Posts Tagged “Matt Carpenter”

As of the time of this writing, 271 people voted in yesterday’s poll and 55% of you would utilize Matt Carpenter in a kind of super utility role between the corner outfield, corner infield and second base positions. there’s not a wrong answer to yesterday’s question and I think I personally would be inclined to keep in majors in that role as well.

One of the comments caught my eye, however. Lou Schuler wrote:

I love [Carpenter] as a utility player, but [Zack] Cox looks like a guy who’s going to be an everyday player hitting in the top half of the lineup.

It struck me as an undervaluation of Carpenter (the “utility player” label) but it’s one that I think consistently happens to him because of his somewhat unusual offensive profile.  Assume that Matt Carpenter is going to have an OBP between .320 and .340 (ZiPS projects .342). Since wOBA is scaled to OBP, we can use that as a decent approximation for his production. For someone with limited power potential, we would scale that number down slightly from his OBP.  That range (.320-340) is still going to make Matt Carpenter a league average-ish player.

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This is the consolidated top 20 list rolled out last week.

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I’m not a big fan of player comps.  Since we have few objective measures of a player’s tools, the comparisons are highly subjective.  There’s also an element of memory involved that I’m skeptical of. A lot of the comparisons made are to players who haven’t played in years — if you ask two people what that players career looked like, you’d probably get two different answers. Humans have a tendency to warp memories to a narrative.

Of course, there’s also the dreaded HoF comparison where a player is compared to the elite outliers of a huge dataset of players. It’s nonsensical to draw straight lines between a new sample/player and a known outlier/Hall-of-Famer but those comparisons happen all the time.

If two players have a similar body type or swing and they they achieve vastly different results with those building blocks, should we care that they looked the same or had the same swing plane? Fundamentally, this is the argument for a player projection system built on statistical comparisons (ZiPS, PECOTA, etc) and that’s a model that I’d rather more adhere to.  Matt Carpenter continues to be an interesting and unusual player to me. He doesn’t hit for much power, he walks a ton and hits for a good average. Can we find anyone in the last decade that looks like that statistically?

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I celebrated the 4th at Veteran’s stadium, where I had the privilege of seeing Arquimedes Nieto take a no-hitter into the 8th inning. I wasn’t able to watch the game with the insane amount of diligence I normally do, as I was entertaining a future in-law who also happens to be a Cardinal fan, but I’ll tell you what I did see. Nieto definitely had us both paying attention with his flirtation with a no-no.

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Quick announcement: I’ll be on UCB Radio tonight at 9:30 to talk all things draft.

Here’s some quick snap shots of who the Cardinals took on Day 2
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