Writings on baseball by Matt Barnard and Dan Stein.

 
We've been omitting stories here and there, but hopefully I'll have a chance to catch up a bit this weekend. In exciting news for Dan and I, we've joined a Diamond Mind Baseball league which was recommended to us by our friend and blogger extraordinaire Aaron Gleeman. We're just first getting our feet wet and our roster in order, but we'll probably be letting our loyal readers in on some of the team's exploits throughout the season. In other news, I'm waiting anxiously for my Baseball Prospectus 2003, which was to be shipped out on February 1st. I ordered my copy through the quickest means possible (according to the BP site), direct from the warehouse, so it wouldn't have to go through a third party and I'd have it in my hands soon. It's February 6th now, and there's been no word anywhere on bp.com that the books have been shipped or anything at all really. Hope we hear something...or better yet, receive the book...before too long. On to baseball.

Travis Lee to Tampa?
I haven't seen any terms bandied about at this point, but I'm going to assume we're not talking about big money here. While we can all agree that Lee's not lived up to the very high expectations the Diamondbacks had for him when he was signed to that mammoth $10 million bonus, he's not been totally brutal either...he's at least played well enough to keep his job in Philly up until this year. Travis Lee is not the starting first base on a championship-caliber team. However, the Devil Rays are nowhere near a .500 team, let alone a championship one. Before this move, the likely scenario would be infield corners of Aubrey Huff (not terrible) at first and Jared Sandberg (yes, terrible) at third. If this comes to pass, Huff can move back to third, Lee can take over at first, and Sandberg can whine some more about not being handed a job. This is really a situation where you've got to select the lesser of two evils. It's possible, at 28 (as Lee will be next season) that there's some improvement left in him, and when your alternative is putting Jared ".229/.305/.444" Sandberg out there on a regular basis, this is very defensible. For right now, I like this for the Devil Rays and for Lee, who probably realizes that Tampa is one of the only places he can get regular playing time.

I've just spent a moment looking at Lee's entry at baseball-reference.com, and his most similar batter (with a similarity score of 956) is Randy Milligan. I haven't been on this planet watching baseball for all that long, but I clearly remember Milligan, a pudgy first baseman best known for his reasonable success in Baltimore over the four year span between 1989 and 1992. I'm about a decade late on this...but man, Randy Milligan was really a pretty decent player, significantly better than Travis Lee has been thus far. That said, there's a pretty significant age discrepancy at work, as Milligan was 27 by the time he got any real shot in the majors, where Lee has been facing big league pitching since 1998 (age 23) in Arizona. Partly because I don't know that we'll ever get back to him, I'm going to run down a few of Milligan's very solid numbers.

Age 27 (1989): .268/.394/.458, OPS+ 143 (124 games)
Age 28 (1990): .265/.408/.492, OPS+ 155 (109 games)
Age 29 (1991): .263/.373/.406, OPS+ 120 (141 games)
Age 30 (1992): .240/.383/.361, OPS+ 108 (137 games)

split between Cincinnati (83 games) and Cleveland (19 games):

Age 31 (1993): .299/.423/.434, OPS+ 131

What happened to this guy? That age 30 year isn't great and the slugging percentages at the end there are low for a first baseman, but Milligan could hit and had real good plate discipline. Let's compare him to another light hitting first baseman of today, Doug Mientkiewicz (who is unquestionably a superior fielder).

Age 25 (1999): .229/.324/.330, OPS+ 66 (118 games)
Age 27 (2001): .306/.387/.464, OPS+ 123 (151 games)
Age 28 (2002): .261/.365/.392, OPS+ 104 (143 games)

Randy Milligan's a better hitter by a substantial margin. This is not meant to knock Mientkiewicz by any means, I was just trying to come up with as close a comp (offensively) as I could for Milligan who's active right now...a first baseman who doesn't post real high slugging percentages. Another relatively close comp according to similarity scores is Marlins first baseman Derrek Lee.

Age 22 (1998): .233/.318/.414, OPS+ 94 (141 games)
Age 24 (2000): .281/.368/.507, OPS+ 122 (158 games)
Age 25 (2001): .282/.346/.474, OPS+ 113 (158 games)
Age 26 (2002): .270/.378/.494, OPS+ 131 (162 games)

Some nice seasons here, and pretty close to Milligan in terms of value, albeit in more playing time and substantially younger. But if Randy Milligan was even close in value to a guy like Derrek Lee (which our numbers indicate he was)...why was he out of baseball so quickly? His career ended after a poor 42 game stint in Montreal in 1994, at the fairly young age of 32. If any of our readers have any background on this...I'd really like to know what happened to Randy Milligan.

Finally, a familiar numbers presentation for the man who should be the centerpiece of this entry, Travis Lee. Based on these, he really looks like the worst player of the bunch, and he probably is. It'll be interesting to see how Lee's career develops from here, whether he and the Devil Rays are able to come to terms or not. I think it'd be the best move for both parties at this point.

Age 23 (1998): .269/.346/.429, OPS+ 102 (146 games)
Age 24 (1999): .237/.337/.363, OPS+ 80 (120 games)
Age 25 (2000): .235/.342/.366, OPS+ 78 (128 games)
Age 26 (2001): .258/.341/.434, OPS+ 101 (157 games)
Age 27 (2002): .265/.331/.394, OPS+ 98 (153 games)

As always, thanks for taking a little time and visiting the dump's sportslog. If you've got any comments or questions, please drop us a line.

EDIT: The deal's apparently done, so Travis Lee will indeed be in Tampa next season.

posted by VZW Watcher at 7:33 PM -