Category Archives: Matt Kemp

Dodgers Depth Chart Analysis: Center (Field) of Attention

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Center field is the shortstop of the outfield, as far as the minor leagues go. Future stars can often be found playing here, much like at shortstop. Yet it is also filled with players who will likely never start there at the major-league level. This does not diminish their potential, but for every “true” center fielder manning the position somewhere on the farm, there are plenty of future left and right fielders who can still be at least average to above-average big-leaguers.

He might not stay in center field, but Joc has a chance to be a solid everyday outfielder in the Majors someday. (Photo courtesy of Dustin Nosler)

He might not stay in center field, but Joc Pederson has a chance to be a solid everyday outfielder in the Majors. (Photo courtesy of Dustin Nosler)

Much as was done with the prior positions, the players I am listing here were primarily center fielders in the minors last season. Again, this does not mean they will end up pushing Matt Kemp to right field. That player probably does not exist in the Dodgers’ system, but he is hard to find in most farm systems. While Jackie Bradley Jr. might be coming up behind Jacoby Ellsbury in the Red Sox system, there are no obvious prospect replacements for fellow post-2013 free agents Shin-Soo Choo of the Reds, Curtis Granderson of the Yankees, or Carlos Gomez of the Brewers.

While the Michael Bourn rumors encouraged some to scream “move Kemp out of center!” (though his collision with the wall in Colorado probably did that even more), the fact is that Kemp is still just 28 years old should indicate he is capable of playing center for at least a few more years. As long as he avoids crashing into things at full speed. If he has learned nothing from that wall in Denver, he should at least call Ellsbury and see how full-speed collisions have wiped out two of his last three seasons.

That debate can rage another time. For now, here are the Dodgers’ center fielders down on the farm, starting with a familiar name.

Tony Gwynn Jr.: The 30-year-old veteran is still around to collect the $1.15 million remaining on that head-scratching two-year deal he received prior to 2011. Sure, he was dropped from the 40-man roster, but the market for light-hitting center fielders is a barren one, so Gwynn has opted to stick around (for now). Ultimately, it is not a lot of money, so the Dodgers could opt to sever ties in spring training if they would rather play a younger man in center at Albuquerque. The fact they have kept him around this long might be more out of necessity, seeing as how Kemp is coming off shoulder surgery and there are probably some doubts as to how a combination of Carl Crawford, Jerry Hairston, and Skip Schumaker could handle center (at least defensively) if Kemp is not ready for Opening Day.

Matt Angle: A 27-year-old fringe prospect snagged off waivers from the Orioles last year, Angle got off to a terrible start in Albuquerque before righting the ship and finishing with a .303/.376/.412 line. It still did not save him a spot on the 40-man roster as he was dropped late in the season. Without the right to refuse the assignment and opt for free agency, Angle is effectively a man in limbo. He could return to the Isotopes, but with Gwynn around he almost seems a bit redundant. Angle’s best hope at this point might be to have a strong enough spring to convince another team desperate for center field depth to swing a trade.

Nick Buss: The former USC Trojan has not moved as fast as most college players, only reaching Double-A as a 25-year-old last season. Now 26, Buss is coming off a fairly average season, batting .272/.328/.411 with eight home runs, 57 RBI, and 19 stolen bases. In a lot of ways, Buss is similar to Angle, only with a shade more power and less patience at the plate. He rarely walks and is often graded as average or slightly below average defensively. At best, Buss could end up a fifth outfielder, capable of playing all three positions. With Gwynn and Angle ahead of him, he might be squeezed out of a starting job at Chattanooga.

Joc Pederson: The best prospect here, Pederson probably will not play center regularly in the Majors, but at the very least he should make for a solid corner outfielder. Still just 20 years old (until mid-April), Pederson fared well against older competition in the California League last year, batting .313/.396/.516 with 18 home runs, 70 RBI and 26 stolen bases. Minor League Ball rated him as the Dodgers’ No. 3 prospect, while FanGraphs pegged him at No. 9. John Sickels said Pederson “has solid tools and terrific instincts,” while FG disagreed by saying “he lacks outstanding tools.” While the scouting community might be split, the Dodgers still think highly of Pederson. Though he ran out of steam in the Arizona Fall League, after he had played for Israel in a World Baseball Classic qualifying tournament, Pederson showed enough with Rancho Cucamonga to move up to Chattanooga for 2013. Whether he stays in center or moves to a corner will be determined in spring training.

