The Angels offense is a problem. They are the worst offense in the American League with a wRC+ of 84. As you might imagine, this is not the result of one particular flaw. The Angels offense is actually a problem made up of a multitude of smaller problems. They are 27th in batting average, 29th in on-base percentage, 26th in isolated power and 25th in walk rate. OK, maybe those “smaller problems” are pretty big. Clearly it needs to be fixed, but where do the Angels even start?
To a certain extent this is a chicken-or-egg argument. Is it worth having a lineup with more power if there is still nobody getting on base? Man can not subsist on solo homers alone. On the other hand, is it worth having more men on base if there still isn’t anyone around to help drive them in?
Mathematically speaking, OBP is probably more important than ISO. That makes sense as more guys on base will ultimately result in more runs. I’m pretty sure we all read Moneyball, so I won’t bother beating that point to death. However, when you are as bad at both getting on base and hitting for power as the Angels are, improving in either area will do just fine. Beggars can’t be choosers, right?
I mean that literally, by the way, the Angels are going to be beggars when they go out to the trade market, especially if Andrew Heaney and Sean Newcomb are considered off limits in trade talks. That makes what the Angels need less important than what the Angels can actually get their grubby little hands on.
Take that into consideration and suddenly the Ben Revere rumors start to make a lot more sense. Light-hitting outfielders are abundant in the league and they tend to come cheap. There’s Revere, Sam Fuld, Coco Crisp, Ichiro, Michael Bourn, Nori Aoki, the list goes on and on. None of the candidates are exactly OBP machines, but they all come with the added bonus of generally being good baserunners and defenders. More importantly, they probably won’t be all that expensive to acquire.
Teams generally aren’t reluctant to give up on slap-hitting OBP-based hitters or undervalue them entirely. Just look at how shoddily Aoki has been treated in recent years. He’s been criminally underpaid his whole career and got swapped for a left-hand specialist reliever. Even when he hit the open market, he was signed on the cheap. Meanwhile one dimensional sluggers like Mike Morse get showered in cash.
That same level of pricing is likely to continue when the Angels go pushing their cart down the aisles of the trade market. For as one-dimensional as Ben Revere is, he’s going to come a heck of a lot cheaper than an equally as limited power bat like Brandon Moss. So OBP is cheaper to acquire and more impactful. Seems like an easy decision on what to pursue, right?
Well, not quite. There is also the upside to consider. Picking up a cheap OBP-centric player will provide immediate help, but that impact will be limited. They’d have to put up an extraordinarily high OBP to real change the complexion of the lineup and players capable of that just aren’t available. Power bats though, they can catch fire for months at a time and put an entire lineup on their back. The aforementioned Mike Morse got the payday he did because of his history of doing just that. That hope of catching lightning in a bottle makes the idea of overpaying a bit for Adam Lind much more palatable.
Thanks to that factor, we’ve now talked ourselves into a logical loop. It still isn’t clear if pursuing OBP or power makes more sense for Jerry Dipoto. Perhaps that isn’t really a problem though. The Angels offense is so bad right now that they can’t really go wrong either way. There is more risk in pursuing a slugger but also more upside. The OBP-focused players provide more certainty, but offer less potential. It all basically boils down to how risk averse Dipoto is and how much he is willing to budget for such a trade or trades, plural. From what we’ve seen of Dipoto in the past, my bet is he goes with the riskier power-based route or gets really aggressive and covers all his bases by swinging multiple trades to address both areas of concern.
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