Adam Dunn?

[HammerTime]

Saw a stat on one of the tv broadcasts that Dunn is 2nd in either NL or ML in homes per at bats. Something like one home run every 12 at bats.

 

He is also 5th All Time.

[SvFan4life]

That was about 4 or 5 days ago when I heard that so I may be wrong now.

 

Who knows...but I do agree with you that MLB draftee's usually take longer to sign..It's a normal process because they are in no hurry to bring them up most of the time.

[AverageJoesGym]

It means that out of every player on the team if they were replaced by average joe off the bench Dunn's Numbers would be the hardest to make up.

 

Easy now, don't be too hard on Average Joe. I always had a high on base percentage with decent power and hit a bunch of doubles. I'm not much in the outfield but I could play either corner well. :D:D:lol:

[UKMustangFan]

Saw a stat on one of the tv broadcasts that Dunn is 2nd in either NL or ML in homes per at bats. Something like one home run every 12 at bats.

 

And Mark McGuire hit one like every 9 ABs....Doesn't mean he didn't still suck.

[saint4]

He is very streaky.

[HOMELESS CAMEL]

He is very streaky.

 

He batted .160 in June, now he is hot again, too bad he will take another month off before the year is over.

[Bandit29]

Gotta sign the Dunner!!!

 

[Clyde]

I'm a Dunn guy. However, I don't think he will be a Red next year nor do I think he gets traded this year.

[HOMELESS CAMEL]

Gotta sign the Dunner!!!

 

 

I really want to go to that game, just so I can get that bobblehead. Just hilarious. :lol:

[malachicrunch]

He batted .160 in June, now he is hot again, too bad he will take another month off before the year is over.

 

Can the Reds afford to have the guy they depend on to produce runs, disappear every other month? That's the question.

Come on. It's either yes or no.

Edited July 13, 2008 by malachicrunch

[akw4572]

Glad you are here to add to this debate with your useless comment.:thumb:

 

Here's my addition for those that care to read it. If you don't take the time to understand it, it won't matter though. Dunn, IMO is the most valuable position player the Reds have, and to me it's not even close.

 

 

Going deeper

 

Baseball traditionalists make way for a new kind of statistician, one who looks beyond batting averages and homers and praises players' EqA and VORP

Sunday, July 13, 2008 3:35 AM

By Scott Priestle

 

THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

 

CLEVELAND -- Eric Wedge and Keith Woolner joined the Indians by way of Boston and an expansion team or two.

 

Wedge was a catcher for the Red Sox and Colorado Rockies, then a minor-league manager for five seasons, his beliefs about baseball shaped amid the sweat and spit of a dugout.

 

Woolner has two degrees from MIT, a master's from Stanford and nearly two decades working for start-up software companies, his beliefs about baseball shaped by years of research and statistical analysis.

 

For the past year, they have shared an employer and a goal: build the Indians into a World Series contender. Each has the ear of general manager Mark Shapiro.

 

Welcome to major league baseball in the 21st century. Statistical analysis is no longer a curiosity or a source of conflict within the game, but a growing pool that numerous teams are tapping.

 

"The quality of the information has changed," Pittsburgh Pirates general manager Neal Huntington said. "Some brilliant people have spent a lot of time and energy examining numbers and running analysis after analysis.

 

"Some of it is eye-opening research. That doesn't mean it's the answer; it's just part of the equation."

 

As the sophistication of the research and analysis has grown, so have the popularity and the influence. A field that was driven for two decades by science-minded baseball fans such as Bill James is reaching a mass audience and the inner circle of big-league teams.

 

The Web site for stat-centric Baseball Prospectus got a few thousand visitors a month 10 years ago but now has tens of thousands of paid subscribers and gets millions of hits a month, said Joe Sheehan, one of its founders. He and other BP authors are occasionally featured in Sports Illustrated.

 

Perhaps most telling is the fact that three men who contributed articles to the site now work full time for big-league clubs: James Click, hired by Tampa Bay two years ago in the baseball operations department; Woolner, hired by the Indians last year to the newly created position of manager of baseball research and analysis; and Dan Fox, hired by the Pirates this season to create and manage a statistical database.

 

"To the Indians' credit, they had a corporate culture in the front office that was open to different ideas, regardless of where they come from," Woolner said. "The measure of whether the idea is a good one is in the results it can produce, not in who had the idea or what their background is or how many years they played ball.

