Baseball players can make contributions in a number of different ways, the most obvious and talked-about of which is how they do at the plate. Defense, position, and baserunning tend to be brushed off as secondary concerns. What follows are the top and bottom 15 in the sum of these latter three values, as determined by UZR, Fangraphs' position adjustment, and Baseball Prospectus' EQBRR.

Note that catchers aren't measured by UZR, so the worst ones are getting a boost and the best ones are getting it in the shorts. However, no catchers are likely to deserve placement on either list, except maybe Gerald Laird. So.

Neither Guti's placement at the top of the list nor Dunn's placement at the bottom should come as a shock; Guti plays a mean center field and runs pretty well, while Dunn's an athlete in the way people used to think glass is a liquid. The 29-run gap between them with the bat is erased here by the nearly threefold difference in "hidden" value. Franklin Gutierrez is awesome. Adam Dunn is not.

I don't think any names here really stand out. At least, they shouldn't. Notice the three Mariners in the top 15 and the bottom 15 being 47% AL Central. Turns out Chase Utley can run well too.

The best way to look at this would be to take a multiyear window such that we could smooth out statistical anomalies or misleading UZR. However, for whatever reason I can't load BP's '07 and '08 baserunning data, so we're stuck with what we have. If you ignore baserunning and focus on UZR + Position, then the 07-09 top three come out as Utley/Gutierrez/Hardy, while the bottom three are Dye/Hawpe/Dunn.

We can just skip the whole background section, right? To many, Lopez's improvement as a hitter is a sign of things to come. To others, Lopez is a decent but by no means extraordinary bat that is approaching a plateau. Figuring out which it is will be of considerable importance as the Zduriencik front office works to move the team forward. So: is Jose Lopez turning into the guy a lot of people thought he'd be back when he was a prospect, or is the likelihood that he's just about maxed out?

I'll try to be as brief as possible.

The first thing to understand is where Lopez is as a hitter right now. And for this, it's imperative that you're able to look past the round, pretty 25 home runs he just hit. Over the last two years, Lopez has posted a .765 OPS, a .327 raw wOBA, and has been 0-5 runs above average after adjusting for park. Perfectly acceptable, of course, but far from great; for all intents and purposes, he's been about as good as Fred Lewis. Nobody considers Fred Lewis a great hitter or anything, right? Okay.

Now, Lopez has made it abundantly clear that he prefers to be aggressive at the plate. He's consistently posted above-average swing rates and O-Swing rates, with his Z-Swing rates fluctuating between average and above-average. What this means is that, while Lopez likes to swing, he doesn't always have the best judgment. Which should come as a surprise to no one. He's not exactly an injudicious hacker or anything, but he's a free swinger, and both Chone Figgins and Adam Dunn drew more unintentional walks in 2009 than Lopez has drawn since 2004.

Plate discipline doesn't usually change very much over a player's career, at least not until he gets old. You'll see some guys make incremental improvements and other guys lose their feel, but by and large, if you're aggressive when you come up, you're aggressive through your peak. With Jose Lopez, then, we shouldn't expect to see him learn a different approach. Better numbers could make pitchers throw him fewer pitches in the zone, but he's unlikely to get much better at identifying what's a strike and what's a ball. He is what he is.

Not drawing a lot of walks means that an aggressive hitter is leaving a source of potentially significant value on the table. In order to be successful and productive, then, he has to make up for this by doing one or some or even all of the following:

(1) Make contact 

(2) Run well

(3) Put the ball on the ground (closely related to #2, really)

(4) Hit for power

Vladimir Guerrero is perhaps the most obvious example of a hacker who's made it work. He's made it work by, throughout most of his career, pulling off #1, #2, and #4. Alfonso Soriano's gone with #2 and #4. Ichiro, of course, favors #3 over #4 to go with his #'s 1 and 2, allowing him to beat out a ton of grounders. It's a different path, but not necessarily a worse one. The point is, aggressiveness, on its own, is not a problem. You don't have to be Nick Johnson if you want to have a career.

Now let's look at how Jose Lopez does here:

(1) Check. Lopez's career contact rate is 86%, well north of the ~80% league average. He's a free swinger, but he's a free swinger who's able to get the bat on the ball an awful lot.

(2) No dice. Lopez may have stolen 31 bags as an 18 year old, but these days he's a big boy. Not that I'd call him slow or anything, but his 12 infield hits last year tied him with Kevin Youkilis, Dunn, and Jason Bay.

(3) Not anymore. Lopez used to have an above-average groundball rate, but he's trended away from that, finishing just outside the bottom third in 2009.

(4) Check, sort of. Lopez hit 17 homers in 2008 and 25 homers in 2009, posting a .191 Isolated Slugging Percentage well above his career mark. This power has been what's elevated Lopez from what he was in 2006 to what he was this past season.

In order for Lopez to improve on what he was in 2009, he could improve his discipline. Conceding this as unlikely, however, he then would have to improve on one or some of those four points. Looking at them again:

(1) Lopez's contact rate is already high, and his rate in 2009 was not significantly different from his rates in 2005 or 2006. I find the suggestion that Lopez could make more contact than he already does to be dubious.

(2) Players don't get faster. As Lopez ages, he's only going to lose footspeed, not gain it.

(3) Possible, but then since he's not blessed with the best speed, this isn't going to help him anyway.

(4) And now we've gotten to the heart of the matter. Those who say Lopez's star is only on the rise believe that he's packing more power potential. Those who say he's near his ceiling don't see it.

So which is it? Just how much more power can we expect to see out of Jose Lopez going forward?

The thing about power spikes is that, generally, they don't come out of nowhere. They're preceded by flashes of power to all fields, and occasional glimpses of considerable strength. Wladimir Balentien, for example, only hit seven homers this year, but his 489-foot dinger off Daniel McCutchen was the longest hit by anyone all season. This is evidence that, while Balentien's far from a complete hitter, he has the potential to drive a lot of pitches out of the park. One also notices that, of Balentien's 15 career homers, six have gone up the middle or the other way. Combine these bits of information with his famously long swing and I don't think anyone would be surprised if a year or three from now he ended up on or near the longball leaderboard.

There are signs. Which makes me wonder, where are Lopez's signs?

Yes, he hit 17 homers in 2008 and 25 homers in 2009. Each added significantly to his previous career high. But home runs, by themselves, don't necessarily tell you that much. How is his actual *power*?

To answer this, I think we realistically only need to consider three things:

• Jose Lopez has hit 70 home runs in his Major League career. He has pulled 66 of them to left field. Three have gone up the middle, and one has gone the other way. Every single one of his 42 homers these last two years has gone to left.


• Hit Tracker Online provides data going back to 2006, covering 63 of Lopez's 70 home runs. Six of them had a standard distance of more than 400 feet. The longest came in at 415. The fastest, meanwhile, came in at 109.8mph off the bat.
  


• He has a pretty quick, compact swing.

Lopez isn't weak. Weak guys don't hit 25 homers while spending half their time in Safeco Field. But when you go through the data, you can't help but feel like, if Lopez were packing more power potential, he would've demonstrated that ability at least a couple times at some point. Where are the deep flies to right field? Where are the two or three fastballs he just stepped into and slaughtered to left? It's clear that Wlad has a high power ceiling. We know that Franklin Gutierrez has some raw strength. But Lopez? Rob Johnson hit a ball 430. Mike Carp hit a ball 426. Jose Lopez has yet to hit a ball beyond 415, with the majority of his homers just clearing the left field fence.

When you go through Lopez's numbers looking for signs of more power, what you come away with are signs to the contrary - indications that he doesn't have much further to go, suggestions that perhaps even reaching 25 was a stroke of good luck. Of all the players to hit at least 25 home runs in 2009, Lopez had the lowest average distance, finishing just below other anomalies Ben Zobrist and Aaron Hill. Just because he hit 25 doesn't mean this is his new level of true talent. If anything, I'd say that we should project Lopez to hit for a little less power next year, not more. Because he just hasn't flashed the kind of ability more befitting a 25-homer sort of guy.

I don't want to say there's no chance, and I certainly don't intend to convey the impression that I think Jose Lopez is bad. As far as the former is concerned, unlikely doesn't mean impossible - baseball analysis is just probability. And as for the latter, Lopez has been a ~league-average player these last two years, and at 26 years old, there's little reason to believe he's about to get worse. This is, after all, supposed to be his career peak. He's a fine player.

It's just...Jose Lopez has been teasing Mariner fans since he was a teenager, but at this point, I think we have enough evidence to say that he's probably not going to turn into a big-time power threat or run producer. There's always a chance that he develops more pop, and who knows, he may even get better at telling balls from strikes, but the odds say he's better suited for a supportive role, rather than a featured one. And that's something that, as they examine all the different possibilities this offseason, Jack Zduriencik and his assistants are going to have to take into account.

