Category Archives: Juan Uribe

Juan Uribe Is Just Too Good to Be True At This Point

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uribe_three_outs_springThe Dodgers are currently up on the Giants, 5-3, in the top of the fourth inning of today’s spring training game in Arizona. All five of those runs came in the second inning, thanks to — as you can see at right — singles from Mark Ellis, A.J. Ellis, & Hanley Ramirez; walks from Tim Federowicz, Adrian Gonzalez, & Andre Ethier; and doubles from Jeremy Moore and Skip Schumaker. That’s all backing a solid outing from Josh Beckett (three whiffs in two clean innings) and much less solid debuts from J.P. Howell (who allowed two runs in his lone inning) and Brandon League (who allowed a Brett Pill dinger).

What else do you see from that second inning linescore? Good friend Juan Uribe being responsible for all three outs in what was otherwise a fantastic inning.

I know it’s spring. I know it’s February 26, that these games don’t count, and that a box score doesn’t tell you whether Uribe crushed balls that Gregor Blanco & Brandon Crawford made wonderful plays on. It almost doesn’t matter, because Uribe has obviously lost the benefit of the doubt long ago.

Even in a spring game, Juan Uribe finds ways to disappoint. I’m actually impressed. Who can really let fans down this early in camp? Juan Uribe, that’s who.

Juan Uribe, Backup First Baseman

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uribe_smilesThree years ago (!), I wrote a post titled “Casey Blake, Backup Shortstop?“, based on a mention from the long-lost Tony Jackson that Blake (along with Jamey Carroll) might be an option to fill in at shortstop if when Rafael Furcal was injured. Furcal, of course, did get hurt, Carroll spent most of his time playing short, and Blake never once saw time there.

I’m a day behind on this because I was out of town for the last few days, but that’s the first thing that came to mind when I saw this nugget from Bill Plunkett of the OC Register:

With no obvious backup first baseman behind Gonzalez, Mattingly said utilitymen Jerry Hairston Jr. and Juan Uribe would work at the position this spring. Uribe has never played there as a professional. Hairston has made two brief appearances there in the majors.

While the idea of Uribe ever starting a game at first base — which is, you know, only the position that demands the highest level of offensive production and a waste of Uribe’s only value, his strong throwing arm — might be enough to have us all wistfully mourn for the days of James Loney & Juan Rivera, I’m easily filing this under “camp talk”. For now.

Uribe, as we know, has just about no role on this team any longer. He’s probably not higher than fourth on the depth chart at any of the three positions he usually plays, yet he still exists. Meanwhile, Mattingly literally has no real backup first base option behind Gonzalez, so you pay lip service to fitting a (very) round peg into a square hole. The fact that he’s still around in camp means that I can’t fully believe he won’t be on the roster until the Opening Day list comes out without him on it. But as I’ve said before, I really believe he’s here only to see if Mark McGwire can perform a miracle in six weeks, and when he can’t, Uribe would be jettisoned at the end of camp. (I know, into the sun.)

Hairston, meanwhile, seems like an acceptable — if imperfect — option. Having Skip Schumaker & Nick Punto (and Luis Cruz, if he fails to hang on to a starting gig at third) around behind Mark Ellis makes it likely that he’ll see far less time at second base than he did last year, and so having him give Gonzalez a breather once a month seems like a reasonable solution given the limited choices he has there.

Fortunately, Gonzalez doesn’t have a terrible platoon split, because that last sentence was going to read “a breather against tough lefties,” before I remembered that they need him to help out Carl Crawford & Andre Ethier in that regard, once again getting back to the huge flaw in the roster. Can they just trade an excess starter for Casper Wells or Franklin Gutierrez or Drew Stubbs already and just make this easier on everyone?

92topps_ajellisMattingly also added…

 ”A.J. has played there in the past,” Mattingly said of catcher A.J. Ellis. “But I don’t really like the thought of doing that (with his primary catcher). I really like the thought of Adrian playing 150 games or more over there.”

While I totally agree with the idea of not wanting to put your starting catcher out there at other positions — what, we miss the days of Russell Martin playing third base? — I can’t help but note that Ellis’ previous first base experience consists of single games in the minors in 2003, 2004, 2007, 2008, & 2011. (And I’m guessing they’re not all starts — while the minor league logs don’t indicate whether he started or not, I imagine you can’t play an entire game at first and manage only a single putout, as he did in 2003 & 2008.)

