Misplaced Priorities

Yesterday's Stats Geek and today's Pirates Notebook both got me thinking about the way the team is being run this year. The Pirates are using a ton of brainpower (insert joke about the Pirates having brainpower) to solve a problem that doesn't really need solved and their not using their brains at all on one that has an obvious solution.

The problem the Pirates seem to be racking their brains to solve is the Jose Castillo- Jack Wilson- Freddy Sanchez situation. There are three players. There are two positions. Someone has to sit. Here's the thing. All three players are pretty similar. Freddy offers a little more offense, but a little less defense. Any combination of the three is going to give you pretty much the same thing every night. I know. It's practically swearing to lump Freddy in with those two, right? Not if he hits like he has this year. We know that .344 is a fluke for Freddy, because .344 is a fluke for anyone that isn't Tony Gwynn. But even when he hit .344, in his flukey good, as good as we can expect season, Freddy's OPS+ was only 117. That's better than average, but his inability to get on anyway other than a hit really hurts him. And when teams adjust to take away that little drop double over the first baseman's head and he hits, say, 35 doubles instead of 53, he's suddenly not a terribly useful offensive player. He's a better offensive player than Wilson or Castillo, but at second or short he's worse defensively than both of them. Castillo's defense could be the best out of any of them, but that's only when he cares. His offense is the same way, he can kill the ball, but only when he tries. Jack is pretty even keel in the field and at the plate except for those short stretches like the Yankee series when he doesn't really try terribly hard. There's no though process here. If they're all the same, try and stick with whichever two are hotter. End of story. This huge debate the team has sparked that the team has no idea how to solve is common sense.

Then we take the catcher situation. On the surface, it seems like a complex problem. Doumit hits, but the pitchers throw better to Paulino. Which one is more important? But wait, let's see who each catcher has caught this year. Paulino has gotten to catch 12 of Ian Snell's 14 starts and 10 of Tom Gorzelanny's 15. He caught Tony Armas and Shawn Chacon a total of five times. He also caught Maholm 10 times and Duke 13 times. Only five of his 50 starts have come with Armas or Chacon on the mound while 22 of the 50 have come with Snell or Gorzelanny on the mound. By contrast, Doumit has made 15 starts behind the plate. Of those 15 starts, six have come with either Chacon (2), Armas (3), or John Van Benschoten (1) on the mound. He's caught Snell and Duke once, Gorzo four times, and Maholm three times. So 40% of Doumit's starts come with the fifth starter on the mound with 10% of Paulino's starts come with the fifth starter on the mound. Duke and Maholm have been bad for stretches, but the Armas/Chacon/JVB slot has clearly been the worst rotation spot on the team (save for Chacon's 10 strikeout game, which Doumit caught!). Despite all this, somehow the we're supposed to believe that the team's record when they play and cERAs mean something. Without even talking about Paulino's abysmal play behind the plate this year, I call bullshit. The solution here is an easy one. Let Doumit catch four of every five games for a while and see if things even out.

This should be easy to figure out. It took me about a half hour on BRef to tally up the gamelogs. The Pirates have clearly spent less time on it and come to the wrong conclusion, while spending all their time worrying about Sanchez, Castillo, and Wilson, something that's not really worth worrying about. And we wonder why they suck.