What happened to Yuniesky Betancourt?

[RockCoCougars]

"I'd rather give up a little in defense to replace a guy who was pretty much an automatic out last season. "

 

Escobar:

 

2010: .233/.288/.326 *age 23

2011: .247/.283/.327 *age 24

 

Betancourt:

 

2010: .259/.288/.405 *Career year! Age 28, power prime for baseball hitters

2011: .268/.286/.391 Age 29

 

And the defense thing? If you honestly can look at a player like Betancourt, and a player like Escobar and say that the difference between them is "a little," I don't even know what to say.

Did you watch Escobar play defense the first half of last season? Particularly during the slide into oblivion in May/June? His ineptness in the field directly cost the Brewers at least 2-3 games. As for the age thing, I don't really care, because I don't think that Escobar is going to be an impact player moving forward. I think the Brewers were smart to dump him for an asset like Greinke while he still had value. He could develop into the best defensive SS in baseball, but if he continues hitting like he has, he's better suited for the AL, hitting 9th. Last year, the bottom of the Brewers order often had three automatic outs- one after another.

[RockCoCougars]

Honest question: If you had to choose between Escobar and Betancourt for 2012, which would you choose? How about for 2012 + 2013?

 

I'd choose Escobar, but that means no Greinke. For 2011, I'll take Betancourt.

[TracyThom]

I'm very happy with the way Yuni has been playing the last 3-4 weeks. Amid all of the criticism, I've been silently pulling for him all year. The Yuni haters have to dislike him less now compared to the beginning of the year, am I correct?

[The Truth]

I mentioned this in the In-Game thread but I'll repeat it here:

 

While we are breaking down Yuni B and looking at sample sizes, it is worth noting that he has been better in the 2nd half of seasons in his career .280/.308/.419 than in the first half .262/.283/.369 ... Yuni B also has a career .287 BA and .781 OPS in August (625 plate appearances) and a career .274 BA, .700 OPS in Sept/Oct (644 plate appearances)

 

So it is actually reasonable to assume that he will continue to at least hit better than he did in the 1st half. That in combination with Dale Sveum's coaching is what we are seeing

[The Truth]

EDIT: Honest question: If you had to choose between Escobar and Betancourt for 2012, which would you choose? How about for 2012 + 2013?

I choose Zack Greinke. 365 days a year, no question

[Nottso]

The Yuni haters have to dislike him less now compared to the beginning of the year, am I correct?

Many will hate him even more for daring to defy "the almighty numbers."

[Ennder]

He has been about replacement level which is better than I expected by a little bit, the margin between that and the worst regular SS in baseball is pretty small though.

[igor67]

daring to defy the almighty numbers? The argument has always been that Betancourt was so bad it didn't matter if you scouted him, relied on fan reports or crunched his stat line he always came out on the bottom. I too hope he does well, I just have no rational reason to believe that this will happen. The hot streak hasn't changed that, if for no other reason than all it has allowed hm to do is get his percentages in line with his career numbers. If he does this for another month and a half and he's got an OBP comfortably north of .300, then we can talk about him having changed and gotten substantially better as a player.

[JohnBriggs12]

Only on the planet that the sabermetric zealots live is Betancourt "about replacement level".

 

I defy any of you zealots to find a replacement SS capable of an 80 AB stretch of .388/.405/.575.

 

His defensive shortcomings would be more significant on a grounball inducing staff. The Brewers have flyball/strikcout pitchers.

[DuWayne Steurer]

It seems to me that sometimes people expect a .300/.450/.750 OPS player to have a .300/.450/.750 OPS slash line every month. Every poor streak is an indication that someone sucks, and a hot streak is an indicator that something has changed, or the player has 'turned it around'.

 

I don't think Yuni has changed, he's having a somewhat predictable hot streak. He's a crappy fielding, .700-ish OPS shortstop who has very poor plate discipline. It does 'seem' like he's not swinging at garbage lately, but it's probably just perception being skewed by the fact that he's hitting lights out for the last month and a half or so. When a crappy hitter has a good month such as he has, the crappy swings and poor plate coverage tend to get overlooked, or downright dismissed.

 

He is what he is, and obviously at this point there's no better options for this season. I hope he stays hot long enough that his offense from this point forward covers up to some degree his terrible defense, but in no way do I want the Brewers picking up his option next year.

[DuWayne Steurer]

I'd rather give up a little in defense to replace a guy who was pretty much an automatic out last season.

Yuni's OBP, even with his recent hot streak, is still .283, lower than Escobar's .288 from last year. If that's not the definition of an 'automatic out', I don't know what is.