By the way, five games of experience at first base is exactly the same as he has on the mound, having made it into eight innings over five games for Jacksonville in 2006-07.

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Speaking of Ellis, we all remember being surprised to find out that he had undergone a relatively secret knee operation after the season. According to Ken Gurnick earlier this week, Ellis “was injured in a home-plate collision July 18,” and indeed he did not play again until July 22. That said, I went over that game against the Phillies — that was the Clayton Kershaw / Cliff Lee matchup that ended on a Matt Kemp walkoff in the tenth — and there’s nothing close to a collision. All three of the Philadelphia runs scored on two hits, neither of which had Ellis making any contact, and while he reached base twice, he never advanced past second. So either it was less of a “collision” and more of an awkward tweak, or it was a different game entirely. Too bad; I was really hoping to pin that on Shane Victorino, too.

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Finally, over at FanGraphs, we’re doing depth chart investigations for every team, and I took the Dodger rotation. This is probably all information that you all know, but since I’ve seen larger sites claiming that every Dodger starting option from Harang to Lilly to Koufax is definitely going to be the #5 starter, it’s probably informative for the larger audience.

What Does It Take To Be Worse Than Juan Uribe?

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92topps_juanuribeOver at MLB.com, they’ve recently unveiled their 2013 fantasy baseball preview, including ranking 843 players — in order — based on their fantasy relevance. Unsurprisingly, Dodgers Matt Kemp, Hanley Ramirez, Clayton Kershaw, & Adrian Gonzalez rank in the top 50.

Much more surprisingly, Juan Uribe is not only ranked, he comes in at #795, meaning that there’s 48 players (subjectively, of course) deemed to be worse than he is. Among those who are more valuable: Tony Gwynn, Cesar Izturis, Nick Punto, Elian Herrera, Adam Kennedy & Miguel Cairo.

So what does it take to actually be worse than Juan Uribe? Let’s investigate.

Being unemployed

Behold: the large group of Jim Thome (#802), Aubrey Huff (#803), Roy Oswalt (#804), Daisuke Matsuzaka (#810), Chone Figgins (#816), Brad Penny (#819), Livan Hernandez (#820), Scott Podsednik (#823), Jason Repko (#828), Jason Giambi (#832), Jose Contreras (#837), Sean Burroughs (#834), Jamie Moyer (#840), & Bobby Jenks (#842) contains years of outstanding performance and at least one borderline Hall of Fame case. But it’s not 2005 anymore, is it? All are over 30, in some cases well over, and none have 2013 clubs at the moment.

It seems that one way to be worse than Uribe is to no longer be a baseball player.

Being signed to a minor-league contract

Dig these names…

Austin Kearns (#786), Ben Francisco (#787), Darnell McDonald (#808), Rick Ankiel (#811), Jeremy Hermida (#814), Andrew Brown (#815), Brian Bixler (#821), Ryan Sweeney (#825), Lyle Overbay (#826), Don Kelly (#827), Joe Mather (#831), Dan Johnson (#833), Drew Sutton (#835), Mike Jacobs (#836), & Ramiro Pena (#838)

…because it might be the last time you ever hear them. They’re all in camp as non-roster invites, and maybe a few will get some big-league time, but the majority probably have seen their last days in the show.

Having no chance to play in 2013

Randy Wolf (#839) certainly fits in the “old and unemployed” section, but he gets a special call-out here for having blown out his elbow in September and undergoing Tommy John surgery, all but certainly costing him all of 2013.

Having no chance to play in 2013 and running afoul of the United States government by forging your name and age

Juan Carlos Oviedo (#841), formerly known as Leo Nunez, was suspended after getting involved in another age scandal, then got into three minor-league games before getting hurt and getting a Tommy John zipper of his own in September.

Being completely unable to hit professional pitching

Jose Iglesias (#813) is a highly touted shortstop in the Boston system, mainly because he’s a fantastic defensive player. He’s also got a career .626 OPS… in the minors. Good luck with that. Josh Vitters (#800) isn’t quite that bad, but the former #3 overall pick has failed to live up to that billing in the Cubs organization since being drafted in 2007 and hit .121/.193/.202 in 109 plate appearances in his first taste of the bigs last year.

Getting busted for PED usage

Jason Pridie (#798) & Marlon Byrd (#824) each went down for performance-enhancing drug usage in 2012 and have only minor-league contracts in 2013.

