The fourth in a non-alphabetical and irregularly updated series of review pieces for each(?) of the players we predicted last spring.

LL/USSM Community: .291/.321/.424
Actual Line: .279/.300/.392

Popular opinion of Yuniesky Betancourt, 2005: This guy's going to be a hell of a player. A franchise cornerstone.
Popular opinion of Yuniesky Betancourt, 2006: Building block. There might not be 25 other players in baseball for whom I'd trade this guy tomorrow.
Popular opinion of Yuniesky Betancourt, 2007: A good player, and a good value. Useful regular to have on the team.
Popular opinion of Yuniesky Betancourt, 2008: trade trade trade trade trade trade trade

There is no more compelling evidence that people are beginning to understand how important it is to be good in the field than the fans' total 180 on Betancourt over the past couple seasons. Yuni came up as an exciting sparkplug of a shortstop who was beloved by casual fans and statheads alike, but despite remaining the same offensive player he's always been, slowly but surely people have turned against him, because the wizard who was once capable of turning any groundball into an easy play has morphed into a fat sack of crap in a pointy hat with stars and moons on it.

It's difficult to overstate just how significant an impact Yuni's defensive decline has had on his local reputation, because again, seriously, his hitting hasn't changed. I know last year's .691 OPS looks a lot worse than 2007's .725, and that his wOBA* has bounced around between .301 and .335, but his skillset's pretty much exactly the same as it was when he first came up as a rookie. Yuni swings. At everything. Then he runs. Some of the time he gets to first base. He's an aggressive hacker who always makes contact and rarely hits the ball into the seats. His swing rate has changed a little bit over the years, and the same goes for his groundball rate as well, but these aren't really significant, and altogether we get the sort of hitter who's mighty easy to project. .280-.300 BA, a handful of walks, and a handful of homers. Bam. Done. For years, Dave's been talking about how Betancourt's skillset gives him a low offensive ceiling, and that's exactly what we're dealing with. The Yuni we've seen at the plate is about as good as we're ever going to see him, and there's not really anything anyone can do about it.

Oh, people thought something was up in 2008. When Yuni's OPS flirted with .600 a few times over the course of the season, there was mounting concern that he had just all-around suffered a total collapse. But at least offensively, those concerns were unwarranted, as Yuni rode a hot 200 at bats down the stretch to end up within his established range. His triple slash line drop was driven almost exclusively by BABIP, and that's just the nature of the beast when you put the ball in play as often as Yuni does. There wasn't anything wrong with his bat in 2008 anymore than there was anything wrong with his bat in 2007, and going forward, I don't see any reason to believe that things will be different in 2009.

But the defense. Cursed defense.

* - projection as of early June; final number not posted

Egads.

It's easy to argue with one metric. UZR and I, for example, seem to disagree on Ichiro, and given that the other metrics back me up, that argument is as yet unresolved. But when pretty much all of the big players when it comes to defensive quantitation come together to hold a big flashing neon sign that says THIS GUY IS FALLING APART it's way more difficult to maintain that they're wrong. UZR thinks Yuni collapsed. Plus/minus thinks Yuni collapsed. PMR thinks Yuni collapsed. RZR thinks Yuni collapsed. If you're a Betancourt supporter, what're you supposed to do? How is anyone supposed to look at this data, combine it with visual observation, and come away thinking that Yuni's any better than a mess in the field?

It's borderline unfathomable to consider that Yuni got this bad this quick, but here we are, and this is our reality. If we apply a smoothing curve, over the past four seasons Yuni's gone from great to average to bad to terrible. Four seasons. He did that in four seasons. Between 23-26 Yuni's aged like twice as hard as Omar Vizquel in one-fifth as long. He appears to the naked eye to be visibly larger than he was back in the day, and while some of that is muscle, some of it isn't, and it's not hard to imagine that this has had a negative effect on his range. Range that is an entirely different kind of jaw-dropping now than it was when Yuni first came up.

