basements Have Feelings Too

I am also a big fan or platooning. There are many teams who have a player at a certain position who is a marginal hitter (for that position). The best solution for that is to platoon with him another marginal hitter who can play that same position. In doing that, you also get a built-in tandem pinch hitting situation. Platooning is an underused strategy and for some reason has really fallen out of favor lately. I am not sure why.

Sounds like MGL would like the Padres’ outfield. He does mention other “soft” considerations, such as ego problems with platooning a star or former star player. I’ll leave room here for a Paul DePodesta joke about a Player Pride Index computer simulation.

Literally every second, Ray and I get hundreds of emails from loyal SacBuntians clamoring for ways to advertise The Sacrifice Bunt for us, free of charge.

“I’m tired of wearing shirts with boring little green alligators, or apparel without hilarious sayings that show the world how witty and hip I am,” they say. And as is our usual policy when strangers on the Internet tell us to do things: we have wholeheartedly obliged.

The Sacrifice Bunt Shop is here, hipper and with more Padres related double entendres than previously thought possible.

Honest to goodness, we don’t make any money off this stuff, besides the good feeling in our hearts we get when people cover their bodies with the logo of our worthy to be on a t-shirt website.

Most shirts feature a design on the front with a Sac Bunt logo on the back. AA means it’s American Apparel. So they’re a little further up the pricing scale, but the shirts are soft and well fitted. You can choose any t-shirt color your heart desires, but if you want a different color ink, or a different style of shirt (long sleeve or moar women’s styles, for instance) let me know.

Remember how delusional Grady Fuson got when Baseball America announced the farm system as 29th in the league? I anticipate the team’s response following this:

Organizational Rankings: #25 - San Diego Padres

Our much revered Fangraphs has begun listing all 30 Major League clubs in descending order and, as you don’t even need to click to see, the Padres ended up at 25th. 

The grading was broken down into Ownership, Front Office, Major League Talent and Minor League Talent. Some highlights:

Ownership: N/A

This is an ownership group in transition, and we just don’t have enough information to give them any kind of grade.

This one seems kind of obvious. They go on to say that there is a sense of shadiness behind the sale to Moorad, as he still had a stake in the Diamondbacks. Personally, I think it’d only be appropriate if a conflict of interest blows up in our face. Nothing’s impossible.

Front Office: B-

Kevin Towers is a smart, likable guy, and currently the longest tenured GM in the game… However, there’s some serious question marks about how the team will be run going forward. With Alderson on the way out, does he take Asst. GM Paul DePodesta with him? Can Towers avoid being fired if the team struggles in 2009, especially with new ownership?

Really, not to be a bloodsucker, but it seems like they went a little soft on the front office. Towers’ legacy in San Diego speaks for itself, but he had a rough 2008. Go through our archives and you won’t see too many “Hey, we signed this guy!” articles, unless they were followed by a “Hey, we traded this guy for not a whole lot!” article. Then there’s our impossibly disappointing minor league system, the uncertainty going forward, and our general 2009 awfulness, and that B- grade seems a bit generous. 

Major League Talent: C-

Regression needs to be expected from both, and there just isn’t much in the way of run production for the Padres outside of (Gerut and Giles) and Adrian Gonzalez. Chase Headley is a solid enough young player, but when he represents the hopes of your future line-up, things aren’t great.

Fangraphs makes a potentially dubious statement in “the pitchers aren’t as good as advertised, and the hitters are a bit better than everyone thinks.” I’m not sure why the pitchers are flat-out not as good but the hitters are just kinda sorta better. Petco Park still eats statistics for breakfast. The Three-G’s all had a road OPS near .900, with Adrian topping out at .946. Only Giles made it over .800 at home. Maybe the scrub seatholders are only a bit better on the road, but I don’t like defining the team by them. 

Minor League Talent: C-

There aren’t any position prospects here that everyone loves, and the ranks of the pitching prospects are full of guys who throw 87 MPH and try to get by on smarts. It isn’t a horrible farm system, but it’s not a very good one either, and for a team in need of a talent injection, that’s a problem.