Losing your job in 2012

Armando Galarraga (#809) & Jeff Suppan (#818) were each DFA’d by two incredibly pitching-needy teams in Houston & Minnesota, respectively, which should tell you all you need to know about them. Matt LaPorta (#822) remains with the Indians but lost his 40-man spot this winter, and Daric Barton (#830) finally lost his starting job with Oakland and spent most of the year in the minors.

This is the list Uribe really belongs on.

Being someone I’ve never heard of before

Moises Sierra (#799) is a 24-year-old outfielder who made his debut for Toronto in 2012. Eduardo Escobar (#817) saw time with both Minnesota and the White Sox around being included in the Francisco Liriano trade. Supposedly.

Not having played professionally in 2012

Scott Kazmir’s (#807) downfall is well-known; after several years of solid performance for Tampa Bay, he was traded to Anaheim and completely fell apart, making just one start in 2011 for the Angels and toiling in the independent leagues last season; he signed a minor-league deal with Cleveland in December. Grady Sizemore (#829) was once one of the best center fielders in baseball, but continued knee issues allowed him to play just 104 games in 2010-11 and not at all in 2012; he’s currently without a team.

Not having played professionally in 2011 or 2012

Jeremy Bonderman (#806) last pitched in 2010 for Detroit, though he’s attempting to make a comeback with Seattle this year. I’d trade Uribe for him in a heartbeat.

Being Bill Hall, apparently

Poor Bill Hall. What did he ever do to anyone? He was actually a pretty valuable player at one point, hitting 35 homers while playing all over the infield for the 2005 Brewers. Since leaving Milwaukee in 2009, he’s bounced from Seattle to Boston to Houston to Fresno to San Francisco to the Yankees (Tampa, really, since he didn’t make it out of spring training) to Norfolk to Baltimore to Anaheim, where he signed a minor-league deal with the Angels last week. He’s hit .221/.285/.382 since 2009, which is, well, terrible. Terrible enough to be the absolute lowest-ranked player here? Apparently so.

Ah, who are we kidding? I’d still take the old, busted, injured & retired guys listed here over Uribe. Nearly every single one. But not you, Aubrey Huff. You know what you did.

On the Continued Existence of Juan Uribe

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Juan Uribe falls swingingOn February 4th, FanGraphs will put out “FanGraphs+“, a web-based supplement of premium content that includes over 1100 player capsules along with several long-form articles. It’s a great value for a reasonable price. 50 of those player caps were done by yours truly, including most of the Dodger roster, and the one that sticks out most in my mind is the one for Juan Uribe. While I can’t repeat what I said exactly here, suffice it to say that any recap of Uribe’s 2012 goes well past actual analysis and well into performance art; I believe I invoked some of humanity’s greatest disasters. It was unquestionably one of the recaps I enjoyed writing the most.

I bring this up because one of the questions I receive on a fairly regular basis is some variation on “why is Juan Uribe still on the roster?!”, and it’s a fair question. He’s really, truly, awful; terrible to the extent that I really don’t need to delve into the statistical facts to back it up — if you must know, his .199 career batting average as a Dodger is the worst in team history by a non-pitcher with as many plate appearances as he has — and the way he was treated by Don Mattingly down the stretch last year, shunned as though he was a leper, would seem to make it impossible to bring him back. (To Uribe’s credit, he reportedly dealt with the situation with class and without causing clubhouse problems.)

That said, Opening Day is still two months away, and while the idea of shipping him off immediately (yes, fine, into the sun) is more than a little appealing, it doesn’t serve much of a purpose other than to satisfy a little bloodlust. For the moment, Uribe isn’t taking up a 40-man roster spot that could be better used elsewhere, not when the likely trade of at least one starting pitcher should free up one spot and the bottom of the roster is still occupied by easily-DFA’d fluff like Justin Sellers. He’s not giving away outs, not when the games aren’t being played yet. He’s not costing money that isn’t already committed.

By simply cutting him now, you cut your losses and move on, much like Seattle recently did with Chone Figgins. That’s fine, but is it really that efficient? No, it won’t bother the new-money Dodgers one bit to swallow the $8m still coming to him — ultimately, that’s what I expect will happen — but by cutting him, you lose the chance to include him in a trade and make him some other team’s problem. (To clarify there, no, no other team is going to come to the Dodgers trying to get him, but if the Dodgers are taking on someone else’s problem or if the deal is weighed a little too heavily for the other team, it’s conceivable to include him.) You also lose the chance to have him work with new hitting coach Mark McGwire, and while I don’t really have a ton of hope that McGwire can find the magic bullet, nor do I think any of us ever expected Uribe to be this bad.