In 2008, Yuniesky Betancourt was a disaster of a defensive shortstop, and combined with below-average defense, the overall package was a replacement-level player. Replacement-level players aren't assets. They are, by definition, easily replaceable. The magician around whom we thought this team would be building back in 2005 took four years to turn into the sort of guy you can pick up for free, and were I to compose a list of the biggest Mariner-related letdowns since I started blogging, Yuni's career would be somewhere near the top. We basically just lost a blue-chipper for nothing. It's like we packed a suitcase for vacation then mistakenly picked up the wrong bag from the carousel on the other end. It's hard to enjoy vacation when instead of clothing and a camera you have to make do with documents and corn.

Projecting Betancourt now is an exercise in disappointment. The ~.320-.330 wOBA* is about what we always expected, but having to put a minus in front of the 10 in the Defense column invariably evokes a deep, heavy sigh. If you think Yuni's a -10 defender, he's a 0.5-1.0 WAR shortstop. If you think he's a -5 defender, he's a 0.9-1.4 WAR shortstop. If you think he climbs all the way back up to average, he's a 1.3-1.8 WAR shortstop. But that's as good as it gets. And considering that last year he was more like -15, it's all but impossible to be optimistic. Even given that he started to look more energetic in the field down the stretch, I can't imagine that he'll ever be able to climb back out of the negatives. No matter what was wrong with him in 2008, I'm afraid that the magnitude of Yuni's defensive decline is such that the process is essentially irreversible. While he may recover some, he'll never recover it all, and he will therefore never be the player we thought he could be.

The time is now to say goodbye and trade Yuni before his reputation around the league catches up to his reputation around here. Make no mistake: there are still a lot of front offices that love him as a player. People who don't have to watch him everyday assume he's still one of the top gloves at his position, and a recent player survey called Yuni one of the top defensive infielders in the American League. People who think Yuni is a good player are wrong, and people who are wrong and have things to trade are good people to call on the phone. I mean, the Dodgers are sniffing around Jack Wilson. The Tigers are sniffing around Julio Lugo and Alex Cora. The Giants are sniffing around Edgar Renteria. The Royals have coveted Yuni for as long as I can remember. Teams need shortstops, and teams like Yuni. This is a good combination. And perhaps now that we have a new front office in town, we'll finally be able to remove the "untouchable" tag from Yuni that Bavasi inextricably affixed and move him in return for more than he's worth. Because at this point, there's nothing to gain by letting him stick around. Yuni may be able to get a little better going forward as he regresses to the mean, but his career ceiling - which was already modest - now appears wholly unreachable, and he's not in line to be an important part of the next contending team in Seattle. Move him. Move him for the value that I'm almost certain would be offered. It doesn't count as selling low if the buyer isn't aware of the low in the first place, and I can think of few things more exciting for this team looking ahead than the opportunity to rebuild up the middle.

Do it. Do it and don't look back.

While Lopez's bat this past season finally started to resemble the one people have expected him to show for so long, all year questions were raised about his performance in the field. There seemed to be a growing consensus that his combination of size, mental mistakes, and perceived effort issues was finally catching up to him and making him a problem at second base. Lopez's defense, some have said, was bad enough that it negated a significant chunk of his offensive improvement.

As it turns out, there's no statistical indication of a collapse. While as always I will concede that the numbers may be wrong, the evidence is pretty solid that Lopez was perfectly adequate with the glove.

RZR: average
OOZ: above-average
PMR: average
UZR: no sign of being horrible
+/-: neither one of the top nor one of the bottom second basemen
Overall team stats: Mariners weak to bad, but not extraordinarily so despite known glaring problems in Sexson, Yuni, and Ibanez

I'm not going to sit here and claim that Lopez hasn't gotten any worse. He probably has. Nearly every player's defense gets worse as he ages. But there's a difference between "declined" and "big giant suck", and the burden of proof is on those that say he's no good, because I'm not convinced. This team may have more problems than Ezequiel Astacio's complexion, but I'm not yet ready to believe that Jose Lopez is one of them.

