Second Guessing Scioscia – Free the Featherston

 Welcome to Second Guessing Scioscia, our look back at some of the questionable decisions that Mike Scioscia made in the last week. And, boy, there are some questionable decisions to be reviewed. In the history of this column, we have never once struggled for content. However, we aren’t anti-Scioscia. The official MWAH stance on Scioscia is pro-Scioscia overall. But his in-game tactics need some help and we are here to provide that help by nitpicking incessantly and grading them with our patented SciosciaFace grading system.

Taylor Featherston has a good life. He’s playing big league baseball, drawing a $507,500 salary for doing pretty much nothing. Don’t blame him though or start calling him a MLB welfare queen. It isn’t his fault that it took nearly two months for Scioscia to figure out how to use him or maybe even just realize that the handsome gentlemen sitting on the bench all this time is an actual player on the team.

Has Featherston been freed?
For the first month of the season, Mike Scioscia didn’t really seem to know what to do with Taylor Featherston. He is a kid who probably wasn’t 100% ready for the bigs. His glove is good and he runs well, but there are questions about his bat, to put mildly. No matter what though, he is going to take up a roster spot all year long so that the Halos can keep him. Such is the life of a Rule 5 draft pick. That’s less than ideal for a team that doesn’t have great depth, but a good manager will figure it out. Right?

Well, Scioscia took awhile to figure it out, or at least start to. Initially, Scioscia said he wasn’t going to replace Freese for defense late in close games. That lasted all the way until the ninth game of the season before Scioscia started giving Freese the hook in favor of Featherston. However, it didn’t really persist. Scioscia only used Taylor as a defensive replacement three times over the first 34 games of the year.

In the seven game since, Featherston has been used as a defensive replacement three times (once he actually started the game at second and Giavotella was brought in with Featherston moving to third, which is functionally the same thing). Even with that, Scisocia still hasn’t been all that consistent when it comes to making the defensive substituiton.

For example, on May 12th the Angels won by three but Featherston didn’t make an appearance, even with Freese having hit in the bottom of the eighth and not likely to come up in the next inning should the game be tied. On May 10th and May 8th the Angels won both games by two runs and both times Freese remained in the game, presumably because he would’ve been due up the next inning had they blown the lead.

Scioscia had also been reluctant to use Featherston as a pinch-runner early in the season. Taylor is one of the fastest players on the active roster and the only Angels other than Trout with more than one stolen base, yet he didn’t pinch-run once in April. In May, however, he’s been used in that capacity four times. You’d think Scioscia would be more liberal about using Featherston in that role, especially in place of the glacial Freese. It is a two-for-the price of one replacement as you get the speed upgrade and the defensive upgrade.

I’m not entirely sure why it took Scioscia a month to figure this out and even then he still seems to not be all that dogmatic about it. Holding off on Featherston just in case the game gets tied is at least a sense of foresight, but it is also planning for the worst. In those three games that I referenced above that Freese remained in the game, the Halos had a win probability of 97% or better. That might suggest that there is no pressing need to get Featherston in the game, but it also suggests that planning for the possibility of blowing the game is planning for an event that is highly unlikely to happen. It would be even less likely to happen if the good defender was in the field in place of the below average defender. Hopefully Scioscia’s more prolific usage of Taylor in the last week suggests that he has finally done that math and come to the same conclusion.

VERDICT:

Lineup Krauss-tastrophe
OK, I know that last week I said we basically should all quit whining about the lineup because even a bad lineup doesn’t hurt a team that much. The caveat there was that it isn’t that bad so long as the manager isn’t doing something clearly and obviously terrible. What I didn’t account for was Scioscia putting Marc Krauss in the two-hole on purpose.

The Angels are already running out a suboptimal lineup with the OBP-challenged Erick Aybar batting leadoff. Now you are handing the most important spot in the lineup to a hitter with a career 69 (nice) OPS+ in 371 career plate appearances. It is almost like Scioscia doesn’t want anyone on base in front of Mike Trout. So, yeah, we are getting pretty close to having the batting order be so unrealistically bad that it actually can put the Angels at a major disadvantage.

Get well soon, Albert.

VERDICT: