Printer-friendly

Contact Author

March 10, 2010

Prospectus Hit and Run

Ozzie's Baserunning Whizzes

by Jay Jaffe

It's tough to beat the White Sox's Ozzie Guillen for entertainment value. His shoot-from-the-lip style creates controversies. His new Twitter account gives general manager Kenny Williams nightmares. Hell, he's got his own MLB Network reality TV show in the pipeline, and his views on professional wrestling are far more interesting than those of Tony La Russa. He's easily the CVORM (Comedic Value Above Replacement Manager) leader among skippers.

One of Ozzie's funnier bits is rather unintentional, however. Despite the coupling of his predilection for smallball tactics (bunting, base stealing, and manufacturing runs) with a desire to call attention to them that's so outsized you'd think these were the 1959 Go-Go Sox, his teams have been overly reliant on the longball in recent years. So reliant that colleague Joe Sheehan christened the Guillen Number, which measures the percentage of a team's runs derived from homers. Last year, the White Sox ranked third in the majors at 41.0 percent, trailing only the Yankees (45.1 percent) and the Phillies (42.1 percent). They've been among MLB's top four during every year of Guillen's tenure:

Over the winter, Guillen pressed Williams to provide him with a more flexible roster, one which offered more speed than he had in the past. In reacting to the team's shedding of sluggers Jim Thome and Jermaine Dye and the addition of Juan Pierre, he declared that aggressive base running would be a major point of emphasis this spring. While the Sox have stolen 10 bases through their first five exhibition games, the skipper's statement highlights the fact that they've been hemorrhaging runs on the base paths, according to our Equivalent Stolen Base Runs (EqSBR) and Equivalent Base Running Runs (EqBRR) metrics, the latter of which incorporates not only steals and caught stealing but advancement on hits and outs:

Under Guillen, the Sox have failed to break out of the bottom half in EqSBR, and they've done so only twice in EqBRR. In all, team has cost itself between four and five wins via base running over the past six years, which at least explains why Guillen thinks it's an area where the team needs improvement.

Still, that won't mean a whole lot more runs scored, particularly if the Sox can't rise above last year's measly rankings of 20th in on-base percentage (.328) and 27th in True Average (.249). PECOTA is cautiously optimistic, forecasting a .339 OBP and 750 runs scored, which would rank 15th in the majors, but consider the notable arrivals and departures in the White Sox lineup: