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February 27, 2011
The Annual Bewilderment
Come the regular season, Washington intends for Beltre to hit fourth with Cruz fifth. The reason: Washington simply doesn't believe Cruz, entering what should be his third full season in the majors, is ready for the job."Wherever Beltre hits, whether it's fourth or fifth, I think he's still going to get the same pitches, a lot of offspeed stuff away and then fastballs in," Washington said. "He's a veteran and he can handle that. I just don't think [Cruz] is ready for it. One more year, I think he might be." [emphasis added]
Washington doesn't explain in detail, but I believe he's implying (in part) that Cruz isn't ready to handle the increased proportion of breaking pitches that cleanup hitters allegedly face. Recall this statement from 2008:
"The No. 4 guys gets off-speed stuff," Washington said on Monday. "Look back and Milton [Bradley] handled more off-speed stuff than fastballs. Hamilton handled more fastballs than breaking balls because they didn't want to put Hamilton on base and let Milton hurt them."
Ah... we've been down this road before. As I wrote back in '08, Bradley actually saw more fastballs than all but one Ranger, while Hamilton saw the second lowest percentage of fastballs on the team. Which is to say, Washington was completely, utterly backwards.
As for the latest assertion, Cruz already sees more offspeed pitches than most batters. In 2010, Cruz received more offspeed pitches than the league median, more than Adrian Beltre, and many more than last year's cleanup hitter Vlad Guerrero. Pitchers just don't like bringing the heat to him:
| Player | Offspeed % | Rank |
| Cruz | 45.4% | 19th |
| Beltre | 43.3% | 34th |
| AL Median | 41.6% | -- |
| Guerrero | 40.2% | 62nd |
Does Cruz struggle against breaking pitches? He certainly didn't in 2010 (data compiled from Fangraphs):
| Player | Batting Runs per 100 Offspeed Pitches | Rank | Batting Runs per 100 Non-Knuckled Offspeed Pitches | Rank | Batting Runs per 100 Fastballs | Rank |
| Cruz | 1.24 | 6th | 0.74 | 16th | 1.85 | 7th |
| Beltre | 0.97 | 13th | 0.97 | 11th | 1.05 | 21st |
| AL Median | (0.12) | -- | (0.13) | -- | 0.27 | -- |
I created a "non-knuckleball breaking pitch" category because: 1) batters so rarely face them, and 2) Cruz destroyed Tim Wakefield (5-5, 2 doubles, homer, walk) such that a large percentage of his breaking-ball value came against Wakefield alone. Beltre exceeds Cruz in this category, but not by much. In sum, Cruz hits well regardless of what's coming at him.
Batting order doesn't matter much, except at the extremes of optimization and silliness, so sitting Cruz behind Beltre means very little in terms of runs scored. Still, I wish Washington would stick to an emotion-based explanation that people can abide ("I'm more comfortable with a veteran batting cleanup. The end.") and omit the technical reasoning that contradicts the facts.
Posted by Lucas at February 27, 2011 01:22 PM