Hey, “isn’t a horrible farm system.” That’s pretty good! But seriously, this cuts to the core of this team’s problem. We can talk all day about the missing $30 million and how that’s hindering the team, but the fact remains that this team needs that $30 million because it has yet to start producing its own talent. While other teams in our league are filling out their lineups with homegrowns, the Padres have Chase Headley and Nick Hundley. And with the exception of Kyle Blanks, no one’s really close. I think this fact needs better representation in the Front Office grade.

I’ll leave you with Fangraph’s summation of this team’s fortunes going forward. Have a good weekend!

Overall: C

 If you’re a glass half full guy, you can hold onto the fact that the D’Backs were very well ran while Moorad was in Arizona, and that the front office is full of guys who could run a team well. If you’re a glass half empty guy, then you see an organization that lacks talent, has only a couple of really valuable players (two of whom have full no-trade clauses), and who plays in a division with two teams that are better, younger, and have greater revenue steams. I have a feeling that San Diego is in for some tough times ahead.

I don’t mean to step on Melvin’s toes, but I feel the need to address Sandy’s dismissal myself.

As Mel documented, John Moores is no longer the owner of the San Diego Padres and, in a matter of time, Sandy Alderson will no longer be the team’s CEO. Despite my earlier requests that Sandy be kept on board, I welcome this changing of the guard with open arms.

Plain and simply, my patience has run out.

I have a handful of complaints, leaving out the 99 loses and bleak outlook for 09, that include Alderson’s work as an ambassador to the Padres community and the draft.

I should start by saying that Alderson’s reaching out to the local radio station was a noble effort. Unfortunately, Alderson often came off as prickly and condescending, torpedoing that noble effort. It seemed to create a divide between the people selling the tickets and the people buying the tickets and, coincidentally or not, the team may sell less than two million tickets in 09, a fifteen year low.

And, of course, there is Trevor Hoffman.

There are no heroes or villains in the story of the end of Hoffman’s Padre career. From everything that we know, which admittedly could be nothing, all parties did their part to severe the relationship. Except the fans, who were left playing the role of the children of a bitter divorce, after a year in which the team dropped 99 games, and were tormented with talks of trading the team ace.

If nothing else, this offseason has been exhausting.

Then there’s the draft.

This is likely (probably) cherry-picking, but it’s also legitimate. As we’ve discussed already, the system is lacking in impact talent in the higher levels, with Kyle Blanks and (hopefully) Matt Antonelli looking like the only potential big league starters scheduled for Portland this year. There is more talent the further down you get, especially when you go way down, but they’re years away from contributing.

When you look at the 2008 team, the only homegrown player who came up in the Alderson era and really contributed was Chase Headley. And while Nick Hundley, Paul McAnulty, and Will Venable did chip in, Headley is the only true everyday player generated by this system. And outside the aforementioned Blanks and Antonelli, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot coming soon.

This takes us back to patience. Alderson has had four years with our San Diego Padres and the seeds he’s helped plant (and the “helped” part is an important distinction) are still years away from bearing fruit. That would seem to mean that this team still has a couple of years left throwing dinner parties during its home remodeling.

At some point, you have to ask when enough is going to enough. And it would seem to be now.

R. EDIT: It’s been brought to my attention that Blanks was drafted in 04, before Alderson came onboard. Make of that what you will.

Having brought you Tom Tango’s fan scouting report, we now present the Marcel the Monkey Forecasting System, or simply Marcel 2009. In plain speak, here are projections for your/our 2009 San Diego Padres. At least, the players still on the team as of this writing.

FIP by the way stands for Fielding Independent Pitching. It uses strikeouts, walks, and home runs, 3 results all pitchers have direct control over, to evaluate performance. It is scaled to look like ERA so it’s nice and easy.

These stats were all compiled using Fangraphs.com, a Sacrifice Bunt endorsed website. Fangraphs also features another series of projections by Lord Bill James. We chose Marcel for reasons of totality: it simply projects more players. And these two are definitely independent projections. While some are eerily close, others are far off.