James Baldwin III: The son of the former White Sox right-hander, this Baldwin combines blazing speed (53 steals last year) and a habit of swinging at everything (177 strikeouts). In many ways he is the ultimate raw American prospect, not unlike his fellow Dodger Dee Gordon. Baldwin hit just .209/.293/.334 with seven homers and 40 RBI for Great Lakes. MLB.com’s Jonathan Mayo called him a “very toolsy center fielder with a ton of upside and a long way to go,” stressing that patience will be needed to turn Baldwin from a great athlete into a polished ballplayer. Considering the lessons learned with Gordon, plus a lack of a desperate need in Los Angeles, and Baldwin should move slowly up the ladder. He is only 21, so there is plenty of time. He could move up to Rancho Cucamonga this year or he might remain at Great Lakes.

Noel Cuevas: A 21-year-old Puerto Rican, Cuevas already fits the bill of a utility outfielder, having played 25 or more games at all three positions while bouncing around the Dodgers’ system last season. Overall he hit .267/.337/.365 and finished with 35 stolen bases. While he does not strike out often (just 40 in 288 at-bats), he rarely walks (24). Cuevas could return to Great Lakes to back up Baldwin, or more likely he will be the utility outfielder at Rancho. He projects as an organizational player only.

Jeremy Rathjen: The sleeper prospect here, Rathjen is a big kid (6-foot-6, 190 pounds), who draws a lot of comparisons to Corey Hart. The difference is that Rathjen, at least for now, can play center, as he did 45 times last year in Ogden. An 11th-round pick out of Rice last June, Rathjen hit .324/.443/.500 with nine home runs, 53 RBI, and 16 stolen bases in the thin air of the Pioneer League. The Dodgers could send him to the unfriendly confines of Great Lakes, or, as he is already 22, he could skip ahead to Rancho should Baldwin need more time in the Midwest League. Much like Pederson, Rathjen’s future could be in a corner spot, but for now the Dodgers will keep him where he is and hope that his bat was not an illusion of Ogden’s altitude and his age versus his competition.

Jacob Scavuzzo: An organizational player who saw the bulk of the time (20 games) in center in the Arizona League. Scavuzzo hit just .220/.281/.317, about all one might expect of a teenager drafted in the 21st round. He will remain behind in extended spring training and hope to fight for a roster spot with Ogden in late June.

* * *

That’s it for the center fielders, where some talent resides, but no one guaranteed to play there in Los Angeles in the future. There is still some talent at the corners, led by a certain Cuban defector and more. Look for the corner outfielders up next (as a warning, it might be split into two parts, since there are an awful lot of ‘em).

Someone Should Make a Database of Players Who Insist On Playing Through Injury

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92topps_mattkempToday’s entry: Matt Kemp.

Kemp had significant surgery to repair a labrum injury, sustained when he smashed into the center-field wall at Coors Field on Aug. 27. He said doctors told him the soreness he feels is normal for the repair work done by Dr. Neal ElAttrache on Oct. 5. Kemp said he can tell that the sharp pain he felt while insisting on playing through September is gone.

“I can definitely tell my labrum is stronger, my shoulder is stronger from the rehab I’m doing,” Kemp said. “I’m sure when I come to Spring Training there will be some limits put on me for some things. I’m not trying to be 100 percent for the first game of Spring Training. I’m trying to be 100 percent for the first game of the season.”

Kemp said he was told to have surgery shortly after suffering the injury, but insisted on playing as long as the Dodgers were in contention for a postseason berth. Kemp was batting .337 at the time of the injury. After the crash, he hit .214 with six home runs, 15 RBIs and 33 strikeouts in 112 at-bats. The Dodgers were two games out of first place when Kemp was hurt and finished nine games back.

