Seattle Sports Insider

HQ POTD: Leonys Martin

question ye Dr. D at your peril, good denizens

Posted by

12/16/15

Two doors down the Great Hall of Wisdom, a toga'ed SSI rhetor wears an OBF slash across his chest. He reasons in most spirited fashion that Leonys Martin has quite reasonable chances of climbing the Safeco Mt. Olympus of 3+ WAR. He argues, in the main, that Martin has in fact done this before, and also that Martin may have been hampered in doing so because of 2015's broken hamate bone.

These arguments are (1) perfectly feasible and (2) the first two things Jerry DiPoto SAID after acquiring said glove magician, making the arguments (3) perfectly feasible.

.....

Good citizens, panic not at the rumour of Dr. D's disdain for this or player or that. He is not correct 100% of the time, though such may often seem the case. Bear also in mind that this debate proposition is signed by Dr. D. on the one side and by Jerry DiPoto on the other. Who knows more about baseball? Me or him?

If it be thy will, SSI will be all too eager to assign Leonys Martin as the test case for which of the two professors, Dr. D or Dr. Poto, boasts the larger cerebral cortex. Hath much learning driven Dr. D mad? SSI Worst Bet, indeed.

Should you feel inclined to wager the Leonys Martin recovery, do so with all good speed. But you may also wish to look away, because Ron Shandler shall offer ye but little comfort. Thusly:

THE Q GOING INTO 2016 IS:

Leonys' past season was not an "off" season; it was a "Zunino-esque" folly, with a 16:69 EYE ratio (from a leadoff hitter!), a 55 OPS+, a demotion and all the trimmings. Can a bad hand indeed count for this blizzard of garbage swings?

Mayhaps, quoth Jerry. ... Nay verily, quoth Dr. D. ... "A BELLY FULL OF HEMLOCK FOR HIM!," quoth the Think Tank. But! Which "him" do ye mean?

HQ SEZ:

GOOD - [DNP, coach's decision]

BAD - Despite his SPD, anemic power and plate skills are not a winning long-term combination. LD's turned into soft FB's and BABIP plunge torpedo'ed AVG and depressed running game. More futility vs LHP's also factored into eventual job loss and demotion. Plus defense may not be enough to regain job.

SLASH LINE - 245/298/338 in 392 AB's with 3.3 runs per game. (Trust us, this is not a good thing. Woeful though it be, it was "regressed" UP toward mediocrity and it assumes that Martin will be playing in an extreme hitter's park.)

QUOTH DR. DETECTO - Wheretofore, young scoundrel? Can there be yet some villainy thou hast not committed in yon batter's box? Know ye this: I'll soon know thy business.

Q-o-VISION TRANSLATION:

a·ne·mic

[əˈnēmik]

ADJECTIVE

suffering from anemia.

synonyms: colorless · bloodless · pale · pallid · wan · ashen · gray ·
[more]
- lacking in color, spirit, or vitality.
  
  synonyms: feeble · weak · insipid · wishy-washy · vapid ·
  [more]

fu·til·i·ty

[ˌfyo͞oˈtilədē]

NOUN

pointlessness or uselessness:

"the horror and futility of war"

synonyms: fruitlessness · pointlessness · uselessness · vanity ·
[more]

Dr's ADD

Could somebody go to TexasLeaguers.com or someplace, and check out that HQ claim that Martin's fly balls turned into cans of corn? Never heard it put quite that way. Or maybe HQ is just assuming this from the fact that his Grounder/Line Drive/Flyball rate morphed from 50%, 22%, 28% into last year's 52%, 15% (!!), 33%.

The good news is, either (by some epic miracle foisted by the Mt. Olympus pantheon) he gets back to his 3-4 WAR, or else we get a Boog Powell playing CF, or else it turns out Guti and Aoki are a wonderful CF platoon, or else Jerry DiPoto waives Martin faster than he did Andy Wilkins. In other words, the good news is that DiPoto is not slow to admit a mistake.

Let's hope he admits this one by January,

Dr. Detecto

Blog:

POTD

Tags:

Leonys Martin

Comments

DiPoto is right

There is, of course, a good case to be made that Martin isn't the next Lorenzo Cain. But even with his disaster of Zunino-esque proportions, Martin offered a 1.1 WAR In an injury plagued season at a premium defensive position. That is setting a very fine floor.

This is a guy who as a 24 year old had a 1.033 OPS in 260 AAA at bats.

There is upside, but there is also an acceptable floor. Jerry wants defense in CF at Safeco. Good idea. So, he basically traded 1.1 from a relief pitcher who pitched full time to get it in CF in part time playing hurt. He had to throw in a decent prospect. That's a pretty good days work, I'd say.

