FanPost

Alex Gonzalez, Cardinals Nation Turns Its Lonely Eyes to You

The news reports the Cardinals might be interested in Blue Jay SS Alex Gonzalez. Should we be excited?

Gonzalez is 33 and is signed for $2.75 million this year with a $2.5 million team option.

This year Gonzalez has 17 home runs, but that is pretty much the extent of his offensive contribution, as shown by his .259/.296/.497 slash line. Essentially, his poor OB% negates much of the value of his power. Fangraphs has him as 4.9 runs above average with the bat and 3.1 runs above average with the glove for 2010.

Can we expect him to continue to produce at this rate? Well, if one expects him to hit something close to his career rate going forward, then no. For his career, he is a .248/.294/.402 hitter--Fangraphs has him as 128.1 runs below average with the bat over his career. If one wants to only go by his more recent performance, from 2006-2009 he was 33 runs below average with the bat. For his career, with the glove, he has been 21.5 runs above average, making him slightly above average over his 12-year career.

Baseball Prospectus’s PECOTA predicted he would hit for a .241 True Average this year (near his career mark). Instead, he has produced a .274 True Average, which is the highest of his career and shatters his 90th percentile forecast of .264.

In short, Gonzalez’s first half hitting in 2010 is not only not very good, it far exceeds his career norms and the wildest predictions of his offensive ceiling. If he regresses at all to career norms during the second half, he will be a poor hitting, average defensive shortstop.

That said, he might be an improvement over the 2010 version of Brendan Ryan, which probably says more about Ryan’s performance than it does Gonzalez.

Two Closing Notes:

1. Gonzalez’s 2010 line of .259/.296/.497 is fairly close to Khalil Greene’s 2007 (the one when he hit 27 home runs) line of .254/.291/.468.

2. While Jose Bautista is not mentioned in the article, I would suppose he is a Blue Jay who might be traded and would fill in at third and could chip in as an OF. He is 4 years younger than Gonzalez. While he also is having a fluky year with the bat (.237/.361/.543), for his career he has been a significantly better hitter (.238/.334/.421) than Gonzalez, with more walks and power. While his .308 True Average is also above his 90th percentile forecast of .295, the weighted mean of his forecasts is .273, or essentially what Gonzalez has produced this year, meaning Bautista’s expected performance with the bat entering the season is as good as Gonzalez’s fluky season. In short, Bautista is likely to be much more productive during the second half of 2010 than Gonzalez is. He is not much of a fielder. Whether he would be an improvement over Freese is open to debate, given Freese’s injury and lack of a proven track record.