“I couldn’t shut it down,” Kemp said. “They told me to shut it down and think about surgery — or at least rest. But I just couldn’t do it. I had to continue and play. That’s what I do. I can’t sit and watch.”

“Sharp pain.” Love that. Love it, especially the part where Kemp was told he needed surgery but insisted on playing anyway, because why should a person in a position of authority — say, a doctor, or a manager — have any say? If this sounds familiar, that’s because this was us in September…

So, what, if anything, have we learned? That no matter how many times it’s been drilled into everyone’s head over the decades that “heroes play through pain,” it’s nearly a universal truth that hiding an injury or attempting to gut your way through it usually ends up hurting everyone in the end. For pitchers, that can mean a minor arm injury becomes a serious one (hi, Eric Gagne!). In Kemp’s case, even if this doesn’t have deleterious effects on his long-term health, the short-term impact is that he’s been a main contributor to the offensive struggles of the club.

Not only did Kemp’s injury-limited awful play hurt the Dodgers in September, now we have to worry about what effect it will have on 2013.

For the last time: playing through serious injury doesn’t make you tough. It makes you foolish, because it hurts the team both in the present and the future. It’d be wonderful if athletes could come to recognize that.

2012 Dodgers in Review #23: CF Matt Kemp

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.303/.367/.538 449pa 23hr 3.5 fWAR C-

2012 in brief: Was best player in baseball for first month before repeated injuries to hamstring and run-ins with outfield fences turned season into a disappointment.

2013 status: Will make $22m in first year of 8/$160m extension.

******

Here’s how highly we think of Matt Kemp: the man hit .303/.367/.538 and I still went back-and-forth on whether to give him a C- or a D+. Actually, that’s getting ahead of ourselves; before we get into where things went bad, let’s remember how great they were at the start of the season, when Kemp blew through April with 12 homers and a line of .417/.490/.893. It’s easy to forget now after everything that happened, but at the time, Kemp was so hot that when he didn’t crush a ball at the speed of light, it was almost a disappointment. (We were, as you can imagine, slightly spoiled.)

It was wonderful. It was amazing. It was unlike anything we’d seen before. For example, on April 14, my game recap of a 6-1 win over San Diego was merely three animated GIFs of Kemp (twice) and Andre Ethier hitting homers. By the 20th, barely two weeks into the season, it was already difficult to find new ways to say “Kemp is awesome”:

Honestly, it’s only April 20, and I feel like I’m already running out of things to say about Kemp. Oh, an opposite-field homer in his first at-bat, his 8th dinger of the year? Oh, getting on base in each of his four at-bats, with three hits and a walk? Oh, a line that’s still sitting at .481/.525/1.000? I’d like to share with you his position on the National League leaderboards – it’s Triple Crown city, in case you didn’t know – but it hardly seems fair, because that would imply that Kemp is actually playing in the same league as the rest of the mere mortals out there.

The next day, he did it again:

Matt Kemp is out-of-this-world, indescribably good. Ho hum, another homer, his ninth of the season. He’s not going to match Sammy Sosa‘s record of 20 homers in one month, set back in June 1998, if only because the Dodgers didn’t start their season until April 5. But the record for April homers, currently shared by Albert Pujols (2006) and Alex Rodriguez (2007), remains in reach at 14.

And then again a week later, in Bryce Harper‘s debut:

Jamey Wright set the Nats down without trouble in the top of the tenth, and that brought Matt Kemp to the plate. Kemp crushed a Gorzelanny pitch into center for the walkoff win, and what else can you really say about Kemp? (Other than, “why in the hell would the Nationals even pitch to him there?”) Harper’s debut brought the spotlight to this game, but Kemp reminded everyone that for all of the potential about what Harper might yet be in the future, the present belongs to Beast Mode.

…and once more on April 30:

I’m not sure if I can find a better way to describe Matt Kemp‘s absurd April than simply by saying this: in 2011, he had a fantastic season, one of the best offensive years in the long history of the Dodgers, a campaign which should have netted him the NL MVP even prior to any controversies around Ryan Braun. And yet despite everything he achieved last year, at no point did he even come close to having a month like the one he just completed to start off 2012.