Sure, there are backup plans. But nothing will come up in January that is going to look like it will outperform this one: a healthy Martin patrolling CF and batting ninth.

12 homers and 18 doubles in 1/3 of a season

Back in AAA in 2012, at age 24. Guti-esque power showing.

Age 23 (just out of Cuba) he also OPS'ed 1000 in AA, before a promotion and tough adjustment to AAA. This earned him a couple of low showings in the MLB Top 100.

He hit .308/.429/.457 in seven years at Cuba, including .320/.470/.530 in 1,000 PAs his last three years.

He used to be a hot prospect, no doubts there. 'course Mike Zunino hit .289/.364/.573 in his minors career ...

.....

Odd, though, with Martin's pre-MLB walks and power, that he's showed none in the majors. His xPX's are in the 60s and his EYE around 0.30.

Interesting question, Doc

Spec. preached mightily on the need to have a good eye in the minors in order to make it in the majors. If he carried this .30 eye into the majors I would definitely be scared off, and DiPo would probably be as well. So what does having a good minor league eye, with decent power, say to us when it translates (so far) into a .28 or so eye in the majors. Do we, for a 27 year old player, expect the further decline we saw in his injury plagued season? That would certainly be the safest bet.

I suspect that maybe DiPoto sees more than a mere glimmer of hope in the entire body of work - a good eye in Martin's past, and thus is willing to take the gamble that it can improve under the tutelage of an Edgar and an organization that stresses tough at bats. There is something here to work with. If there wasn't, he wouldn't.

But the glimmer+ has to come with good glove and baserunning skills.

And that's why WAR is not an absolute.

There's no way that I believe a replacement player would be 1.1 wins worse than Martin was last year...there is a point where you are so bad offensively (or defensively in other cases) where there is a non-linear impact of your suckage on the team. A 50 OPS+ is one of those points. Martin was not a 1 win player last year...WAR's linear assumption is wrong and Martin proves it. And no...I don't think a broken hammate bone can worsen a player's eye ratio.

Come June, ifr Martin is OPS+ing 100, I'll apologize for doubting Dipoto's judgment...but to me, Martin is the worst full time starting regular the Mariners have had since Brendan Ryan.

When your replacement player is James Jones?

Let's take the mythical replacement player out of the argument and plug in some truly freely available talent: James Jones is freely available talent for center field: .564 lifetime OPS vs. .666 for Martin. Actually, I can believe it. But it does take expecting a certain level of defensive play in CF. I suppose a case could be made for Justin Ruggiano, who played the corner OF especially well for the Dodgers last season. We could go that route again. But then, you talk a non-linear impact of suckage - shaky CF defense.

With the defense he really only needs to OPS+ 90...

Witness his almost FIVE war 2014 when he OPS+'d 92...

Isn't the classic symptom of a hamate problem being sapped of power and batspeed? Wouldn't losing those two things be EXACTLY what caused the two issues Martin saw in 2015?

For a switch swinging contact hitter loss of power doesn't mean loss of homer runs... It means... Line drives turn into pop fly's... hmmm exactly what you pointed out...

Also for a contact player bat speed is his tool to fight against tough strike out pitches... again, hamate break -> makes it painful to swing fast and hard -> makes it hard for him to foul off K pitches -> hence the ballooning strike outs...

It seems reasonable to ME that with the injury fixed, that his 2013/2014 seasons should be the EXPECTATION... the median Martin going forward...

Why are we framing this as the expectation is that Martin is Zunino terrible with the bat and by some MIRICLE could MAYBE get back to being half the man he was before? Did Martin lose some magic secret sauce from 2013/2014? Were his first two years a mirage somehow? Deal with the devil? Why are they brushed aside like they didn’t happen or they don’t actually represent Martin today?

Like I said in the earlier thread, we should be starting from the position of: Martin is who he is (90ish with the bat, top 3 CF in the league with the glove), with a chance to have a down... OR UP season... The UP season for Martin ISN'T that he gets back to his norm... The UP season for Martin is that he has great BABIP luck in SafeCo, hits 295 instead of 270, hits a bunch of SafeCo wide open spaces doubles and OPS's 105/110 instead of 90 and all of a sudden we have a SIX win player on our hands...