No new ideas presented here. I just remember that, back when I was first learning about regression, one of the things that stuck with me was seeing how the top batting averages in the league in Year X looked in Year X+1, so here's a similar concept with a different, more contemporary statistic. What you see below are the top 20 players in WAR in 2008 and how they then did in 2009. Accompanying them is an old friend.

Please try to keep this in mind if you notice that Franklin Gutierrez is having a tough time repeating as a superstar.

Guess I should talk about this, since the Mariners seem to be showing considerable interest. I understand I'm late to the party, but then I never expected that the M's would still be hovering around at this point in the sweepstakes.

It's easy to see why Chapman's getting so much attention. Though Major League scouts haven't seen him that much and he hasn't thrown a lot against quality competition, just watching what comes out of his arm for one inning against anyone tells you pretty much everything you need to know. Just 21, he's a lefty who sits in the mid-90s and has the capability to touch triple digits with his fastball, and the slider he flashed in the WBC had a wicked amount of horizontal movement. Chapman's stuff - just his pure stuff - is top-notch. Anyone who can throw that kind of fastball and that kind of slider and mix them with the occasional change, curve or split is going to open some eyes. Though raw, Chapman comes with incredible, virtually limitless upside.

Which isn't to say that the downside isn't there. The big mark against Chapman is that his command sucks. I don't know if his control sucks, but as far as hitting his spot is concerned...he can't be much fun in batting practice. Poor command diminishes the value of even elite-level stuff. Beyond that, his secondary pitches are numerous but unconvincing, he has minimal experience against disciplined bats, a lot of people have already pegged him as a future reliever, and there are questions surrounding his maturity.

We shouldn't oversell all that, though. If it weren't for the flaws, Chapman would be the best pitcher on the planet. His age and background work as points in his favor, as he still has a lot of room to develop, especially on the watch of some of the best instructors in the world. His command should get at least a little bit better as Major League coaches work on his delivery. And I don't much care that there are pictures of him hanging out in what looks like a strip club, since he's the equivalent of a college freshman in terms of his experience with freedom. He may be a little immature, and he may be known for pouting on the mound when he doesn't get a call, but, again, he's 21. Felix used to whine a lot, too.

Chapman, clearly, is a quality prospect. He is by no means a guarantee. What he is right now is sort of the equivalent of the old, bad Matt Thornton. There's a chance he may never be more than that. He might always survive on two pitches and struggle to find the zone. But remember that Thornton figured it out, and Chapman's still the definition of 'raw'. His upside is what makes him valuable, and his upside is huge. There's a reason why a lot of the best organizations in baseball are in on this guy.

What makes the situation dicey is that Chapman wants to get paid. A lot. Or at least his agent does. The numbers being floated around are $40-60m, which, as you can imagine, are separating the serious courters from the casual ones, and the serious courters with money from the serious courters without it. $40-60m is an awful lot of money. At that kind of desired cost, he blows away other international free agents and becomes a big-time prize with big-time risk. The team that ends up landing him is gonna have to be damn sure they know what they're doing.

So the obvious question is, do I think Chapman's worth what he wants? To which my answer is, I don't know. You can't say he should lower his asking price to something more in line with that of a typical high draft pick, because Chapman isn't a draft pick - he's a free agent. He can ask for a ton of money because he knows there's a ton of demand, and there's a ton of demand because he packs a ton of talent. I don't know how much that talent is worth. I've seen very little of him, and the lack of experience against advanced competition makes him difficult to project. What I would suggest in a case like this is that you trust that, no matter what they decide, the Mariners know what they're doing. If they decide Chapman's worth a bid, go with it. If they decide he isn't, go with it. The whole appeal of these guys is that they're better at talent evaluation than most of the world, and "most of the world" includes you and me, so this is one of those times where I'm happy to defer to the people in charge.

Let's say, though, that the M's do decide to make Chapman an offer. Then what happens? For him to sign here, I think one of three things would have to happen:

(1) Chapman weighs his presumably similar offers and chooses the M's over the competition

(2) The M's knowingly makes an inflated offer in order to sweeten their standing

(3) The M's see something other teams don't, something positive, and offer Chapman a higher contract as a result of perceiving him as more valuable than the other teams

#1 seems unlikely to me. If Chapman gets a handful of offers from places like Boston, New York, Seattle, and others, I don't think he picks to settle in the northwest. Seattle's a very difficult place for someone in Chapman's situation to live, and it's also not an organization that would put him in the best position to win. Boston and New York in particular are both more successful and far less isolated.