Kemp didn’t quite reach the Pujols/Rodriguez April homer record, but his 12 did set a Dodger mark. Unfortunately, that April 30 homer would be the last we’d see for quite a while. Kemp didn’t go deep in May… or in June… or in July until the 12th inning of a game against the Phillies on July 18, ending a drought of more than two-and-a-half months.

We all know why, of course. Kemp slipped on a wet field in Chicago trying to get to a ball in center on May 5, and didn’t start the next day (though he did pinch-hit). Despite concern here and elsewhere about his condition, he started the next six games, contributing little, and finally was forced out of a game against Colorado on May 13:

The fun started in the bottom of the third when Matt Kemp, who had already driven in the first Dodger run on a groundout in the first, bounced out to Troy Tulowitzki but was noticeably limping while trying to beat the throw. He was removed from the game, throwing his glove at the dugout wall out of frustration, clearly still bothered by the sore left hamstring which he first injured last weekend in Chicago. Honestly, I wish he’d have received a day off before this.

Later that evening, we learned Elian Herrera was on his way to the Dodgers, though we didn’t yet know why. Two days later, after results of his MRI were back, Kemp was placed on the disabled list, where he clearly belonged. After serving the minimum stint on the disabled list, Kemp returned on May 29 and… well, look. You know as well as I do that he made just two starts before re-injuring himself and leaving in the second inning of the May 30 game. It’s been very popular since then to claim that he came back too soon, that the training staff should have made him wait. But is it really that clear? He played in several minor league rehab games, and he made it through his first game back without any problems. I’m not arguing conclusively either way here, just that it seems to me that due diligence was done in deciding when to bring him back. If anything, I think he was allowed to return too soon when he hurt it in the first place, but I can’t find anything on this blog that shows we thought he was coming off the DL too soon when he did.

This time, Kemp’s return wasn’t quick, costing him all of June and half of July before coming back to start the second half of the season. As I don’t need to remind you, that was the darkest time of the year. With Kemp out, Ethier slowed, and everyone else in various stages of health, Don Mattingly was regularly forced to trot out lineups with things like “Juan Rivera-Scott Van Slyke-Adam Kennedy, #3-4-5!” Say what you will about Mattingly’s choices and the struggle of the revamped roster to produce after Ned Colletti’s shopping spree, I firmly believe that the single biggest reason the Dodgers came up short this year is that their best player missed about a third of the season. You think having a healthy Kemp in center rather than Tony Gwynn might have made a difference?

By the time Kemp returned, the Dodger lead in the NL West had shrunk from 5.5 games to a mere half-game. Kemp, however, picked up where he left off, hitting .324/.370/.488 over 41 games between July 13 and August 27, including a 17-game stretch to start August where he had hits in 16 games and hit .423/.468/.662 over that span. His absence seemed like a hiccup; with Hanley Ramirez & Adrian Gonzalez in town and Luis Cruz establishing himself, suddenly the Dodger lineup seemed primed to explode.

Now, if you’re saying that a “41 game period that ended on August 27″ seems awfully arbitrary, you wouldn’t be wrong. But I’m also assuming that you know exactly why I chose that date, because August 28 is, well, when this happened:

Kemp sat out two games with what was initially termed as a sore knee & jaw, but he was clearly not the same, hitting a meager .214/.267/.420 over 120 plate appearances for the rest of the season. If there’s blame to be placed on the medical staff or manager it’s here, because while Kemp’s willingness to play through pain is commendable, putting him out there when absolutely anyone could see that he was injured wasn’t helping the team. (I will, however, accept the counter-point that it’s not like giving more playing time to Rivera would have really made for a larger contribution.)

Two days after the season ended, Kemp had surgery to repair a torn labrum and frayed rotator cuff in his left shoulder, a procedure that will prevent him from swinging a bat for about three months but shouldn’t cause him to miss the start of 2013. Will it limit his power, however? That remains to be seen, though we all remember what happened to Shawn Green. (Yes, that was something of a unique case, but still.)

