Sunday, July 15, 2007

Juan Encarnacion Hatred

On many Cardinals blogs that I read, most notably Viva El Birdos, a great Cardinals blog, there seems to be a lot of angst towards Juan Encarnacion. This was true last year, during the World Series run, when he was even benched for two games in the World Series and during the limited time he did play, registered a .000 batting average.

Much of this seems to be because of his seemingly lackadaisical play in the outfield and his less than overwhelming offensive stats. Now I'm certainly no huge fan of Encarnacion. I think he's a pretty average player at a power position, and he does look like he's playing at 80% effort most of the time. However, I do contend that at this time, he's probably our best option out there, and certainly better than most of our options.

First off, to once again refer back to Larry at Viva El Birdos, he did a post several weeks back showing what kind of returns there have been in trading the apparently very tradeable Juan Encarnacion. In his career, he has been traded four times, and each time, his role in the trade diminished from being the main part of the first trade, as a relatively young player with some more upside to being a throw-in in the last trade. Given that his trade value doesn't appear to be great(especially with a moderate, but not exactly cheap 6.5M salary next year), why would we trade him just for the sake of trading him?

Let's look at all the other options compared to Juan:

Juan has posted a very pedestrian .305 on-base percentage so far this year, showing that he still doesn't know how to take a walk. However, his slugging is a very respectable .461, which again, isn't monstrous by any means, but it shows he can slug in some runs.

Our other options on the major league roster to take his spot are So Taguchi and Skip Schumaker.

Their OBP/Slugging:

Taguchi: .344/.372
Schumaker: .333/.377

So if we dump Enc for one of these because Enc sucks with the bat, we're actually putting someone even more inferior out there. Sure, Gooch and Skip both get on base more, but certainly not enough to give up 90 points of slugging in the power position that is right field.

Our AAA outfielders pose only slightly better options:

Ankiel: .319/.588
J-Rod: .377/.503
Stavinoha: .327/.419
Cabrera: .275/.250

Ok, so obviously Cabrera and Stavinoha would be steps back. They're not keeping up with Encarnacion's stats and they're in the Pacific Coast League, a notoriously hitter-friendly league. That leaves J-Rod and Ankiel as options.

Ankiel's slugging is huge. To give you an idea of how good .588 is, Pujols is slugging .533 so far this season, Chris Duncan .545.

So that seems like a good option right? Wrong. Ankiel's huge slugging is due to his relatively impressive HR total(26 in 301 AB). However, he's drawn only 19 walks this season. Obviously against the far superior pitching in the majors, his homers are going to decline, and he doesn't get on base even in the hitter-friendly PCL. He might be a guy that could come up and give you 10-15 homers for the rest of the season, but he'd probably do it while putting up a .250 On-base, which is pretty god-awful. Also, in the case of Ankiel, because of the many times he's been optioned back and forth between the majors and AAA, he is considered to be "out of options." This means that if he doesn't work out and we want to send him back to AAA, he has to clear waivers first, so basically any MLB team could try to steal Ankiel from us if we decide he needs to go back to Memphis to work on that plate discipline. So now the player we put about 8-9 years of time into is playing for someone else. That's obviously not good.

Rodriguez however does bring up an interesting possibility. He's shown the ability to hit major league pitching pretty well, albeit in a very small sample size. He only has 332 career at-bats to go on, but his major league stats are a .378 on-base and a .434 slugging. His AAA stats reflect this at .377/.503 right now.

Rodriguez would be a decent option offensively, as he would be cheaper and would give pretty similar production if he's capable of producing that .378/.434 clip as a fairly regular player. However, he's not a huge improvement, despite his much superior OBP. And while Encarnacion looks like he's going through the motions in right, his defense is far superior to the defense we've seen in the past from J-Rod. Not to rip on Duncan, because he's a far better outfielder than last year, but does anyone really want to see an outfield of Duncan and Rodriguez in the corners with either Taguchi, Schumaker or a diminished Edmonds in center?

That seems like a recipe for disaster.

As sad as it is to say it, for the remainder of this year, at least, and quite possibly for next year, unless we're ok spending 10M+ on a player like Eric Byrnes(who, by the way, has career offensive numbers of .328/.456 as far as on-base and slugging, about 20 points better overall in OPS than our own, much cheaper Juan).

Juan Encarnacion, like it or not, Cardinals fans, is our best option in right field until his contract expires.

Edit: Realized I left one person off. Ryan Ludwick could be an option. Monstrous AAA numbers of .380/.642(yes, .642 slugging, 100 points higher than Pujols has this season), but keep in mind in limited playing time, when he's probably ideal for the situation, his major league numbers this season are .278/.477 and his career MLB numbers are .294/.433, so still probably not an upgrade over Juan.

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