I've been as critical as anyone of Bill Bavasi, the new Mariner's GM. He's signed some bad free agents, made some bad trades, and always finds a way to spend more than he needs to for the level of performance he's getting. So, when my favorite baseball writer, Rob Neyer, wrote a column prompting an analysis of Raul Ibanez, which can be found here, I decided to take a look at his stats. I ended up doing a fair bit of number crunching, and wrote Mr. Neyer a fairly lengthy letter with my findings. Here is the body of that letter:
"I wanted to, first of all, look at his stats against AL West teams. Then, knowing from your column that Kauffman is Coors East, I wanted to only look at Ibanez on road games against AL West teams. This is what I found for his stats last season:
AVG/OBP/SLG/OPS
Edison Field .174 .269 .174 .443
Network Coliseum .154 .154 .231 .385
Arlington .231 .286 .346 .632
Safeco Field .455 .538 1.273 1.811
Of course, that's only 73 ABs. The Safeco numbers are amazing, considering the size of the park, and the strength of the pitching staff, but it's only 11 ABs. Here are his composite numbers from last year on the road in the AL West:
With Safeco: .254/.312/.506/.818 in 73 ABs
Without Safeco: .186/.236/.250/.487 in 62 ABs
Either way, really not impressive numbers at all, but it's a tiny sample. So, I took at look at his stats from 2001-2003.
Edison Field .278 .333 .389 .722
Network Coliseum .243 .378 .432 .810
Arlington .231 .268 .333 .601
Safeco Field .381 .435 .881 1.316
His numbers go up quite a bit when you look at a bigger sample. Here are his composites for the last three years:
With Safeco: .283/.354/.509/.863 in 154 ABs
Without Safeco: .251/.326/.385/.711 in 112 ABs
So, as we can see from this bigger (though still small) sample, Ibanez hasn't performed terribly bad on the road in the AL West, if you include Safeco. Without Safeco, though, he is a very mediocre corner outfielder.
What's curious to me is how much playing against the Mariners on the road has boosted his stats. It's a big park with a good pitching staff, but he does better there than at Arlington! The big question for the Mariners is if his performance benefits from the park, or if he just happens to mash their pitchers well. Either way, it's an expensive experiment.
Sorry for the lack of brevity, but it was an interesting question, and I wanted to see if I was justified in my distaste for the new GM. Hopefully there was something in this that you didn't already know. Thanks"
So, yeah, not the most technical look at Ibanez. I know it doesn't use any of the newer metrics to measure his performance, but I didn't really think that was particularly important in this instance. I mainly wanted to get an idea of what performance level we can expect from Ibanez when he's playing within his new division and away from the friendly confines of Kauffman Stadium. To be honest, I don't really have any answer at this point. I really am not sure if he just happens to be a hitter suited to hitting at Safeco, or if he has the Mariner's pitchers' numbers. Hopefully someone smarter than me will look into this more deeply.