Tag: joe mauer

The Mejia Question For Tribe.

The All Star break is over, and now the eyes of baseball shifts to the trading deadline at the end of this month.

And that leads to speculation about the Indians’ top prospects, catcher Francisco Mejia and pitcher Triston McKenzie.

Mejia gets even more scrutiny because of the offensive production on the catchers on the big league roster, Yan Gomes and Roberto Perez.

Gomes has an OPS of 680, and is hitting just .222 with a .315 on base percentage.  Perez is even worse with a 517 OPS and his batting average is just .178.  Combined, the two backstops have 6 HR and 36 RBI.

Mejia has all the look of a professional hitter.  A switch-hitter, he is hitting .334 with 9 HR and 34 RBI at AA Akron, and has a 928 OPS.  This following a season where he had a 50 game hitting streak, and combined at Class A Lynchburg and Akron, he hit .342 with 11 homers and 80 runs batted in.

He also doesn’t strike out, which is huge in today’s game where swinging and missing is plentiful.  His high in whiffs is 78 in 446 at bats, and that was during his worst year in the minors, when he hit .243 at Lake County in 2015.

One thing we know, or should know, about the Tribe front office is they value defense, pitch framing, and handling a pitching staff the most from their catchers.  If they can hit, that’s great, but they don’t seem to be in a hurry to replace Gomes or Perez behind the plate, because they do those other things very well.

Baseball Prospectus ranked Mejia as the third best prospect in the game, and said they would rank him first if they knew the Dominican native was going to remain behind the plate long term.

The reason for that is Mejia’s size, he’s 5’10” and weighs 180 pounds.  By contrast, Gomes is 6’2″, 215, and Perez is 5’11”, but weighs 220 pounds.

Ivan Rodriguez, who will be inducted into Cooperstown later this month, was only 5’9″, but weighed 205 pounds, so Mejia can get a little bigger and be a catcher for a long time in the big leagues.

On the other hand, Mejia looks like the kind of hitter that is special, and do the Indians want that bat to be subject to the daily grind and pounding a catcher takes, and perhaps shorten his career.

Look at Joe Mauer, who is much bigger than Mejia, but was an elite hitter as a catcher, with an OPS over 800 nine times in his first ten full seasons, and a winner of three batting titles.

He was basically done as a premier hitter at age 30 in 2013.

Do the Indians want to subject Mejia to that pounding or perhaps move him to another position and keep a possibly elite bat in their lineup for a long time.

Obviously, the Tribe front office would rather not deal Mejia, but they may have to if they are making a deal like the one that brought them Andrew Miller last year.  In fact, remember he was involved in the ill-fated deal with Milwaukee that Jonathan Lucroy vetoed.

By the end of the month, we will see if the Indians dodged a bullet with that move, or they don’t think Mejia can become the type of catcher they would be comfortable with defensively.

He is purported to have a great arm and gets out of his crouch quickly, so we would be talking about pitch framing and handling the hurlers.

When you understand what Cleveland wants from the position, you can understand why Mejia is not in the Indians’ plans for this season.

Is he is their plans long term?  We will find out in a couple of weeks.

MW

 

Santana and Cabrera Can’t Catch Break

We understand that radio sports talk shows and Twitter are not representative of the feelings of the majority of sports fans anywhere, particularly in Cleveland.  However, in listening and reading daily, there seems to be a lack of support for two regulars for the Cleveland Indians.

Those players are Carlos Santana and Asdrubal Cabrera.

Santana got off to a great start in 2013, hitting .389 with 5 HR and 13 RBI in April.  Still, he is putting together his best full season with the Tribe, batting .272 with 12 HR and 48 RBI for the season.  He currently is enjoying career highs in batting average and on base percentage, and has a 835 OPS and anything over 800 is very good.

For the stat guys out there, Santana ranks as the fourth best catcher in baseball in VORP (value over replacement player) behind just Buster Posey, Yadier Molina, and Joe Mauer.  Posey and Mauer are former MVPs and Molina is a viable candidate for the award this season.

Much of the criticism of Santana comes on his handling of the pitching staff.  However, the Tribe pitcher’s ERA with Santana behind the plate is 4.17, not all that different from the 3.87 figure with Yan Gomes, the new people’s choice.  The league ERA is 4.32, so Santana is better than average.

Santana has struggled in throwing runners out on the basepaths, getting just 12% of the runners stealing, and he has been behind the plate for 38 of the league leading 56 wild pitches thrown by Tribe hurlers.

Granted, he’s not the second coming of Johnny Bench defensively, but he’s still one of the better catchers in the game and a very good offensive player.  What’s not to like about a player, who at 27 is just entering the prime of his career.

Cabrera is tougher to defend because he is having an off-season in 2013, but he still is a two-time All-Star at shortstop, and still puts up solid numbers offensively at a defensive position.

According to VORP, Cabrera ranks right in the middle of American League shortstops, between Erick Aybar and Stephan Drew.

He could be suffering from having a down year after two solid offensive seasons, both of which he tailed in the second half, but he’s solid, not spectacular defensively.  He also probably suffers from not being Omar Vizquel, one of the more popular Indians of the late 90’s.

Before the trade deadline, there were a lot of fans who wanted GM Chris Antonetti to trade the team’s starting shortstop for pitching prospects and turn the job over to Mike Aviles.

Admittedly, it may be prudent to deal Cabrera over the off-season with prize prospect Francisco Lindor possibly being ready for the big leagues as early as next season.  But to trade him now would be crazy.

Neither Santana nor Cabrera is an outgoing player with the media, probably because they aren’t comfortable speaking English, their second language.  That doesn’t play well in Cleveland, where talkative players become popular ones.

However, the reality is both are solid, if not very good players and both are extremely important to Terry Francona and the Indians.  Most teams would love to have both guys playing regularly in their lineups.

Both players should get the benefit of the doubt from the ticket buying public.  It’s a shame they seem to be more criticized than appreciated.

KM