 

"If this doesn't prove to be a useful way for the Indians to go about building a ballclub, then maybe it's not going to last long term. But for now, they're open to it, and hopefully I'm contributing enough that they see some value in continuing it."

 

Stats and scouts

Woolner, Sheehan and others echoed Huntington's sentiment that statistical analysis is "part of the equation," not a substitute for traditional scouting.

 

Statistics explain what a player or team has done during a period of time longer than any scout can observe. Increasingly, today's advanced statistical analysis can suggest what a player or team is likely to do in the future, even what he or it should do to become more efficient. But statistics cannot explain why a hitter's swing produced a particular result, or how a pitcher's delivery might be changed in order to get different results.

 

"What I think people get in trouble with is when they go all feel or all numbers," Wedge said. "You have to put it all together and look at everything, then make your best decision. You can't have an ego about it."

 

When the book Moneyball, written by Michael Lewis, was published five years ago, it highlighted the tension between the Oakland Athletics' scouting department and stat-centric front office, and it quickly became a flashpoint for scouts who feared being phased out and statistical analysts who yearned for acknowledgement of their work. Since then, folks on both sides have gradually stopped debating who is more important and looked for ways to blend their viewpoints.

 

One veteran scout for a National League club said he studies statistics more than ever and more and more of his colleagues do the same. For instance, before coming to Cincinnati two weeks ago to follow the Reds, the scout looked up each pitcher's walk rate, strikeout rate, ground ball-to-fly ball ratio and opponents' batting average and each hitter's contact rate and walk rate.

 

"If you scout someone and totally dismiss the numbers, you're missing something," he said. "If you don't look at (Adam) Dunn's stats, you might think, 'This guy sucks. Get him out of here.' But he's a hitter. He gets a bad rap around here, but he's the only guy on that team who can change the game."

 

The poster child

In many ways, the Reds' Dunn embodies the statistical evolution.

 

He does not fit the old ideal of contact hitting and defense, and his batting average (225 through Friday) is poor. But he is on pace to reach 40 home runs and 100 walks for a fifth straight season, and the statistical research of the past two decades has shown that the ability to get on base and to hit for power are the most important elements of a successful offense.

 

At the start of the week, Dunn led the Reds in home runs, slugging percentage and Equivalent Average (EqA) and was second in Win Shares and Value Over Replacement Player (VORP).

 

Meanwhile, the statistical research that led to the creation of EqA, Win Shares and VORP also uncovered a red flag above Dunn: Players whose value derived largely from walks and extra-base hits tended to decline faster than players with a wider range of abilities.

An athlete such as Cincinnati's Ken Griffey Jr. can add muscle, pull the ball more often and learn to draw more walks as he ages; Dunn cannot learn to swing the bat faster.

 

Even an organization as traditionally scout-centric as the Reds can find value in such information. Team officials might not be able to cite Dunn's EqA, and they might not know that baseball-reference.com lists Darryl Strawberry, Harmon Killebrew, Rocky Colavito and Tom Brunansky among his comparable hitters, but some in the front office have an eye on the stat sheet.

 

"There's some neat stuff out there, if you can extrapolate it," assistant general manager Bob Miller said.

 

From software to hardball

Woolner handles all extrapolating for the Indians. He spent the previous 10 years researching and writing for Baseball Prospectus "as a hobby." He wrote or co-wrote six essays in the book Baseball Between the Numbers, including one that introduced a new statistic for measuring relief pitchers and one that debunked the notion that certain catchers can improve a pitcher's results.

 

"My background has always been in high-tech," Woolner said. "I had done a lot of work with products that helped analyze business data to let businesses make better decisions about inventory, their supply chains, those kinds of things. So that kind of approach works pretty well in (baseball), too. It's just a different kind of business and one we don't look at in that way."

 

Increasingly, folks are looking at it in that way. The ballpark isn't just for ballplayers anymore.

[SvFan4life]

^ You really should have just cut out and pasted the bolded part of the post.

[Clyde]

^ You really should have just cut out and pasted the bolded part of the post.

 

Disagree. You need context.

[Auxier RiverRat]

You calling HT a chick?:lol:

 

I dont know you. Please dont use my words in a way they werent used by me.

[Auxier RiverRat]

Gotta sign the Dunner!!!

 

 

Is that a young David Letterman