2006 in Review- Ronny Paulino

Now that 2006 is over, I'll be looking at one or two Pirates and their 2006 season each day. I'll look at what we expected, what we got, and what that might mean for the future. I may or may not assign a meaningless grade to their performance. Today: Ronny Paulino.

2005 key stats: .315/.372/.538 with 13 homers and 42 RBI in 301 PA at AAA Indy and .292/.350/.435 with 6 homers and 20 RBI in 183 PA at AA Altoona
2006 PECOTA: .265/.321/.415 with 12 homers and 55 RBI in 452 PA
2006 key stats: .310/.360/.395 with 6 homers and 55 RBI in 476 PA

Baseball Prospectus may have been the only people that saw this 2006 coming for Paulino. One of the comparables the PECOTA system spit out for him was Sandy Alomar, a pretty good outlook for a young catcher. They also guessed that the Pirates' love for his defensive skills might put him ahead of Ryan Doumit on the depth chart. They hit pretty closely on his final OPS, though he ended up with a higher batting average than they guessed and accordingly, a higher OBP, which off-set his poor power performance.

The question that everyone now has is whether or not Ronny can keep it up. Besides his partial-season stint at Indy last year, he never hit .300 for a full season in the minors. What he did do, however, was constantly improve as he rose through the system. He had a very poor 2003 with both Lynchburg and Altoona, but had a good 2004 with the Curve that lead to an early promotion to Indianapolis the next year (full minor league stats here). The giant red flags that went up this year, however, were his batting average loaded OBP and the fact that only 25 of his 137 hits went for extra bases. Power often develops late and he put up a better SLG in the minors, but he mostly just hit more homers in the minors. What I'm afraid of is that he's too slow to leg out a ton of doubles (triples are out of the question) and most of his power is homer dependent, which is a bad thing for a righty at PNC Park.

There is also the subject of his defense. Granted, things are not easy for a catcher that is tossed right into things like he was, but his D was mostly bad. He blocked the ball very poorly all year (he allowed 9 passed balls but there were numerous wild pitches that could've been prevented by him) and a .988 fielding percentage is very poor for a catcher. Still, he did a decent job at throwing out runners and his ball blocking skills will likely get better. BP 2006 rated him as an above average defensive catcher (not much above average, but some) in all of his minor league stops, so we can expect that to improve (I hope).

Paulino was great in 2006 and certainly much better than we could've hoped for. His minor league history also suggests that he might keep hitting for average, but catchers that catch a ton of games (as Paulino did this year and probably will next year if Doumit is his only backup, which is likely) almost never keep that up for long (Joe Mauer is the first catcher to win an AL batting title... ever). If he loses his average, he loses his on-base percentage, which would be a big blow to his offensive contribution to the team. It's also probable that part of his .310 average this year was due to teams simply not knowing much about him or his abilities and not worrying about a rookie catcher. More attention will be paid to him next year and with his long swing pitchers may not have much trouble finding a hole. I'm not saying that we should be negative about Paulino, he's certainly earned the starting job behind the plate next year and done far more than we could've expected. Still, I'd be careful about being anything more than cautiously optimistic about what he might do next year.

Stats from Yahoo! Sports, The Baseball Cube, and my trusty copy of Baseball Prospectus 2006.