There is a famous scene in the movie “Moneyball” where in a meeting of talent evaluators, GM Billy Beane, played by Brad Pitt, brings up a player and asks the group why he likes that player.
The assistant GM Peter Brand (really Paul DePodesta) played by Jonah Hill replies “he gets on base”.
That is a credo the Cleveland Guardians should use going forward toward 2024.
We all understand the Guardians need power too. They are last in all of baseball with just 106 home runs and rank 13th the American League in slugging percentage. We know they stress contact, striking out the least in the league, but are only 9th in the AL in on base percentage.
If you don’t have power, you better have a lot of guys getting on base. You see, “he gets on base” translates to “he doesn’t make outs”.
The three best Cleveland players to avoid making outs are Jose Ramirez with a .349 on base average, with Josh Naylor at .347, followed by Steven Kwan at .340. The next best player is Bo Naylor at .320.
The two players who joined the Guardians in August, veterans Kole Calhoun and Ramon Laureano are next at .319 and .318 each.
And since the game of baseball is measured by 27 outs, having guys who make a lot of outs is not good in terms of scoring runs.
We aren’t sure the front office thinks getting on base (err, not making outs) is a valuable skill. For exhibit A, we present Yandy Diaz.
Diaz certainly wasn’t the hitter he is today in Tampa (889 OPS), but what he did do here was get on base. He had a .361 OBP in the 88 games he played in Cleveland in 2017-18.
Last season, the Guardians traded two young outfielders, Nolan Jones and Will Benson. Their on base averages in AAA were .388 and .396 respectively. To be fair, they did receive Juan Brito for Jones, and he has a career .393 OBP in the minors to date.
The player they kept instead, Will Brennan, had a .367 OBP at the AAA level. This isn’t to bash Brennan, who seems to have improved after a mid-season slump. But he’s walked 12 times all season, less than Mike Zunino and the same number of times as Calhoun.
By the way, Jones and Benson both have a .367 OBP in the major leagues this season. That number would be the highest on the 2023 Guardians.
What is we told you they have a player on their current roster who got on base at a .393 clip at the AAA level? That player is Tyler Freeman and they can’t find a place for him right now.
We are sure there are other examples, but in 2016, Cleveland had veteran switch-hitter Robbie Grossman in training camp. Grossman has a career mark of getting on base at a .344 clip. Grossman played part of ’16 with Columbus, before being released in May.
He went to Minnesota, where he recorded OBPs of .386, .361, and .367 over the next three seasons.
We think the Cleveland organization is searching for the long ball so much, they are forgetting there are two aspects to offense, and the ability to get on base is one of them. And quite frankly, it’s probably easier to identify and obtain.
Remember this, a player with a 1.000 slugging percentage simply went 1 for 4 with a HR. A game in which a team had a 1.000 OBP would never end.
Cleveland Sports Perspective 