Sean Casey

I was going to do this around 7 or so but I forgot about Blogger's scheduled maintenance at the time (which is why if you tried to get to the site around then you probably got an error message). Anyways, after my Doumit predictions yesterday, we'll start moving around the horn to Sean Casey today.

2005 key stats: .312/.371/.423 with 32 doubles and 9 homers
2006 ZiPS: .313/.373/.441 with 34 doubles, 1 triple, and 11 homers

Casey is a much tougher task to predict on because of his health. As this great post from a month back by Rowdy at HW indicates, Casey is like two different people when he's healthy and when he's hurt. Last year he puttered along with an OPS of under .800, in 2004 he tore the cover off the ball to the tune of .915. The problem, of course, is that at the age of 31 (32 in July), he's had three fairly poor, injury filled years in the last four seasons. As Rowdy's post illustrates, Casey is the type of guy that won't complain about being hurt, he'll just grit his teeth and go about his business, even if it hurts the team. While this is admirable, it doesn't help his stats and it doesn't help us get better. It's also the type of atitude that Jim Tracy will eat up. This means that even if Casey's hurt, don't look for Craig Wilson to spell him much unless amputation is necessary.

So, the question is whether Casey can stay healthy and whether he can have a bounceback year if he is healthy. People cite the short porch at PNC as reason to think he'll hit more homers. Others dismiss that pretty quickly, saying that his power is to the opposite field. I played around with his hitting charts on MLB.com and found out that that isn't entirely true. While his XBH are sprayed around pretty well, most of his homers do in fact go to right field (I looked at both PNC and the GABP). So yes, it is possible the short porch will be beneficial to Casey, though PNC is only about 5 feet deeper than Great American to dead right and the wall is a bit higher, so the benefit probably won't be anything incredibly drastic. Other people seem to think that some mystical quality of Pittsburgh water will make Casey happy to be home and will see him hit better this year. They forget that Casey was incredibly unhappy when he found out he was traded to the Buccos. Then again, I don't put a whole lot of stock in the mystical "happy to be home factor."

The bottom line is that even if Casey is healthy, he's only slugged over .450 twice since 2001. He's almost 32 years old with a slew of health problems in the past four years, so even if he's healthy I really doubt he'll be getting better. Chances are good he'll hit for a decent average, because that's what he does. That means he'll get on base at a decent clip. The problem is that if he doesn't (aka he's hurt), not only will he not get on base a ton, his SLG will come down (like it did last year) and Tracy will keep playing him, even with a more capable Craig Wilson on the bench. Most fans will fail to notice this, mostly because of his award winning smile and charity work.

That being said, with all skepticism aside, I do think Casey is due for a healthy season this year. I really do like the guy and I hope things go well. For my prediction, I'm going to say that the ZiPS are pretty on target here, I'll go with .315/.375/.445 for Casey and keep my fingers crossed that he stays healthy, because if not we could be looking at a .290/.350/.420 type season.