Can't figure this one out.This is discouraging. It really is. The press release just landed in my e-mail inbox and it really kind of took my breath away. The Royals have traded prospects Danny Cortes and Derrick Saito for Mariners shortstop Yuniesky Betancourt. Folks, this is your new shortstop. Betancourt is currently rehabbing from a hamstring injury, but when he returns, he will almost certainly become KC's regular at the most important defensive position on the field. Why is this such bad news? Well, Betancourt is 27, which means he is entering his offensive peak and should already be at his defensive peak. And, according to my system, he is the second-worst player in baseball this season.
The core statistic in my baseball evaluation program is Wins-Added. It measures a player's contributions in hitting, fielding and pitching, adjusts for context, compares to league and positional averages for a baseline and is expressed in terms of wins. Zero is average. The top player in baseball so far has been Tim Lincecum, the Giants' ace taken a few picks after Luke Hochevar a couple of drafts ago. Lincecum has 7.42 Wins-Added on the season. That means a team of otherwise average players would be expected to go 88-74 strictly because of Lincecum's presence and he's still got almost half a season to add to his total.
Zack Greinke and Albert Pujols follow Lincecum in the ratings. At the other end of the scale is Betancourt, who ranks 1,099th in baseball with -2.51 wins added. The only player worse is A's shortstop Orlando Cabrera. Betancourt ranks 1,015th of 1,023 rated defensive players. He's 795th of 807 hitters. You quite simply can't be much worse. The use of "worse" and "worst" may be a little misleading, though. As a measure of both productivity and efficiency, a player has to play a lot to accumulate a large negative number. There are players worse than Betancourt that don't see the field nearly as often. However because he is a regular, he does as much damage to his team as any player in baseball, except for Cabrera, who at least has a good track record.
Admittedly, Betancourt is having an off-season with the bat. He's hit .250/.278/.330 so far in 2009. I had him projected at .283/.309/.407. That would actually be acceptable if he were a good glove man. We'll get to that in a bit. His average has generally been .280ish and he's got a little bit of sock for a player at his position. Unfortunately, he knows the strike zone about as well as I know hieroglyphics. That is, not at all. He's walked 70 times in over 2,200 big-league plate appearances. The Royals simply can't afford to add another on-base sinkhole into their lineup, but that's exactly what they've done.
Let's get back to Betancourt's defense, which I'm sure is going to be praised in the team's quotes about this deal that will emerge later. My poor rating for his glovework is based upon the revised zone-rating statistics available at The Hardball Times. Betancourt's is the worst of any shortstop in the AL -- and it isn't even close. That may very well be due to the hamstring issue because he's generally around .800 in RZR, versus the .720 he's put up this year. But .800 is only an average RZR and paired with his horrific batting line, the end result is a losing ballplayer.
With defense, it's always a good idea to cross-index with other systems, so I did. The current gold standard in fielding analysis, in my opinion, is the plus-minus system of Baseball Info Solutions and available with a subscription to Bill James Online. In that, Betancourt ranks 33rd at his position. Last year, he ranked 35th. He's never posted a positive number in his career and has never ranked higher than 20th defensively among shortstops.
Betancourt is very much a worthy successor, and is very much similar to, the Neifi Perez, Angel Berroa, Tony Pena Jr. line of shortstops in Kansas City. To pull off the remarkable feat of extending this dynasty of ineptitude, the Royals traded a pitcher (Cortes) who was ranked as their third-best prospect by Baseball America entering the season.
Cortes wasn't having great season at NW Arkansas, but he wasn't terrible and all signs point to the 22-year-old righty becoming a member of a big-league rotation some day. The other prospect, Saito, was a lower-round draft pick by KC last year. He's a lefty and is a longshot prospect, but does fashion a respectable strikeout rate for a southpaw.
This is a head-scratcher. I don't understand -- or approve of -- this trade on any level. To me, this seems like another example of the Royals dealing for a player because of what they think he can be, rather than recognizing what he actually is.