Where Marcel predicts Jake Peavy with a 3.25 E.R.A. and 9.00 K/9, James has the Peavs at 3.26 and a 9.00 K/9. Not all players are so close. Marcel predicts Chase Headley posting a .772 O.P.S. where James puts him more than 75 points higher at .848. James also sees Will Venable at .688, 71 points lower than Marcel.

Clearly, prognostications should be taken for what they are, especially since Marcels is touted by creator Tom Tango as “the most basic forecasting system you can have, that uses as little intelligence as possible.” But let’s assume that this are true predictions. What/who jumps out?

(Besides Travis Denker. WTF?)

Headline written by R. Lankford during the course of an AIM conversation. Headline stolen by M. Nieves during the course of that same conversation.

Now that’s settled, a pair of recent articles on the Fangraphs site are relevant to Padres fans’ interest, with an added bonus that you probably haven’t seen this stuff on mlbtraderumors already.

The first is a quick overview of the Padres farm system’s performance this year. Marc Hulet names Chase Headley, Matt Buschmann, Matt Antonelli, Cole Figueroa, and Eric Sogard as the graduate, the riser, the tumbler, the 2008 draft pick, and the sleeper, respectively. I’ve heard (and written) about the success of others in the system, but I haven’t seen much coverage of some of these guys. That’s a good, albeit anecdotal demonstration of the organizational depth we enjoy these days, especially in the lower levels.

Next, Dave Cameron checks in on the results of four major prospects for star player trades from the previous offseason. Go ahead, guess how they’ve turned out. Ready to be wrong? Here’s Dave:

Four big trades of all-star caliber players, and in every single case, the rebuilding team either held steady or got significantly better while the contender didn’t improve at all, and in some cases, got a lot worse.

Poor results for the team acquiring the star don’t necessarily mean there is a correlation between trading for stars and playing worse the next year. But to paraphrase Cameron, it pretty well confirms what some of us have been saying: one player cannot carry a team.

John Sickels at Minor League Ball takes a look back at Kevin Kouzmanoff as a prospect.

I enjoy these retrospectives of MLB players when they were just prospects. Reminds me that all players at one point were guys I’d never heard of. There’s a point in there somewhere.

He was unstoppable when healthy however, hitting .389/449/660 for Double-A Akron and .353/.409/.647 for Triple-A Buffalo.

(snip)

I gave him the coveted Josh Willingham Award, annually awarded to the minor league player whose bat I am most comfortable swearing about. He can f**king hit.

That year of Kouz’s still blows me out of the water. As I recall his was near the top overall line in all of the minor leagues.

Too bad about his discipline this year, 20 walks in 600 plate appearances for a .304 OBP is definitely not optimal. I think with the weak third base market this offseason, and Chase Headley just hanging around and trying to look busy, this is the time to trade Kouz. Though a 120 OPS+ season or two from the Mashin Macedonian wouldn’t surprise me.

I have.

Now, granted, I don’t actually live in San Diego, so watching isn’t an option for me. But I’ve stopped following the games as closely and the Padre I’m most likely to talk about is Stephen Strasburg (fingers crossed). But that could change.

Accelerating their youth movement, the Padres Monday will install prospect Matt Antonelli as their regular second baseman and promote pitcher Wade LeBlanc into a rotation that will expand to six starters.

“I’m excited to see these young guys,” General Manager Kevin Towers said.

Padres call up cavalry for stretch

Me too, Kev. Me too.

While he came into the season ranked second in the organization by Baseball America, Antonelli’s had a rough year, posting an O.P.S. of just .641 in Triple-A. However, his walk rate has been good and his B.A.B.I.P. has been incredibly low. In August, he posted an O.P.S. of .864, which is more than 200 points higher than his season mark.

While anything’s possible, the Padres aren’t making the playoffs. And it will probably be a chore trying to follow them the rest of the way out, at least as much as it has been for the rest of the season. But with the Padres taking a look to the future, LeBlanc and Antonelli will be joining Will Venable, Chase Headley, and Nick Hundley in San Diego, there’s still room for excitement.

Experience it, please.