#2 is possible, but I also think it's unlikely, because when you have a guy who's already as big a risk as Chapman, I don't think a front office such as the one we have in power would put itself out there any more than it has to. The team will probably look at Chapman, assign a value, and go forward with that value, and if it isn't high enough, then so be it. To offer him more than that value is worth would be to increase the risk while leaving the reward.

#3 is probably the most likely of the options. The Mariners' scout(s) might see something about Chapman that makes them more confident in him than other organizations, and that confidence would be reflected in the contract offer. And that could make Seattle the favorite. The issue, though, is that with so much publicity and so many eyes, it's hard to imagine that the M's would see something that goes undetected by everyone else.

All in all, though the M's are in on Aroldis Chapman, and though they appear to be serious, from where I sit, they don't have very good odds. While the Mariners are a solid organization on the rise, they just can't compete with the Red Sox and Yankees in a lot of areas which Chapman would find appealing. Throw in that there are other organizations aside from these three getting involved and that only reduces our odds even further. So, although there's a chance, I'd be surprised. Shocked, even. And, hey, maybe that's a good thing. He's a risky son of a bitch.

Personally, what I find to be most interesting about all this is that, for the M's to be involved, they have to know that Chapman's going to cost a lot. And for the M's to be involved despite that knowledge means that they're prepared to offer Chapman a lot of money if they determine that he's worth it. I don't buy into the suggestion that Chapman would be brought in to "replace" Felix Hernandez for one minute, but I do have to wonder what this means as far as the Felix negotiations are concerned. If the M's are potentially willing to give a lot of money to a 21 year old Cuban with minimal experience, then they'd be willing to give a lot of money to a 23 year old who's proven himself to be one of the best pitchers in baseball, right? You can't be open to taking an expensive risk at one point and closed off to taking an expensive risk the next, can you? If you can, why?

• The whole reason I tuned in in the first place was to watch Michael Saunders. Venezuela makes the third country in which Mike doesn't know when to take the bat off his shoulders.


• Road team uniforms in the VWL are equipped with external brassieres, presumably in an effort to shame the wearer.


• Venezuelan tools and American tools are a lot alike.
  
   


• Watching a game in the VWL is completely unlike watching a game in the Majors for me, and not just because I don't care about the results. While Major League Baseball remains in large part unpredictable, I know a lot about it. I know a lot about how it works and I know a lot about the players, so if I'm watching a game, then in any given situation I can't help but call on my knowledge in thinking about all the most likely outcomes. If Willie Ballgame goes up against Mariano Rivera, I know Willie's probably not going to get on base, and he's almost certainly not going to go deep. If the Orioles play the Yankees, I know the Yankees are probably going to clobber them to death. If Miguel Batista is pitching to anyone, I know it's probably going to be annoying. I'm just constantly and instinctively thinking about everything I know such that games lose a bit of that magic I used to feel when I was a kid.
  
  When I'm watching the VWL, though, I don't know shit about what's going on, I don't know shit about most of the players, and even if there's a guy with whom I'm somewhat familiar, I generally don't know shit about when he's in. I don't even know who the Cardenales de Lara were playing. It's just...baseball, competitive, high-level baseball as unblemished by understanding as any baseball I'm ever gonna be able to watch. I kind of knew when Saunders was hitting, and I kind of knew when Luis Valbuena was hitting, but outside of that, between the nameless uniforms and the dearth of graphics and the Spanish-language broadcast, it was just an onslaught of Game, a game about which I never once remarked "well of course he missed that" or "he should've thrown the changeup."
  
  It's easy to say that learning so much about the numbers has enhanced my enjoyment of the sport, but the sport itself is fun enough as it is, and I can't fault anyone for not wanting to jeopardize the love they already feel by going off in pursuit of a better understanding. For many, the basics are sufficient.
  


• I know that teams in the VWL will bring in a handful of American imports, but when you're navigating a Spanish-language website about a team in Venezuela, there are certain things you don't expect to see on the front page. This is one of them.
   