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An illustration:

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Alternate title: Baseball Players Should Stick To Playing

Results from a recent survey of 473 players that asked them questions ranging from "Who's the best?" to "Who's the dirtiest?":

Best defensive infielder, A.L.

1. Orlando Cabrera, White Sox, 16 votes
2. Yuniesky Betancourt, Mariners, 16 votes
3. John McDonald, Blue Jays, 10 votes
4. Placido Polanco, Tigers, 8 votes
5. Adrian Beltre, Mariners, 6 votes

I'm not going to quibble with four of these, because while you could probably come up with a list of better defenders, they're still pretty good, so whatever. No, I really only take issue with one of them. And you can probably guess which.

While he came up and made some dazzling plays in 2005, these days there exists not a single shred of evidence that Yuni's any better than an average defensive shortstop, and there exists a substantial amount of evidence that he's quite a bit worse than that. Like, even by as many as 10-20 runs. That goes beyond below-average and verges on awful. Which would've been hard to imagine a few years ago ("What? That's crazy! You're crazy!"), but when you hear about it now, your reaction is more along the lines of saying "okay, yeah, that makes sense" with a shrug. We've just seen too many fieldable balls get through to the grass to really put our hearts into refuting such a claim.

But baseball's a funny sport. A sport where people love to form opinions and hate to ever change them. A sport where first impressions mean everything and reputations carry more weight than they ever did in high school. A sport where, once you're given a label, you have to do something extraordinary to lose it.

Yuniesky Betancourt's reputation as an outstanding defensive shortstop first took shape in 2005, and it persists to this day despite a small mountain of evidence to the contrary. It clearly persists among players, and I guarantee you that it persists among a bunch of front offices. Not all of them, of course - some teams are smarter than others - but in an age in which the defensive analysis of individual players still carries an air of uncertainty, there are a lot of important people feeding off of subjective and often misleading information. Information like "hey that Cuban kid can really pick it up and throw it."

We know better, but a lot of teams don't (update: sadly, the Mariners are probably one of them). A lot of teams see a young shortstop with a cheap long-term contract that can hit for average and make the play behind second. Or, to put it another way, a lot of teams see a guy with a decent amount of value, where in reality Yuni's turned into one of our more pressing concerns.

We really ought to use this to our advantage. I suppose we could sit around and hope that Yuni rediscovers the magic that made him so exciting four years ago, but players don't really ever do that, so it seems to me that the solution is to deal him before his reputation finally catches up to the kind of player he actually is. We already know there are teams out there looking for a shortstop. Here's one with a lot to offer. I feel like the Mariners should be obligated to at least give them a call and find out what's up.

As a general manager, there is no more favorable situation than knowing that other organizations place too high a value on one of your players. Yuni is one such player, and dealing him away for some talent in return would give this team a lot more flexibility going forward while removing one of its heaviest anchors. As far as I'm concerned, this shouldn't even be a question. Yuni, you used to be a treat to watch, but then you discovered sandwiches, and were I in charge I'd be doing whatever I can to unload you for something shiny before people find out the truth. This team is just harder to make good with you than without you.

After yesterday's game, we now officially have the worst team defense in baseball.

Suck it, Giants.

The thread below inspired me to take a closer look at Yuniesky Betancourt to see just how much he's actually contributing to this team. For a while we've been assuming that he's a pretty average bat for a shortstop with above-average defense, but how does this stand up to investigation? I decided to avoid work for half an hour to find out.

Let me tell you - it doesn't stand up very well.

