The Mercenary and the Hapless Wonder

By Matt Himelfarb
Posted Tuesday, January 1, 2008

It has been just about a month since the Mets sent outfielder Lastings Milledge to the Washington Nationals for OF Ryan Church and catcher Brian Schneider, and the evidence for declaring Scott Kazmir part II is coming in faster than material needed to impeach President Bush.

Come on, everyone needs a holiday buzz kill at some point, right?

One piece of evidence came to my attention early Thursday morning. In a move hardly anyone could lose sleep over, the Kansas City Royals signed the recently non-tendered catcher Miguel Olivo to a one year deal with an option for 2009. Although the exact terms of the contract were not available as of this writing, it is hard to imagine Olivo will earn well above the league minimum, let alone the $10 million Schneider is due over the next two years.

No trust me, there’s more.

As usual, after hearing of any acquisition, no matter how inconsequential it may seem, I began my ritual of scrolling through several statistical web sites (First Inning, Baseball Prospectus, and The Hardball Times) to try and capture the gist of the deal that just went down. As the granddaddy of sabermetrics, Bill James, would put it, these numbers had the power of language; language that said there was little difference between the mercenary Schneider and the hapless wonder Olivo.

Don’t take my word for it- the numbers tell a great deal of the story.

Offensively:

(2007 Statistics)

OPS:

Schneider: .659
Olivo: .667

EqA:

Schneider: .248
Olivo: .232

wOBA:

Schneider: .284
Olivo: .282

K%:

Schneider: 13%
Olivo: 26.1%

BB%:

Schneider: 11.6%
Olivo: 3.4%

While Schneider is far better than Olivo as far as plate discipline, their overall offensive production, (OPS, EqA, wOBA) is exceedingly similar. It is also worth noting that 22.5% of Schneider’s walks in 2007 were intentional.

Defensively:

(2007 Statistics)

CS%:

Schneider: 28%
Olivo: 28%

ERA:

Schneider: 4.79
Olivo: 5.04

Of course, our analysis would be unfulfilled if we did not take a more thorough look at each of them defensively, since defensive performance constitutes a large part of a catcher’s value, and most metrics, such as the pair above, can be skewed and fail to cover key areas of a catcher’s defensive performance. Therefore, I enlisted the help of Matt Birnbach, a Florida Marlins analyst over at Most Valuable Network.

On Olivo, Birnbach said, “Amazing arm, can't catch for his life, has rough time with balls in the dirt, any ball thrown from the outfield or relay man that doesn't reach him on the fly will go to the backstop, quick feet, any ball out in front of the plate on a slow roller or bunt is no issue for him, decent-solid gamecaller.”

And, despite his well ballyhooed defensive reputation, the scouting reports on Schneider mostly consist of some version of, “an above average arm”, “good receiver” and “excellent at working with pitchers."

If reputation is worth anything, I am sure most people would take Schneider over Olivo if you put a gun to their head. But you are likely to get very much the same player in Olivo at about 20% the cost- and we have not even touched on Milledge yet.
 

You can contact matt at: matthimelfarb@gmail.com