Thus ends a season which could have been great, but just didn’t work out that way. Argue about the grade if you must; when healthy, in April and August, Kemp was even better than we could have hoped for. Yet for two-thirds of the season, he was either off the field due to injury or clearly limited by it. For a team which missed tying for the second wild card by a single game, nothing else in 2012 had quite as large of an impact.

******

Next up! Andre Ethier gets himself paid!

If Matt Kemp Hadn’t Been Allowed to Play Through Injury…

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I’m not a doctor. Neither are you. (Well, only most of you, as it turns out.) And more than ever this season, I’ve tried to be cognizant of the fact that we’re not in the clubhouse, we’re not in the front office, and we’re not privy to conversations happening between executives, doctors, coaches, and players. It might actually be a conservative estimate to say that 95% of what we hear players and executives say to the media is either a finely-tuned version of the truth or an outright lie.

That’s especially true when it comes to injuries, because it’s unfair for us to watch on television and expect to know exactly what’s going on inside a player’s knee or back or elbow. Hell, sometimes injuries catch us completely by surprise; for weeks, A.J. Ellis‘ September slump was chalked up to “running out of gas at the end of his first full season,” until we found out days after the season ended that he’d undergone knee surgery to repair his meniscus. (News which was broken by his wife on Twitter, by the way, because the times we live in are fantastic.)

This is all a long way of saying that while I know there’s so much we don’t and can never know… it still drives me up the wall to see a quote like this from Matt Kemp yesterday, regarding the left shoulder surgery he had on October 5:

“When I hurt it, I asked the doctors if I could damage it more by playing with it and they said no, so I kept playing, and when they got in there they were surprised that I could play with it. It was worse than they thought,” said Kemp in his first comments to the media since the operation.

This isn’t quite the same thing as “player attempts to hide injury and causes additional damage to both himself and the team by playing through it,” which we saw with Jerry Hairston this year and dozens of players in years past. With the team desperately trying to hang on in the playoff hunt, Kemp can’t really be faulted for attempting to play through pain and be out there for his boys. He’s a team leader, and that’s what leaders do.

The problem is that Kemp was even allowed to make that decision. I’m not suggesting doctors are magicians, of course, because the human body is a complicated miracle and it’s impossible to know exactly what’s going on, especially when you’ve yet to open him up and check inside. So to find out additional information once he’s on the table isn’t unexpected.

It’s just… despite all my caveats above, everyone knew Kemp wasn’t right. Everyone. And not only was he risking further damage to himself by trying to play through it, he was hurting the team by being awful down the stretch. Granted, it may not have mattered because it’s not like giving more playing time to Juan Rivera (his likely replacement in left, with Shane Victorino moving to center) is an improvement. But something that I think has been forgotten about Kemp’s season, which we’ll get to more in-depth in his upcoming review, is that it’s not as simple as “great in April, hurt through July, bad down the stretch”. Between returning from his second hamstring pull and running into that wall in Colorado, Kemp was once again very good. After that… not so much.

July 13 – Aug 28: .324/.373/.488 185 pa
Aug 31 – Oct 3: .214/.267/.420 120 pa

It got so bad that Kemp missed two games in a big series against San Francisco during the second week of September to go for another shoulder MRI. Even at the time, we were hardly disappointed he was out:

You want to know how rough things are right now? Dylan Hernandez reported a short time ago that Matt Kemp would miss the remaining two games of the Giants series after undergoing an MRI on his shoulder, and the response here isn’t “oh, no.” It’s “yeah, that sounds about right, and it’s about time.” It’s not strictly accurate that his recent slump has coincided with his adventures in the Colorado outfield, because he was on a bit of a “.250/.306/.321 over the previous two weeks” slide even before that, but it doesn’t take an advanced medical degree to see that Kemp just hasn’t been right since then, collecting just three hits in his last 32 plate appearances.

So, what, if anything, have we learned? That no matter how many times it’s been drilled into everyone’s head over the decades that “heroes play through pain,” it’s nearly a universal truth that hiding an injury or attempting to gut your way through it usually ends up hurting everyone in the end. For pitchers, that can mean a minor arm injury becomes a serious one (hi, Eric Gagne!). In Kemp’s case, even if this doesn’t have deleterious effects on his long-term health, the short-term impact is that he’s been a main contributor to the offensive struggles of the club.

