I realize this is yesterday’s news, but I wanted to talk a bit about Rob Biertempfel’s report that extension talks have cooled between the Pirates and Neil Walker. On the surface, this isn’t a big deal. Walker’s a solid-but-not-spetacular second baseman and he will, at the very most, be a super-two eligible for arbitration after the 2012 season. It would be nice for the Pirates to get some cost certainty with him and to maybe tease down the price in the event that he does become a super-two, but it’s not something that needs to be imminent. The Pirates have much more immediate things to worry about for the upcoming season and they have a better player in Andrew McCutchen, who should be more of a priority even if he’ll be a tougher sign.
Of course, it’s not so easy with Walker because he’s from Pittsburgh. That makes him popular with the fans and (most annoyingly to me) that makes him the guy the team pushes out front, even if that means having the broadcasting team spew nonsense about his RBI totals night after during the summer. Whenever this happens, I tend to go out of my way to point out Walker’s shortcomings, which in turn makes a lot of Pirate fans angry at me because Walker is lots of Pirate fans’ favorite player, for obvious reason. This starts an endless cycle of bickering and so I want to take a step back and assess Walker a bit better as a player and try to get a better idea of what the Pirates should be trying to do with him in the coming years.
Because the Baseball Establishment — from the managers to the broadcasters to the portion of the media that is staid in their beliefs — can be so inflexible in their reliance on “traditional” baseball stats (and thus, in how the game is related from them to the public), bloggers like me that write with a saber-slant have a tendency to go overboard in making points that question the status quo. Take, for example, the Jonathan Papelbon contract. Papelbon’s deal with the Phillies is worth between $12 and $12.5 million over four or five years. That’s a ton of money to pay for a reliever and the general saber-consensus is that relievers simply aren’t worth that much because they don’t pitch that much. In six full seasons with the Red Sox, though, FanGraphs estimates that Papelbon was worth about $62 million. Now maybe there’s something to be said for WAR as it translates to value for relievers (that is, good relievers often come out of nowhere and can be very underpaid and thus maybe the shorthand of 1 win = $4-$5 million doesn’t hold true for them, but of course mediocre relievers often get huge deals and so we could go in this circle forever) and if that’s true the Red Sox overpaid, but the reality is that Jonathan Papelbon is an excellent reliever who’s been head and shoulders better than anyone not named Mariano Rivera since 2006 and by the same metrics that people use to evaluate players, he’s very nearly worth the money the Phillies are paying him. But since relievers are often overpaid and because pointing this out is one of every stat-head’s hobby horses, a lot got made about Papelbon’s deal even though it’s entirely possible (or, at the very least not out of the realm of discussion) that the Phillies really didn’t overpay for him by that much.
I use this as an example because this is what I do with Neil Walker. Walker is praised by broadcasters and writers and Pirate fans for 1.) his high RBI totals (his 83 RBIs lead all NL second baseman and was third in baseball), 2.) his glove (his fielding percentage tied Brandon Phillips for the best in the NL at second base) and 3.) the general perception that he’s clutch. These things drive me crazy because 1.) RBIs are very context-based and not really a meaningful indicator of anything on their own, 2.) his glove isn’t that great and it’s not hard to see his range is kind of poor when you watch him play and 3.) that’s a silly reason to think a player is good. And so I spend a lot of time railing against RBIs and pointing out Walker’s shortcomings as a fielder and destroying arguments about clutch, but I don’t spend a lot of time saying this: Neil Walker is actually a pretty good second baseman.
If we stick with FanGraphs’ WAR as a metric, there were only nine second basemen better than Walker in 2011, and only four of them were in the National League. And if you look at any advanced fielding metric, they’ll all tell you that Walker got a lot better in 2011. He went from -9 to -5 in Defensive Runs Saved, even though he played more games in 2011. He went from -17.1 to -2.5 in UZR/150. His dWAR at Baseball-Reference (based on Total Zone Rating) went from -0.9 to -0.3. I understand that a lot of people are on the fence about these advanced fielding metrics for a lot of reasons (some good, some not so good), but when three of them agree the way do here I feel pretty good about drawing the general conclusion that while Walker was pretty bad with the glove in 2010, he wasn’t nearly as bad in 2011 even if he wasn’t quite as good as people think.
And at the plate, just throw the RBIs out for a second. Forget about them entirely. Walker hit .273/.334/.408 in 2011. The average NL second baseman hit .258/.319/.380. Walker did it despite struggling from the right side of the plate for a huge chunk of the year and with a huge power-outage after May 20th (he had six homers on May 20th, he finished with 12). Those numbers are a step back from his 2010 numbers for sure, but remember that in 2009 he had a .304 OBP at Triple-A. His walk rate last year, one of everyone’s biggest concerns, was 8.4%, which is well-improved from his 6.7% at Indianapolis. In general, I think he’s showed a positive offensive trend in his two years with the Pirates even if last year as a bit of a step backwards from 2010.
So where does Walker go from here? I don’t know that his ceiling is much higher than what we saw in 2011, to be honest. In general it seems like players peak young defensively, though Walker’s relative inexperience at the position might make him the exception to that rule. I do think he can probably hit with a bit more power than we saw last year, though I’m concerned about the switch-hitting struggles. All the same, though, if Walker can be around a 3 WAR player for the Pirates for the four years (and maybe beyond if they get that extension worked out), he’ll be a very solid player and second base will be a position the Pirates won’t have to worry about for a while. It won’t be for any of the reasons that you might read about in the newspaper or hear on TV, but it’ll still be true.
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