• The phrase "sabor Venezolano" came up during the broadcast at least eight or nine times. I don't know enough Spanish to know if the announcers were referring to a particular style of baseball or if they were trying to sell me something delicious.


• There were a lot of PA sound effects during certain parts of the game, such as that string sample from Psycho, suggesting that Lara's adversary has the same production budget as the Rangers.


• Luis Ugueto plays for Lara. Remember Luis Ugueto? Hasn't been in a Major League organization for two years. Spent 2008 playing in Italy of all places before signing on with an independent team in Laredo. He is one of ten players on that team with a size that isn't listed as 0'0, 0 lbs. One of his teammates is named Robert Moron. 


• Sometimes the stadium PA would chime in with the notes to the Ole! chant, only instead of being the familiar sort, their version was played in a minor key that made it 1000% more unsettling. 


• The crowd wasn't huge, but it was spirited. I don't want to say that Americans are worse baseball fans (or sports fans in general), because truth be told it's just a difference in culture, but every time I watch a sporting event overseas I wish that fans here would make half as much noise. It's a difference in culture, but that part of our culture sucks.


• Venezuelans believe in Santa, and their Santa puts his trust in Banco Federal.

More photos » by Evan Vucci - AP

Washington Nationals' Adam Dunn seen playing his best defensive position.

Browse more photos »

On May  of 2008, we published an article here looking at whether Adam Dunn might be a good investment for the Mariners during the 2008 offseason. Yeah, remember those days? It was the first of May and we were already looking forward to the offeseason. Anyways, the negatives on Dunn boiled down to these two views:

1. His skills were old player skills and thus prone to rapid aging, making a long term contract bad news.

2. His defense is horrible.

Jeff equated Dunn's defense to:

have you ever tossed the ball around with a friend on the beach? Have you ever missed the ball and had to go get it in the ocean? You sprint after it with all your energy, but you're limited by both the wet sand and the foot or three of water, so while you never really lose sight of the ball, and while it's not in danger of drifting away, it still takes forever to get there.

Now, little to be known at the time, but the market completely crashed in the offseason and Dunn, despite our fears of getting between a 5Y/$75M and 6Y/$90M contract, ended up at two years and just $20 million. That short of contract effectively eliminated concerns about his decline phase. He was just 29 this year so a contract running his age 29 and 30 seasons seems like pure gold. It's like getting the first two years of the Richie Sexson contract. That would be awesome. Well done, Nationals.

On the second point however... Keep in mind that this is not an isolated incident. Adam Dunn's defense has been atrociously bad for years and the fact that it's horrible is as unanimously agreed-upon as you'll find a defensive statement in baseball. His UZRs the four years prior to 2009; -19, -15, -19, -28. That's bad. But you know what they say, if you're ugly, just find an uglier person to be your friend and you'll look more attractive in comparison. So Adam Dunn went out and had 2009, a season in which he rotated through 1B (67 games), LF (62 games) and RF(22 games). Combined from the three, Adam Dunn tallied a -36.4 UZR.

-36.4.

Adam Dunn was the 20th best hitter in baseball this year according to StatCorner's park-adjusted wOBA. FanGraphs equals pretty closely on his hitting value. He had a career year in batting average and nearly one in OBP and OPS as well. Because of his defense and position, he netted 1.1 WAR. Endy Chavez played 54 games in the outfield, had a sub-.700 OPS and managed 0.9 WAR.

-36.4 UZR. Unfathomable.

Ichiro Suzuki's walk total this past season, 32, marked his lowest total since his inaugural 2001 campaign. Granted, he had fewer plate appearances this season than he's ever had in America, but even as a rate, his walk numbers were down.

Using rates, Ichiro drew a walk in 4.7% of plate appearances, (2.2% intentional and 2.5% unintentional). It was the highest rate of intentional free passes since his 2005 season, which is no big surprise there. Ichiro was great this year. It is somewhat of a surprise when you consider who was batting behind him though. Franklin Gutierrez and Russell Branyan both had 55 starts apiece in the second lineup slot and neither of them would be considered offensive slouches.

Still, Ichiro's 2.5% unintentional walk rate was by far the lowest mark of his career, even lower than that 2001 season (2.7%). Is that a cause for concern going forward? After all, we don't expect Ichiro to post a .384 BABIP each year, so we would all rest a little easier if he didn't need to bat in the mid .300s just to have an above average OBP.

