But the thing about Miles last year was that towards the end, he hardly ever actually played. He was supposedly healthy and he still had a year on his contract left, so the Cubs had a guy they were responsible for beyond 2009 and they would never let him on the field for any more than one plate appearance. Mercifully, he didn't start a single game after August 22.
This year, the Cubs new poster boy for utter uselessness is Koyie Hill. The man has a .550 OPS which only sounds good compared to Aaron Miles circa 2009.
If he had enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title, he would rank as the worst hitter in major league baseball this year. Juan Pierre is over 100 points higher than him. Ryan Theriot is almost 100 points higher. The corpse of Jason Kendall is batting 65 points higher than Hill. Your friend and mine, Cesar Izturis (the guy who was pushed out of Chicago by Ryan Theriot), is at .558.
Maybe he is in for his defense. Except he sucks at that too. He has thrown out 16% of baserunners trying to steal on him. The league average is 28%. He has -.2 dWAR which is another way of saying his defense is actually costing the team wins when compared to the defense of a random AAA call-up.
Maybe the Cubs don't have anyone else for the position. Well, except for Welington Castillo who has only managed to get into 4 games despite having as many homeruns in 12 plate appearances (1) as Hill has in 193 plate appearances. He had an .815 OPS in AAA this year. His overall OPS in the minors is .726. Sure that isn't the definition of awesome, but it is over 150 points better than what Koyie Hill brings to the table.
Castillo has thrown out one of the three baserunners that have tried to steal on him in the majors and has a career caught stealing percentage of 40%.
Why the hell isn't Castillo playing more now that Soto is done for the year?
Koyie Hill isn't Fred McGriff or Moises Alou that veteran managers gave playing time to so they could pad their career stats and maybe get another contract after leaving the Cubs. Mike Quade is supposedly auditioning for his job and he is trotting Koyie Hill out there damn near every day.
Sure, when Castillo actually got in the game, he stabbed Tyler Colvin with his bat. That was bad. But here's the thing - he didn't do it on purpose and he did it while hitting an RBI double. Then he went and added a homerun with his new bat. The only reason Koyie Hill never accidentally breaks his bat and stabs someone with it is because he hardly ever makes contact. If he did, it would almost assuredly have happened on a weak pop-up.
Also, Welington Castillo never just walked away from a live base-runner and allowed him to score.
It just doesn't make any sense unless Koyie has photos of a member of Cubs management doing a Joe Morgan impression.
Posts
7 comments:
Well, it might be that he's a switch-hitter, although he sucks from both sides. Koyie's not ALL bad. I'd rather see what Beef Castle can do in garbage time though, but my stock answer is that you operate under the assumption that the Cubs do things logically.
I don't like defending Hill as he doesn't deserve it, but caught stealing percentage is a useless statistic in and of itself. For example, Soto has caught 847.1 innings this year to Hill's 457.1 innings. 95 runners have attempted to steal a base on Soto while 37 have done so against Hill. If Hill caught the same number of innings as Soto, only 68 runners would have tried to steal a base. Hill's career CS% is 29% to Soto's 25% so not only does Hill stop runners from even attempting to run, he throws out a greater percentage of them. Using career numbers and adjusted innings for Hill, only 48 bases would have been stolen against him if he were behind the plate as much as Soto has been this year. That's a difference of 23 extra bases and a few more outs to go along with it. That's rather significant. If the extra base is worth about .3 runs on average (thereabouts), Hill's been better at stopping the run game by more than 2 runs with half as much playing time. Adjusted over the same sample as Soto it's closer to 5 runs.
We have to remember to not only look at SB, CS, CS%, but also the rate at which bases are stolen against catchers. Compared to Soto, Hill shuts down the running game.
That's not justification to play him, but really, does it matter at this point? Castillo is a back-up at best who had a miserable season in AA a year ago and hit for some insane power in a league this year in which Micah Hoffpauir, Ronny Cedeno and others have hit for insane power. Castillo was still WELL below average at getting on base against AAA pitching (a hitter's league). Castillo is probably better than Hill, but not by much.
When Lou said earlier this season that he was going to play Hill because he shuts down the running game, he was absolutely right when you compare it to Soto. As I said though, that's not justification for playing Hill over Soto. No way. Not even close, but Hill over Castillo? That's only a big deal in that Koyie Hill shouldn't have been on this team this season. He won't be next year and we'll get a good dosage of Welington Castillo's .275 OBP as a back-up.
False.
Actually, MB makes good points about the usefulness (or lack thereof) of CS%. Nevertheless, I still stand by my assertion that Koyie Hill sucks and that we all know that Koyie Hill sucks.
Meanwhile, Welington Castillo, probably sucks, but we don't know it for sure yet. So I'd rather watch him play, if for no other reason than variety.
I also fully expect to be able to write this exact post next year bemoaning the fact that Castillo is getting all the playing time over Robinson Chirinos.
We speak on behalf of all Cubs fans in thanking you for not including a photoshopped image of naked Jim Hendry with this post.
And we agree: let's see what Castillo has to offer, especially against the good pitching of the Giants and Padres. For what it's worth: Bruce Levine hinted in his chat that Cubs' brass were not happy with how Castillo called the game from behind the plate recently. But still.
I'd argue we do know that Castillo sucks. We don't yet know that he sucks at the MLB level, but we know enough about him to know the odds of him not sucking are not very good. Could he get better? Sure, but I'm not betting money on it. As a back-up, he's fine, but so is Koyie Hill. Chirinos is better, but he has Fuld and Hoffpauir disease. I think he just turned 82 years old yesterday. That's nonsense, but he's not young. I think he's only a year younger than Soto and not even at AAA.
Back-up catcher doesn't bother me that much. The Cubs aren't losing this year because of an inadequate back-up behind the plate. It may not be helping to have Hill, but most back-up catchers really suck at hitting.
Post a Comment
The easiest way to comment is to choose the Name/URL option from the Comment As dropdown menu below. You do not need to put in a URL for this option to work.
Sometimes upon submitting the comment, you will get an error saying there is a problem. Submit the comment again and it should work. I am looking into correcting this glitch.