Kemp came back and was even worse, hitting .192/.250/.288 over the next two weeks as the Dodgers continued to slide, and we couldn’t quite understand why he’d not been shut down. By the end of the month I’d pointed to his injury-fueled struggles as a much more important reason than Adrian Gonzalez why the Dodgers wouldn’t make the playoffs, and while Kemp briefly rebounded by hitting four homers in the month’s final week, he also ended the season on an 0-10 skid, including leaving half the state on base during the crucial loss in game #161.

Again, I can’t really blame Kemp for any of this. It’s not like his injury concerns were kept secret from the team, and you’d never expect him to pull himself out of the lineup in a pennant race. It’s just at some point the manager or the training staff or both ought to step up and realize that A) despite the greatness of the player, he is really, really not helping you and B) the long-term health of the franchise star you just signed to a $160m extension needs to be the priority, rather than a long-shot bid for the second wild card.

On the whole 2012 was a very difficult year for the Dodger medical staff, since only four teams lost more days to the DL than they did. I’ve generally tried not to put too much blame on the trainers for that, because when Ned Colletti is going to go out and sign older players with injury histories like Hairston, Mark Ellis, Juan Rivera, Ted Lilly, etc., that’s the sort of thing that’s going to happen. (It’s a miracle that Chris Capuano & Aaron Harang made it through unscathed.) In addition, it’s hardly fair to put Kenley Jansen‘s cardiac concerns on them. But this is one case where health concerns and the business of winning baseball games seemed to coincide, and Kemp was allowed to keep playing. It’s not difficult to wonder if his poor September was the difference in missing the playoffs by one game, and now there’s concern about his 2013 since the shoulder injury was worse than anticipated.

Again, we weren’t in the room and we don’t know what went into making the decision to keep him on the field. But from this view, it appears to be all downside, and that’s an opinion that was easy to have months ago; this isn’t revisionist history. Let’s just hope this doesn’t continue being a problem into next year as well.

Dodgers Win Fifth Straight, But Can’t Gain Ground

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Matt Kemp ended up taking the worst of this, which, DOES NOT WANT.

For three innings, it briefly looked like it might be one of those days against Colorado starter Jorge De La Rosa, who’d allowed 12 runs (10 earned) in the first 6.2 innings of his comeback from Tommy John surgery over two starts. You know what kind of days I mean, the kind where one team clearly outmatches the opposition but just can’t get it done, and with St. Louis beating Washington today, the Dodgers are quickly running out of opportunities to waste.

Fortunately, that worry didn’t last long, thanks to another display of power from a suddenly resurgent offense. In the fourth inning, Matt Kemp his 23rd of the year and fourth in five days. After Adrian Gonzalez singled (his first of two on the day) and Hanley Ramirez flew out, Luis Cruz parked his sixth of the year, giving the Dodgers a 4-1 lead.

Ramirez made it 5-1 by driving in Shane Victorino (who had three singles) to end the fifth – Kemp was thrown out on the play as shown above, and was slow to get up – and then A.J. Ellis continued his remarkable run in the sixth by slamming homer #12, marking his sixth straight game with an RBI. That, combined with another effective game from Josh Beckett (albeit against a Colorado lineup that might not satisfy the MLB requirements for bringing enough regulars to road spring games) proved to be more than enough to sweep the series and win the team’s fifth straight game.

Unfortunately, it’s almost certainly too little too late. The 10-4 drubbing that Carlos Beltran and the Cardinals put on the Nationals keeps them two games up with three to play, and treading water isn’t good enough at this point. When they send Aaron Harang to the mound against Matt Cain and the Giants tomorrow night, the Cardinals will be about six innings into a Bronson Arroyo/Jaime Garcia matchup with the Reds in St. Louis. Can the Dodgers sweep San Francisco while the Cardinals lose at least two of three, with Adam Wainwright & Chris Carpenter lined up for the final two? Stranger things have happened, I suppose.