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July 1, 2008

Prospectus Today

Adaptations

by Joe Sheehan

The Red Sox lost 5-4 to the Rays last night, falling a game and a half behind the team with the best record in baseball. (More on them tomorrow.) The Sox lost in part because Jacoby Ellsbury failed to reach base in four plate appearances. The game continued what is a brutal slump for Ellsbury; he has not reached base more than once in any game since June 15, and his June numbers make Juan Pierre look like…OK, a slightly better Juan Pierre: .245/.265/.327, with 20 strikeouts against three walks.

I want to go back to a piece I wrote a week ago for CBS Sportsline, which hosts the AL Tout Wars league. In the piece, I describe a trio of trades I made in an attempt to salvage my season, and I include the following note:

There's something else going on here as well. I am utterly convinced that I got the meat of Ellsbury’s season. His peripherals have spiraled downward in June, and he has so little power than I suspect pitchers are starting to just knock the bat out of his hands. With fewer times on base, and what will probably be a tendency to steal less as the season wears on, I strongly suspect that Ellsbury won't get to 60 steals this year. I feel like I traded him at a high point.

Now, that Ellsbury has hit .194/.237/.306 with six strikeouts and two walks since the deal helps to make me look competent, but that’s not the point I’m trying to make. No, instead I’m fascinated by the apparent path of Ellsbury’s season, one in which it appears—and I want to be careful to qualify this with the note that sometimes an apparent pattern is just noise—that pitchers have learned about a critical hole in his game and have begun to exploit it.

For a second, get a mental picture of Ellsbury, or just click back to the front page and take a look at him. He’s listed at 6'1" and 185 pounds, and he looks a bit smaller than that. Ellsbury has some pull power to right-center, but he distributes the ball around the field with a level stroke, hitting more balls to left field than to center, and more to center than to right. Power is not a big part of his game; despite a couple of blips in small samples at Double-A in 2007 and last September in the majors, Ellsbury’s isolated power has generally been between .100 and .125, with even that mark raised by the doubles and triples he gets with his speed rather than his putting a charge on the balls he connects on.

Comparisons to Johnny Damon, who has a similar swing, are both persistent and reasonably accurate, with one critical difference. As Ellsbury rose through the Sox system, he struck out a bit more at each level, but never at a rate that created concern. Last season at Pawtucket, he struck out in 11.7 percent of his plate appearances, a figure that has risen to 12.7 percent in the majors, and 13.0 percent this year. The raw figure isn’t crippling, but the steady trend does indicate that he’s being overpowered just a bit more at each level.