At this point in baseball’s off-season most players that have decided to play have found a home. For a decent number of older veterans that might only be a temporary home thanks to a minor league deal and an invite to spring training, but most guys that are planning on carrying on are reporting to someone’s camp this week. That is not the case with David Eckstein as of yet.
Even on mlbtraderumors.com, there hasn’t been any speculation about Eckstein and any team coming together on an agreement for quite sometime now. He also hasn’t announced that he’s retiring either, leaving anyone who’s interested in a bit of limbo. Given his age, 36, and his performance over the last three years he’d probably be looking at no more than a bench role for 2011.
Eckstein spend last season with the San Diego Padres where he put together his best year since 2005. He hit .267 with a 5.5 percent walk rate and a .059 isolated power. Not too impressive, but he did put up a 6.2 UZR, his best UZR number in his ten year career. It all added up to 2.0 fWAR, almost matching his 2.3 fWAR from the last three seasons combined. With so much of that value hinging on his defense it’s not likely he could repeat that in 2011.
This isn’t meant to drudge up support for Eckstein to carry on either. He’s had a good career, made two All-Star appearances and won two World Series rings as well. The end of Eckstein’s career, if this is it, will probably lead to one last round of cracks from the sabermetrically enlightened at Eckstein’s expense. For much of his career traditional baseball writers have probably heaped more praise on Eckstein than was warranted.
He was all too often tagged as a “gamer” or “gritty” a “hustler” and the old “someone who plays the game the right way” type of player. Those are the kinds of labels those of us who are statistically inclined don’t care for. The terms can’t be quantified and only serve to inflate the stature of those who would otherwise be considered lesser players. You could call anyone a “gamer” all you wanted to with no real way of being proven right or wrong for doing so.
This is of course no fault of Eckstein’s but when a lot of the player’s justification for large amounts of playing time comes from throwing those terms around it doesn’t bode well for that player’s reputation amongst the sabermetric community. And he didn’t exemplify many of the virtues that we look upon favorably such as hitting for power or drawing lots of walks.
He was a good fielding shortstop through at least 2004 but probably should have been moved over to second base in 2006-2007. But he wasn’t shifted off short completely until joining the Padres in 2009. He never had a strong arm, but it’s not Eckstein who should be faulted for sticking at short longer than he should have.
Offensively, if he is all done he’ll finish up as a .280 hitter with a 6.6 percent walk rate and an ISO of just .075. He tallied 35 home runs, 232 doubles and 123 stolen bases as well. Only twice did he post a wRC+ over 100, once in his career year of 2002 with the Angels and again in 2005 with the Cardinals. Those also turned out to be his only two seasons with 3.0 fWAR or more.
Eckstein’s most impressive skill was avoiding striking out. He went down on strikes in just 8.3 percent of his career at-bats. From 2002-2010 he had the third lowest swinging strike percentage in all of baseball at just 3.1 percent. And it’s the way in which he did that he made him fun to watch.
Eckstein, who’s a small guy if you didn’t know, might not have been able to turn on a 95 mph fastball and crush it over the centerfield wall but he could foul it off if it looked like a strike and make the pitcher come at him again. If you want to throw one label on Eckstein as a hitter that might stick, pesk, might be the word. He’d foul off lots of pitches and try and slap hit his way on base. Whether or not getting hit by a pitch on a regular basis is a skill or just being stubborn is debatable, but Eckstein had an affinity for that too. He got plunked 143 times in his career second only in that time to Jason Kendall.
Does getting hit a lot or annoying pitchers by fouling off several pitches until he could put one in play have a lot of value? No. But Eckstein is the kind of guy who could only make it as an athlete in baseball. He certainly extracted the maximum amount of value from his body over the course of his career. Eckstein made watching baseball fun because he looks like one of us, actually he’s probably smaller than a lot of us. He had the look of a regular guy playing a kids game.
It’s easy to forget about guys like Eckstein especially now with all the statistics we have to dive into all the time and breakdown almost everything a player does into a value. Baseball was certainly good to Eckstein but Eckstein was just as good for baseball.
He doesn’t deserve a mountain of praise if this is the end, there won’t be any statues, Hall of Fame talk, none of that. He probably won’t even get a retirement press conference or a one day contract with the Angels out of it either. But we should all take a second to acknowledge the guy before moving on with the next season that lies in front of us. And if you read this far, you already did.
Original Story:
http://fansided.com/baseball/2011/02/...
