2007 Preview Part 2

Jason Bay must continue to produce at a high level.

This is the second part of a running season preview in which I look at things that I think have to happen in order for the Pirates to be a decent baseball team in 2007 and decide how likely I think they are to happen. Part 1 can be found here.

This one kind of seems like a no-brainer. I mean, Jason Bay has been head and shoulders above every other Pirate player at the plate the past three years and he's only 28 years old, so why shouldn't we expect him to produce at a high level? To put it simply, Bay's numbers dropped last year in every single important offensive statistic except for home runs and RBIs (and RBIs are certainly debatable in terms of their value when measuring an offensive player's worth). So will it happen again? Bay has to keep up a high level of production for the LaRoche trade to be significant because the reason the LaRoche trade was significant in the first place was that it gave us two mashers at the heart of our lineup. So let's look at a few things.

First up is something that I bring up over and over again, a Nate Silver article written for ESPN.com's Page 2 last spring that ranked the top 50 players in all of baseball. Bay ranked in at #9 with Silver having this to say:

There's growing evidence that Canadian players, facing a weather-shortened season as amateurs, develop on a different schedule than their south-of-the-border counterparts. Matt Stairs didn't become a big-league regular until 29, Larry Walker peaked in his early 30s, and Eric Gagne looked like a quad-A player until he donned his closer goggles at 26. PECOTA thought that Bay's 2005 was a career year, but it has no variable to account for longitude; we think that it's the start of something big.

This is pretty much the definition of "music to my ears." Still, the more I look into this the more questions I have about it. Not being any sort of professional at all in this kind of thing, I hate to question someone like Nate Silver, but the sample size here seems to be much too small. According to Baseball Reference, only 210 MLB players (position players and pitchers both) have been born in Canada. Most of them don't even remotely qualify for a comparison to Bay as they've been roster-fillers, utility guys, etc., or they played 100 years ago in leagues that don't compare to today's leagues. What is said about Walker, Stairs, and Gagne is certainly true, but it's also true that a lot of players peak later these days thanks to a lot of reasons. If we look at the three players mentioned, Walker took his game to a different level after moving from Montreal to Colorado and its thin air at the age of 28 (EDIT: I'm kind of an idiot, OPS+ is calculated with park factors in mind and Walker was still mind-numbingly good in Colorado, still, I think the point stands that there are a number of factors that could be at work here), Stairs career took off when he joined an Oakland A's team that has lots of players suspected of steroid usage, and Eric Gagne struggled with lots of arm troubles before the Dodgers moved him out of the rotation and into the pen. I suppose if this were Mythbusters, the best we could do would be a "Myth: Plausible" on this one. It's not that it's not impossible. It's that I'm not sure I'd count on it.

So let's throw Canadians out the window for the moment and consider Jason Bay against his Baseball Reference comparable players through age 27. Of those top 10 comps (Geoff Jenkins, Norm Cash, Jim Edmonds, Bobby Higginson, Hack Wilson, Ryan Klesko, Tim Salmon, Jason Giambi, JD Drew, and Aubrey Huff), six of them posted their top full-season OPS+ at the age of 28 of later (an explanation of OPS+ for those that need it is available at the invaluable FJM Glossary). They peaked (in terms of OPS+) as late as 34 (Edmonds) and as early as 25 (Jenkins, though Jenkins has had two very similar years to his 25 year old year at 28 and 30).

That's pretty encouraging, I think. Six of the ten players on the list posted their best seasons during the age period that Bay is entering this year and only two of them (Higginson and Huff) suffered precipitous dropoffs around Bay's current age. Furthermore, Bay's drop in production last year can be attributed to more pitchers in the league learning about him, pitching around him more often, and him not dealing with that terribly well (as has been documented several times before, Bay's numbers dropped severely in situations with runners on base but first base empty). Depending on if he hits 5th (where Tracy will probably hit him) or 3rd (where he should probably hit), his RBIs may vary a bit next year (they'll be higher if he hits fifth; he'll score more runs if he bats third), but in terms of offensive production, I think it's pretty safe to count on another All-Star year from J. Bay.