For much of 2015 the answer to the question, “Is Pedro Alvarez’s offense good enough to make up for his defense,” has been obvious: the answer was no. Alvarez is having a historically bad season at first base, if you go by advanced defensive metrics. His UZR this year is -10.1, while the next closest qualified first baseman (Miguel Cabrera) is at -3.6. His UZR/150 is -24.9. You have to go back to 2008 to find a first baseman worse than that; Mike Jacobs had a -26.8 UZR/150 that season. Most players aren’t close — the third worst defensive first baseman by UZR/150 behind Jacobs and Alvarez is Paul Konerko at -15.3 in 2010*. He’s actually been a bit worse defensively at first this year than he was during his disastrous season at third base last year, when he posted a 19.0 UZR/150.
Alvarez went into a mini-slump at the plate after the All-Star Break that brought his OPS down to .719 after it had been hanging in the .760 range all year. At that point, his first base experiment looked like a complete bust, and it looked like the Pirates desperately needed to do something at the deadline to fix the issue. On July 23rd, right around the time people started reported that the Pirates were shopping Alvarez to anyone and everyone, Alvarez hit his first home run since early July. Starting on that date and going through last night, Alvarez is hitting .303/.344/.640 with nine homers in 32 games. That gives him 21 homers on the season and brings his season line up to .249/.310/.470. That’s a wRC+ of 112, right in line with Alvarez’s best years (in 2012 and 2013, his wRC+ was 112 and 113, respectively).
There is not a whole ton to be gleaned from this hot streak, other than that Pedro Alvarez is still Pedro Alvarez and it’s nice to see him finally get on a tear after not really doing so in 2014 or the first part of 2015. Even though his strikeouts are generally down this year (26.3% compared to 30+% in his pre-2014 seasons), he’s whiffed 29 times in 96 PAs during this hot streak. He’s not walking a ton, either, with six walks in the same span. I was hoping before his arm troubles and foot injury last year that his decreased strikeout rate might result in more OBP to go with all of the home runs, but the reality is that it hasn’t. He’s right where he’s always been, in terms of OBP and ISO and the other rate stats you’d want to use to evaluated a power hitter.
I’m not really sure what the conclusion is here, other than to say that I don’t think this latest hot streak is proof that Pedro Alvarez is anything other than Pedro Alvarez. He’s hitting just like he did prior to last year, he’s just no longer useful defensively at a helpful defensive position. As Matt Bandi said to me on Twitter the other day, Alvarez’s peak value came from him being a pretty good hitter and a decent third baseman. The first part of that statement is still true, but the second part has completely flipped to the point that he’s the worst defender at the easiest defensive position to play. Even with this scorching hot month, his FanGraphs WAR is 0.3, which means that he’s essentially been a replacement-level player this year. Effectively, his only value to the team now comes in his ability to get white-hot for a month or so, hitting a ton of homers and pulling the offense along in his wake. This current hot streak has come at the right time for the Pirates and if it continues for another couple of weeks it could be legitimately helpful to their drive to win the NL Central, but unless he ventures into offensive territory as yet unseen in his career, it’s awfully hard to imagine him as a viable National League player in the future.
*As an aside; this exercise shows why bad fielders are put at first base. As bad as Alvarez has been at first, there are several players across the league that have been similarly bad seasons at their own positions. This is an unusually bad defensive year for a first baseman, though, and if you scroll back through FanGraphs UZR/150 numbers, you won’t find even one first baseman among the league’s ten worse defenders, despite the fact that first baseman are almost always the worst fielders.
Photo by Justin K. Aller/Getty Images
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