On the surface, this would have seemed a good year for Ichiro to post a banner year in the walks department. Afterall, he was thrown first pitch strikes at the lowest rate since 2001 and was thrown strikes overall at the lowest rate of his career, continuing a three year trends that has seen pitchers suddenly shift away from throwing him more strikes than average. 

Unfortunately, Ichiro responded to these extra out of zone pitches with more swings. His 48.9% swing rate is back up to his 2001-5 level after a three year hiatus. Interestingly, it appears to be a roughly equal jump in swings at both strikes and balls as you see his Z (strike) Swing% jump 3% and his O (ball) Swing% rise 3.4%. Coupled with a decrease in contact rate (mostly on pitches in the strike zone curiously), and you have a recipe for both more strikeouts and fewer walks. Ichiro posted his worst-ever contact rate when swinging at pitches in the strike zone and he also posted his worst-ever swinging strikeout rate.

There was a slight dip in his contact rate on pitches outside the zone as well, but I am not concerned about that as the drop was small and it still leaves Ichiro at a super high level. In fact, I wonder if Ichiro's prowess at making contact at pitches outside the zone has given him more confidence to swing in general. Compare 2004 to 2009, Ichiro swings at almost twice as many non-strike pitches as he did back then and at fewer strike pitches. It would be nice to see him go back to those levels.

Regressing his 2009 BABIP to his career level costs him 14 hits and 20 points of batting average and that represents a sizable slice of his OPS gone. Now I don't want to come across as saying Ichiro needs to draw more walks in 2010. He could hit for more power. He could maintain his high BABIP. He could steal more bases. There are lots of things Ichiro, or anyone, can do to improve their game in the face of a declining isolated discipline. It's just... it would probably be a lot easier to just draw a few more walks. We know you can avoid swinging at those non-strike pitches, Ichiro and it didn't seem to hurt your offense any.

I wonder if his missed time at the beginning of the season caused him to press a bit to collect base hits in order to ensure that he got to 200 on the season. If so, then perhaps he'd relax a bit next year and we'll see the walks go back up. Who knows, really? I learned years ago to stop actively worrying about Ichiro. One of these years, probably, we'll be able to look back and be able to point at some moment in time and say, "there, that's when he started to actually decline." That hasn't happened yet, but Ichiro's plate discipline numbers are going to be something that I will pay attention to in 2010.

You won't see me cite Game Score very often, but for our purposes here, it's perfectly suitable.

A.J. Burnett, Career: 54.6 average game score, 17.2 standard deviation
Andy Pettitte, Career: 51.4, 17.2

A.J. Burnett, Yankee: 53.3, 17.0
Andy Pettitte, Yankee, 2007-2009: 49.8, 16.3

And, for the hell of it:

C.C. Sabathia, Yankee: 58.1, 17.8

For a little perspective, Felix's numbers this year came out to be 60.8 and 16.5. Felix in 2007, meanwhile, came in at 52.1 and 18.7.

A.J. Burnett has a reputation for being wildly inconsistent, throwing three ugly innings in one start and then spinning a shutout the next. That angle has, naturally, been played up in the postseason, as the Yankees "can't be sure what they'll get" out of one of their more shiny investments from game to game.

The people saying that last bit are correct. The point they're missing, though, is that the same thing could be said for pretty much every other pitcher in baseball. Starters are inconsistent. When so much depends on the weather, the opposing lineup, and the defense, it isn't realistic to expect a guy to go out and have the same game every turn. There will be variation. And though Burnett is far from being the most consistent pitcher in the league - Roy Halladay, for one, is more reliable - people need to get over the notion that his body is some sort of exceptional binary system that on any given day will either suck or excel. He made two starts lasting fewer than five innings this year, to Pettitte's three. He made five starts in which he allowed 6+ runs, to Pettitte's four. And 71% of his starts this year have generated a game score between 40 and 70, to Pettitte's 62%. Pettitte, of course, is just standing in as an example, as someone most "baseball people" will tell you is consistent. As it turns out, it seems he's not really much more consistent than the guy who used to wear rings in his nipples.

I hate the word "consistency" and all of its sister terms as people relate them to baseball players. A bit of inconsistency isn't a flaw, because consistency the way people talk about it doesn't exist. Some players will fluctuate around good results while some players will fluctuate around worse results. The sooner people can understand that, the better I'm going to sleep.

Note: I realize that standard deviation isn't the best way of looking at this. Other measures are being attempted!