February 06, 2007
Outfield Worries
Balls, Sticks and Stuff worries a bit about the Phillies outfield offense:
The first thing that your eye is drawn to is just how much the offense is going to depend on Chase Utley and Ryan Howard. The second thing you notice is how much below the league average Victorino is in right field. There's no doubt he'll get to more balls hit to right field than the average right fielder, but we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking it is going to come close to making up for the deficit in offense.
Probably the third thing you noticed was that Pat Burrell is projected to basically put up a league average OPS for a left fielder. I'm not sure I buy that, so I looked at several other projection systems and most place Burrell's OPS between .860 and .870, which gets above league average, but is still way down from the .891 OPS he has put up over the last two years. One has to believe that there is some sort of wrinkle in the systems that marks Burrell lower than they should and that his past performance is more indicative of his future performance.
It's Pat's age. At 30, he's going to be downgraded as he's more likely to decline that improve at this point.
Posted by David Pinto at
08:41 AM
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Offense
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Thanks David.
I thought about age as well, and you probably know more about these things than me, but would hitting 30 make his stats drop all of a sudden? I can understand a gradual decline, but that much?
There may be other things as well. I do know the biggest thing is age however. Players peak at age 27, so they're more likely to decline every year after that.