 

And for the record, I think you're grossly selling short the difference in defense between the two.

[endaround]

Only on the planet that the sabermetric zealots live is Betancourt "about replacement level".

 

I defy any of you zealots to find a replacement SS capable of an 80 AB stretch of .388/.405/.575.

 

His defensive shortcomings would be more significant on a grounball inducing staff. The Brewers have flyball/strikcout pitchers.

Cliff Pennington in July hit .341/.386/.476

[Fear The Chorizo]

Cliff Pennington in July hit .341/.386/.476

 

That's not .388/.405/.575 now, is it?

[endaround]

Counsell hit .354/.442/.542 in May of 2005. Bad hitters can have a great 100 PAs. Counsell over his career is a slightly better hitter than Betancourt but not by that much (wOBA of .308 vs .296).

EDIT:In Sept/Oct 2008 Betancourt hit .343/.368/.525 while playing in Seattle. Needless to say, it wasn't the start of a whole new hitter.

[Oldcity]

 

His defensive shortcomings would be more significant on a grounball inducing staff. The Brewers have flyball/strikcout pitchers.

This is crazy. The Brewers are fourth in the NL in xFIP, yet they are ninth in ERA. How can you get more significant than that? Betancourt is a huge factor in this discrepancy.

I really don't understand this "I told you so" attitude. Is the claim that the Brewers made the right decision in not replacing Betancourt when his OBP was in the .250s? Was the idea "Just wait... He'll go on a hot streak to get it into the .280s that will make the abysmal first four months worth the wait!"

[rluzinski]

JohnBriggs12]I defy any of you (sabermetric) zealots to find a replacement SS capable of an 80 AB stretch of .388/.405/.575.

Does understanding the fundamentals of statistical analysis make me a zealot? The only reason Betancourt is still in the league is because he can hit OK for a SS. The fact that a hitter like him can hit great for 80 AB is NOT something to get too excited about in terms of future expected performance. It's not hard to find many examples of an average hitter having an excellent month.

"I really don't understand this "I told you so" attitude."

Don't you remember when the Betancourt detractors said that he couldn't hit great for even 80 consecutive AB? It was a big deal.

[kramnoj]

Only on the planet that the sabermetric zealots live is Betancourt "about replacement level".

 

It's not his bat that is replacement level. In fact, it's his bat that is bringing him up to replacement level.

[MJLiverock]

Yuni is seriously hated on this board. He started poorly and some very smart stats oriented people jumped all over it and acted like he was never going to improve. The latest hot streak really isn't that surprising if you believe in mean reversion for him. Counsell who started awful, but is a favorite had many of the same Yuni haters, had people defending him and acting like he would automatically improve despite his age.

 

Yuni is not good, no one disputes that. I think the dispute comes in the degree of badness. The early season clamoring for guys like Punto, Izturis, Renteria, Wilson as great improvements have quieted down as they are all just bad players who have proven to be nothing better and probably worse than Yuni. The level of certainty put of defensive stats and WAR to decimal places leads some down that path of declaring there is a noticable difference between a bunch of bad players. I have no problem saying Yuni is below average defensively, now whether or not he is -11.5 or -7.0 or -2.0, I question how accurate defensive metrics are when combined with very accurate stats like the hitting ones. When a defensive stat like UZR 150 comes up with Craig Counsell is the best fielding SS in baseball this year, over 2x better than Tulo, I tend to question how anyone can use it to the decimal place level for accuracy, or that defensive ability jumps all over the place for a player in his prime.

 

JJ Hardy has negative defensive stats for the year, and he is revered here as some sort of defensive whiz.

[cwolf2012]

"When a defensive stat like UZR 150 comes up with Craig Counsell is the best fielding SS in baseball this year, over 2x better than Tulo"

 

The sample size is too small to be significant. When Morgan had as much PT in CF as CC has at SS right now, his UZR/150 was +75. The first several hundred innings are just noise. Think of it as a hitter hitting over the course of a couple of weeks. Not really indicative of their skill.

[SoCalBrewfan]

He's hot now, so all the awfulness of the first half apparently doesn't count?

 

It's sadly not hard to find games in April and May, one- or two-run games and extra inning games, where a guy who wasn't a complete black hole might have made the difference. Remember this game:

 

http://www.baseball-refer...s/WAS/WAS201104150.shtml

 

There are others...the boxscores are out there if your memory has faded. (Maybe it's post-trauma memory suppression.) And that's not even measuring the balls in play that a shortstop with more range might have converted the out. A few more Ws in those games early, and we're not sweating this Cardinals series quite so much. Now he's hot, undoing some of that damage, but even with the hot streak, we're still looking at a guy who is sub-replacement level...at this instant his season so far is exactly the player that stat 'zealots' predicted. That's more than I dared to hope for given where he was on June 1, so count me as pleasantly surprised.