It seems to me that SSI is getting WAY wrapped around the axel of an injury plagued, outlier season... Which is not the norm for SSI... I attribute this to the fact that the cost of acquiring Martin was a swift kick to the man region for a bunch of folks around here and so we can't see Martin clearly through the Bartender/PK tears... :)

Or I am completely wrong and you all can make fantastic amounts of fun at my idiocy when Martin Craters for the first half or 2016 and is out of baseball and working at a snow cone stand by 2017 :)

300 PAs in 2015 does not equal 1100 PAs from 2013-2014

It's logical to think that 2015 was the outlier unless Martin continues to hit like that all of 2016.

That being said, it's also possible that during 2015, he picked up some bad habits which could take awhile to iron out. If that's the case, he would probably improve but not enough to produce like he did before.

It feels like people want to discount what the defensive metrics say about Martin. I agree that they don't always get things correct but Martin has been around a few years and all metrics seem to like his defense. I'm fairly confident that his defense makes up for having a relatively poor bat.

What is good is also bad for Martin

Martin's defense is not questioned, nor is it being discounted. In fact, I think most here agree that Martin's defense - speed, arm, routes, smarts, and etc... will make him a top 5 CF defensively in any city... but in Seattle where the ball tends to hang in the air longer, Martin is probably a top 3 CF defensively.

Unfortunately, if Martin has not fully healed yet from his hamate bone injury, or he re-injures the same spot, or if the league has actually figured Martin out, or whatever any other reason is for last year.... if he does not bounce back, Safeco and Oakland will especially PUNISH Martin's offense, so that he will be Brendan Ryan offense bad because the ball hangs up in the air here.

Furthermore, IF Martin had these tendencies when he was in Texas, they were limited his first few years by playing 90 games in Texas (81 home, 9 Houston).

Yep, at an 80-90 OPS+ he's a fine player

He'll get you 6-10 runs with his legs on the bases - close to a WAR right there. UZR gives him credit for 10-15 runs defensively; between the two skills we're at 2.0. If his offense is 0.0 then with the position adjustment (CF) he's going to be 3+. Juan Lagares and Billy Hamilton have been similar players attempting that game.

Only Q is whether he can defend himself in the batter's box. That was Tejas' question, but it doesn't seem to be DiPoto's.

Why is it a question?

All of the evidence shows that when not injured Martin is completely fine with the bat, in fact even in 2015 before he got injured he was doing well.

I mean why is it any more of a question for Martin than it is for anyone... Cano, Cruz and seager could all come in and have an injury year or a down year, or battle a stomach virus for half the season or something...

As I said above I take the 90 OPS+ to be pretty much a given... the most likely outcome. I still give a good 10-15% role of the dice that he ages / lucks into a really outstanding season. 110 with the bat and stealing runs like crazy with his glove and legs...

Keep it comin' OBF

Part of the appeal in a scathing POTD is to hear the case made on the other side of the ball. Loov eeeet :- )

Not sure I'd say "all of the evidence" points to his being fine with the bat in 2012-14. True, his final slash lines were decent. However, the 2012-14ff evidence should include (1) his K:BB ratio as a leadoff hitter, (2) his Power Index, and (3) the Rangers' own commentary on Martin's future.

There's evidence for a Martin bounceback, and they don't need it to be an epic bounceback. But the concerns shouldn't be minimized. In any case, if he goes 110 with the bat he's a lefty Mike Cameron. Keep sellin' me :- )

Agreed

That's it! If he's 90-ish AND the Paul Blair glove he's advertised to be, then he's a huge get.

At 70 OPS, he's Brendan Ryan...or not even that.

Grand Salami OBF!

Seems entirely reasonable a player's eye can be affected by a jacked up hand. As you expalined very well hard hit balls turn into soft hit balls, or fouled off. Tough strikes can't be fought off as easily and instead are swung through. Hitting is so hard that the smallest thing wrong can have a huge impact. Hands are right up there as the most important thing to have healthy. Kinda like me trying to shoot some jumpers with my son last night at hoops practice with what is looking more and more like plantar fasciitis or a stress fracture in my foot. Not as pretty as usual!

Arbitration system

One of the problems we see with the arbitration system is that it constantly drives up salaries for individual players regardless (almost) of performance. Texas couldn't account for the risk of another down season by offereing the same pay - or a cut - so is essentially forced to trade him. Even if Texas thought a bounce-back likely, the process of one-or-the-other outcome means the player's agent can argue that the team EXPECTS a bounce-back by the fact they DIDN'T trade him, and if the team bids low to cover the contingency that he doesn't fully bounce-back, they lose and are stuck with a less-desirable contract, which gets them less in the trade.

So, the system perversely makes it almost necessary to trade a player who doesn't have a stellar season, because the cost of losing in arbitration continually drives the payroll upward for players who may never improve. More and more, true free agency makes more and more sense for the 3-7 year players.