Ronny Paulino talk

Like most of you probably did, I read the article about Ronny Paulino this morning in the PG. I chuckled to myself about his new commitment to working hard and thought, "Yeah, right!" I still kind of do think that. But then I thought harder about it. If Ronny Paulino doesn't catch for the Pirates in 2008, who does? Carlos Maldanado? Michel Hernandez? Johnny Estrada? Kelly Shoppach? You know I'd push Ryan Doumit like crazy, but he's just not durable enough. Ronny Paulino is it. Accordingly, I decided to see if I could find anything positive about Ronny Ballgame.

During Ronny's rookie year in 2006, he had a .722 OPS against righties and an .845 OPS against lefties. Last year he dipped brutally to .593 against righties, but he actually managed a big improvement against lefties, jumping to 1.055. Somehow, Ronny Paulino is a flat-out lefty-masher. You might even say that not all aspects of his offense were awful in 2007. It's pretty damn unlikey Paulino's going to have an OPS below .600 against righties again in 2008. In fact, he's probably more likely to go over 1.000 against lefties again.

Another thing that I thought was interesting was that in the second half of the season, lots of people (myself included) rushed to the defense of Adam LaRoche when he started hitting, even though he really didn't hit all that well in comparison with his previous seasons. At the same time, we were ignoring Paulino's .780 OPS over his last 80 games (from June 17th onwards). Interestingly, he didn't do it by hitting righties better, but rather by killing lefties even more. Still, a .780 OPS isn't a bad one for a catcher.

Finally, it's easy to forget that we're dealing with a guy that's just in his second year. He'll be 27 this year, which is right when he should be entering his prime. The projections I've seen are split for him: ZiPS has him at .263/.321/.366, which is actually worse than last year and Bill James' handbook has him at a respectable .287/.342/.416.

Of course I haven't mentioned his defense at all yet. Paulino is terrible in a lot of aspects of catching, especially blocking balls and catching balls. He's got a decent arm, but he's often slow to throw. The thing is, if anything's correctable for a guy in his position, it's definitely his defense. A player may not be able to learn how to hit or how to tell a curveball from a fastball, but he can always learn to block a ball. If Paulino's really ten pounds lighter and promising he's going to work hard this year, it's most likely that that difference will be seen in his defense.

Paulino's no all-star, but it is fair to note that I think he took a ton of crap last year because he was a favorite of Jim Tracy, who was pretty unpopular with Pirate fans. It's certainly not unreasonable to think he might be an average catcher in 2008. Unfortunately for us Pirate fans, I think that the problem is that we're excited about the prospect of an average catcher.