Besides, you could probably use the depth for the endless spring training games. Having Luis Cruz & Hanley Ramirez each away at the World Baseball Classic opens up some time on the left side, and Jerry Hairston may be limited early as he recovers from hip surgery. As much as we like the idea of “anyone who isn’t Uribe,” does anyone here really love Nick Punto or Dallas McPherson that much? No? I didn’t think so.

So no, I don’t want to see Uribe in uniform on April 1, nor do I expect him to be. But does it really matter if he gets cut on January 30 or February 30 or March 30? As long as he’s not eating up plate appearances in games that count, I submit that it doesn’t.

There Is Just Nothing Juan Uribe Can’t Do Poorly

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Over at FanGraphs, Matt Klaassen has been going through the best and worst plays of 2012 based on WPA. (For those not familiar, that’s “Win Probability Added”, and is a context-based stat which shows how each play in a game added or subtracted from a team’s chance to win. It’s based on situation, so a two-run homer, for example, is far more valuable when you’re down one in the ninth than when you’re up six in the fourth. You can read a full definition here.)

A few days ago, Klaassen looked at the worst bunts of 2012 by WPA; that is, the bunts which did the most damage to a team’s chance of winning. (The correct answer here is probably “all bunts”, but still.) Who’s the very first name on the list? Oh, this is just wonderful:

Worst Bunt into a Double Play

One would think that a bunt into a double play would be the worst overall bunt of the season, but that is not true this year, at least. On May 8, Brett Pill homered off of Clayton Kershaw in the top of the second inning to put the Giants on top of the Dodgers 2-0. By the bottom of the seventh, the Dodgers were still down 2-1, but Ryan Vogelsong, who had been dealing all game, was on the hill. The Dodgers started a nice rally with singles from Juan Rivera and James Loney. It was a nice situation to have — two runners on with no outs. Juan Uribe came to the plate and bunted. It made sense — Uribe’s hitting has totally gone into the tank since making the move from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Maybe he’s a double agent. Buster Posey fielded the bunt and the Giants managed to get both Uribe and the lead runner, costing the Dodgers -.228 WPA. It wasn’t the Dodgers last shot — Andre Ethier‘s double play ball with the bases loaded in the eighth was even more devastating — but Uribe’s bunt was very bad.

I didn’t have a recap of that game, but the disastrous call was not lost on others at the time…

Eric Stephen, “Dodgers Sacrifice Chance To Win In Loss To Giants“:

The Dodgers offense could only manage one run in their 2-1 loss to the Giants Tuesday night, as the Dodgers’ demise was hastened by a pair of ill-fated bunts.

Down one run, the Dodgers threatened in the bottom of the seventh inning off Ryan Vogelsong when Juan Rivera and James Loney opened the frame with singles, but a Juan Uribe sacrifice bunt attempt turned into a 2-5-3 double play that effectively neutered the rally. Uribe has one successful sacrifice bunt attempt in the last three seasons.

Chad Moriyama, “Don Mattingly Regrets Nothing About His Bunting, I Regret Watching The Game“:

In the bottom of the seventh inning, with the Dodgers down one run, the team basically hit the lottery by somehow managing to get Juan Rivera and James Loney to not make outs.

That brought up Juan Uribe in what was clearly a traditional sacrifice situation, especially considering that Uribe sucks. However, while he does have 60 sacrifice bunts in his career over 5121 plate appearances, he’s had only one sacrifice bunt in the last three seasons over the course of 941 plate appearances. As such, it’s safe to say that he’s not exactly accustomed to bunting.

Uribe executing a successful sacrifice is anything but a foregone conclusion, then you add that you’re actually lessening your chances of scoring runs by bunting, and it’s just an overall terrible decision.

Mattingly though, of course, called for the bunt anyway, and it worked out SPLENDIDLY

The next inning, Mattingly called for another bunt with men on, and while this one worked, it merely opened up first base ahead of Matt Kemp. Kemp was of course walked intentionally, and San Francisco lefty Javier Lopez retired lefties Andre Ethier, Loney, & Tony Gwynn to end the threat. Mattingly later said he wouldn’t have changed his decision in either case, even after the fact… and all of a sudden I’m wondering if this post should have been more about Don Mattingly than Juan Uribe.

Either way, bunting is the worst. The. Worst.