A fan of the Yankees, Red Sox, and large sample sizes.

 
NICK JOHNSON

As a big Strat-o-Matic baseball guy, I constantly pay attention to hitter and pitcher platoon splits. For hitters, I like to see a big difference between how they hit lefties and righties (preferably favoring righties). For pitchers, the more consistent, the better. The reason? You can pick specific hitters to take advantage of opposing pitcher handedness, but when you pick your pitcher, you can't decide which of your opponent's hitters will be in the lineup. Why play a pitcher who gives up an extra .200 points of OPS against lefties, if you can help it? That's just asking your opponent to plop 7 or 8 lefties in to the lineup, even if some are merely mediocre.

Anyways, I only bring this up because I was checking out Nick Johnson's page over at ESPN.com. As a Yankees fan, I enjoyed watching Johnson get on base for the past two years, and was disappointed to see him go to the Expos. After losing almost two months to injuries this year, what do his splits look like? (OBP SLG OPS)

vs. L .486 .360 .846
vs. R .346 .500 .846

Hmm, consistent, yet... not. Nick's got an OPS of .846 against both righties and lefties, but he's doing it in drastically different ways. Patience against lefties, but no power to speak of (.280 AVG .080 ISO) with all his power (3 HRs, 7 2Bs in 72 ABs) against righties. As OBP is more important than SLG, he's actually been more productive against lefties so far.

Posted by Sky at 9:17 AM | 0 comments