When he first came up to the big leagues, Yuni wowed us with his defense, and when the advanced metrics didn't support our opinions we wrote it off as a sample size anomaly. But here's the problem with maintaining that stance: Yuni has more than 3000 innings under his belt now as a Major League shortstop, and the advanced metrics still don't like him very much. Here are the big three to which I have the easiest access:

RZR, 2005-2008

Yuni: .802, 37 OOZ per 1000 innings
Average SS: .821, 41 OOZ per 1000 innings

PMR, 2005-2007

Yuni: 462 outs per 4000 in play, .115 DER
Average SS: 459 outs per 4000 in play, .115 DER

UZR, 2005-2007

Yuni: -5 runs per 150 games
Average SS: 0 runs per 150 games (duh)

That's bad. The numbers are painting the picture of a guy who's something like -10 < x < 0 runs in the field, relative to his position, and both the agreement and sample size are good enough for us to be able to say this with a fair bit of confidence. I think a lot of us have been giving this some thought for a little while now, what with Yuni's added weight and visibly diminished range, but when you actually spell it out and put it in plain writing...it's a bit of a shock to realize that the thing you appreciated most about a player doesn't exist, and arguably never did.

So that's his defense. What about at the plate? Let's go with wOBA :

Yuni: .303 (career)
Average SS: .316 (2005-2008)

To convert wOBA into runs, you simply divide by 1.15, which gives you runs/PA. Over 600 plate appearances, wOBA puts Yuni at 7 runs below the average shortstop.

But then, wOBA isn't park-adjusted. If you prefer something that is, you can look at Baseball Prospectus' EqA (or you can convert wOBA yourself but let's just keep this simple):

Yuni: .241, 61 EqR per 600 PA (career)
Average SS: .253, 67 EqR per 600 PA (2005-2008)

That's not much better. Depending on what you think of the statistics and how you adjust for Safeco, Yuni again comes out as being -10 < x < 0 runs below the average shortstop, this time with the bat. Which - ignoring baserunning and other minor stuff that generally doesn't make much of a difference either way - gives you a guy who's somewhere between 0 and 20 runs below average for his position per season.

That isn't good. Which means Yuniesky Betancourt isn't good. The fact that he's a shortstop making a paltry $1.25m this year makes him a reasonable value, but for all his enthusiasm and contact and hilarious arm positioning when he's running the bases, he just isn't a good player.

And that's lame.

I better hurry the hell up if I want to be done with these things by Monday. Don't forget to swing by USSM, since Dave's covering the pitchers.

AB: 556 (536)
2B: 35 (38)
3B: 5 (2)
HR: 10 (9)
HBP: 3 (1)
BB: 21 (15)
K: 55 (48)
SB: 12 (5)
CS: 7 (4)
GB%: 46 (43)

BA: .291 (.289)
OBP: .321 (.308)
SLG: .424 (.418)
IsoPa: .029 (.019)
IsoPo: .132 (.129)

An observation:

Johjima projected walk rate increase: 43%
Lopez projected walk rate increase: 38%
Betancourt projected walk rate increase: 35%

I have a theory about this. When people are filling out their projections, they're trying their hardest to be realistic. That's the whole point of the exercise; wild-ass guesses would render the project entirely worthless. So with that in mind, when people were entering their data for Johjima/Lopez/Betancourt, they threw in a few extra free passes because they didn't think it was humanly possible for someone to walk so infrequently. Well guess what? You sons of bitches are wrong. It is possible, and these three players are living proof.

Anyway, walks aside, there's not too much that's different here. Yuni's put up back-to-back identical seasons, and you guys see more of the same coming up. High average, low OBP, limited power, and enough stolen base attempts to make us wonder why Yuni ever bothers trying to steal. Nothing extraordinary, but slightly above average for his position. For $1.25m, that's a heck of a deal.

So once again, it looks like most of the attention will be paid not to Yuni's bat, but to his glove. We're still waiting for his defensive stats to catch up to his stellar reputation, but if it doesn't happen now, that'll give us three and a half seasons' worth of data calling him ~average. That's a pretty significant sample, and one that'd force us to re-consider just how valuable a player Yuni really is. I mean, the decent offense and low price already make him valuable enough, but elite-level defense would make him one of the better steals in the league. If he doesn't really have it, I guess we'll just have to settle for "good", instead of "mind-blowingly awesome". Raspberries.

Prediction: Yuni's offense barely changes, but nevertheless attracts quite a bit more criticism than it did last year due to a little clutch situation regression to the mean.