2007 Preview Part 8

Freddy Sanchez must equal or at least approximate his 2006 season.

This is the eighth 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, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, Part 4 here, Part 5 here, Part 6 here, and Part 7 here.

Freddy Sanchez had what most people would probably call a career year in 2006, winning the NL Batting Title and hitting .344/.378/.473. Unfortunately, the Pirates' offense this year isn't good enough for Freddy's 2006 to be a career year. He's going to bat third and chances are pretty damn good that for at least a month or so he's going to be the only person in front of Adam LaRoche and Jason Bay that can get on base with any kind of regularity at all, so he's going to have to do it.

I've looked at Freddy's 2006 in the context of his minor league numbers before, so I'm not going ot waste too much time on that this time around. Instead, I want to look at little closer at what he did last year and how much can be classified as luck vs. how much we can expect to to carry through. I'll start by saying that these two Beyond the Box Score pieces that ran at mid-season last year are the basis for what I'm looking at right now, just to give credit where credit is due. Let us continue.

To start with, Freddy lead the NL with a line-drive percentage of 27.5% last year. Those BtBS pieces place the league average around 15%, so it's pretty clear that Freddy was above average last year. The two guys right behind him were Miguel Cabrera and Todd Helton. If you look at their career numbers at their links, their LD% is pretty consistent throughout their careers. Freddy's was a still very good 23.3% in 2005. So there you go, Freddy is a line drive machine and that probably won't change. That's good. But LD% is certainly not a predictor of batting average and it's not even a predictor of a good hitter- Adam Dunn and Jack Wilson (!) were the next two hitters behind Helton.

So let's move along, Freddy had a BABIP of .370, good for second in the NL behind Cabrera. That's an obscenely high BABIP (average is generally around .290), but Cabrera, who as we just said has always had a high line drive percentage, hasn't had a BABIP below .340 in the past three years. Helton, who we said the same thing about, had a BABIP of .321 last year (still above average) and was above .350 the two years before that.

Still, it's not a fair conclusion to draw that because Helton and Cabrera hit lots of line drives and have a high batting average on balls put in play that Sanchez will have to repeat his past season. That's because I think we all would agree that we're kidding ourselves if we think Freddy Sanchez is on the same level as a hitter as Miguel Cabrera or even an aging Todd Helton. Both of those guys have a lot more power than Sanchez (remember that despite his fairly gaudy .474 SLG, Freddy only slugged .423 after the break) does and they both are much more patient at the plate. Really, the only thing they have in common are line drive percentages, BABIP, and high batting averages.

So what does it mean for Freddy in 2007? ZiPS puts him at .306/.348/.432 and PECOTA at .298/.344/.425. I think those are both a bit low, I think he could easily come in around .320/.350/.440, though I wouldn't count on a whole lot more than that. The problem with that is that even at those levels he's not the third dynamic hitter the Pirates need, he's just a good hitting second baseman