 

For better or worse he's our shortstop, so I'll hope he outdoes himself going forward. That's what makes this fun...sometimes unexpected things happen, just as sometimes a coin flips heads ten times in a row. This is, after all, the city that remembers Hurricane Hazle.

[rluzinski]

"He started poorly and some very smart stats oriented people jumped all over it and acted like he was never going to improve."

 

Who was were they, exactly? If these people didn't think Yuni would improve, they obviously weren't very stat-oriented to begin with. can you site a specific individual, a specific example? The thread is still there.

 

People jumped on Yuni before he ever played an inning for the Brewers. He projected to be a very bad SS, due in large part to his bad defense. While his poor offensive start increased the number of fans who wanted to see him replaced, that came largely from the fans that judge players more on in-season performance than anything else.

 

Betancourt's great July/August has allowed his offensive numbers to rise to close to his preseason expectations:

 

Current: .268/.286/.391

ZiPS projection: .272/.299/.409

 

Sorry if that doesn't excite me.

 

"The level of certainty put of defensive stats and WAR to decimal places leads some down that path of declaring there is a noticable difference between a bunch of bad players. I have no problem saying Yuni is below average defensively, now whether or not he is -11.5 or -7.0 or -2.0, I question how accurate defensive metrics are when combined with very accurate stats like the hitting ones. When a defensive stat like UZR 150 comes up with Craig Counsell is the best fielding SS in baseball this year, over 2x better than Tulo, I tend to question how anyone can use it to the decimal place level for accuracy, or that defensive ability jumps all over the place for a player in his prime."

 

Another straw man argument. No one is using only a small sample of UZR to suggest that Betancourt is a bad defender. No one even needs to rely on only advanced defensive metrics. It doesn't seem like you are arguing in good faith, as all the evidence that suggests Betancourt is a very bad defender has been presented MANY times on this board.

 

I don't "hate" Betancourt; I simply don't like that he projects to be a bad player and he starts for the team I root for.

[DuWayne Steurer]

Yuni is seriously hated on this board. He started poorly and some very smart stats oriented people jumped all over it and acted like he was never going to improve. The latest hot streak really isn't that surprising if you believe in mean reversion for him. Counsell who started awful, but is a favorite had many of the same Yuni haters, had people defending him and acting like he would automatically improve despite his age.

I was absolutely one of the guys that said Counsell should have gotten more playing time, when he was at least getting on base at a .315 clip. Of course as time has progressed, Counsell has been a hack at the plate, and has done nothing to deserve playing time.

 

Every player is going to have defenders and detractors, I don't know why this is surprising to people. The problem with Yuni is not only did he start poor, many people looked at the stats AND the scouting reports AND the fan banter and came to the conclusion that Yuni would be among the worst starting SS's this year. Even WITH his current hot streak, he's one of the worst starting SS's. his offense has, at BEST, minimized the impact of his terrible, statue-esque defense.

 

Poeple say he has 'steady hands on balls he gets to', and that's great. Too many people still use errors as the top judgement tool though. I'd far rather have a shortstop that gets to 90 balls out of 100, and boots 10 of them, than a SS that gets to 60 balls out of 100, and boots 5 of them. The 'error prone' guy is still making 15 more outs. Yes, that's an extreme example, but the people that are saying Yuni's defense 'isn't that bad' are really undervaluing how important the shortstop's defense is to a team.

[kramnoj]

He's hot now, so all the awfulness of the first half apparently doesn't count?

 

Who is making a genuine argument supporting this?

 

Now he's hot, undoing some of that damage, but even with the hot streak, we're still looking at a guy who is sub-replacement level.

 

What stat are you looking at this shows him to be below replacement level? B-ref and fangraphs have him at 0 or .1

 

There are others...the boxscores are out there if your memory has faded.

 

There are also games where he has had nice defensive plays and his bat has contributed to wins.

[SoCalBrewfan]

I'm responding mostly to Briggs, who points to his hot streak and says

 

Only on the planet that the sabermetric zealots live is Betancourt "about replacement level".

 

As you note, all the games count...the good ones and the one he's thrown away. (Almost literally in one case.) As I check this morning, Yuni has indeed reached zero at bb-ref. Bully for him.

[Thurston Fluff]

What would Yuni's salary be next season? If we used the money KC gave us for his buyout to pay for part of his salary next season would that make him a cheap alternative?