Notes, quotes and comment

Danny Valencia is hitting over .300
so far for Kansas City, but most of
his playing time has come against
left-handers.

Important if true: Mike Berardino, the Pioneer Press beat writer who is also a Baseball America alumnus, says BA's mock draft 3.0 will project the Twins taking Tyler Kolek with the fifth overall pick June 5.

That would be the first mock draft to diverge from the Nick Gordon-to-the-Twins scenario, and an indication that BA's reporting suggests that scouting directors are truly leery of the health risks posed by truly high-velocity high schoolers. Kolek is regarded as the hardest-throwing prep pitcher of the draft era, which opened in 1965 with a guy named Nolan Ryan in the field.

No prep right-hander has ever gone 1-1, and if Kolek doesn't I don't know what it will take for it to happen.

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Former Twins third baseman Danny Valencia, on his third organization since washing out in Minnesota, figures to get regular playing time in Kansas City. The Royals shipped stalled prospect Mike Moustakas back to Triple A Thursday.

Valencia has put up a slash line of .308/.362/.423 with K.C., but that's not only in limited at-bats, it's come mostly against lefties. Right-handers have always turned off his faucet. Valencia would be a more useful player if platooning were common, but it ain't the seventies.

The Royals entered the season with playoff ambitions. Moustakas' failure dampens those ambitions. Valencia as a full-time player will dampen them further.

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It took the Dodgers a couple of days, but they released ear-chomping catcher Miguel Olivo on Thursday evening.

Perhaps there were procedural issues behind the delay, but canning Olivo had to happen. I expected it to come much sooner than it did.

I note that the original stories all cited Scott Boras, the high-powered agent whose client list includes the chompee (Alex Guerrero), as the source for the information about the chomping. I wonder if Boras went public quickly because he knew the Dodgers hoped to downplay the incident rather than lose a piece of catching depth.

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A big ouch: Prince Fielder figures to have spinal fusion surgery in his neck. If so, he will miss the remainder of the season.

I don't know enough about such things to guess at how much it will affect his play in future years. Fielder has seven years and more than $160 million left on his contract, which Texas inherited from Detroit; the Tigers will pay part of that, but on the whole Dave Drombowski, the Detroit GM, is looking really bright in moving Fielder off his payroll last winter.

Miguel Olivo: Sort of a catcher, sort of a cannibal

Miguel Olivo has hit
145 major league homers
and allowed 100 passed
balls.

Miguel Olivo is not having a particularly good year. He's a 35-year-old catcher who has milked more than 10 years of major league service time out of one real tool (he hits a few homers), but this year he got beat out by Drew Butera for the Dodgers backup job.

So he's spent almost two months at Triple A Albuquerque, putting up the kind of inflated numbers Albuquerque is known to produce while waiting for enough catchers to get hurt at the big club for him to get the call. On Tuesday he got into a fight in the dugout with teammate Alex Guerrero, and when the combatants were separated Olivo had a piece of Guerrero's ear in his mouth.

Fights between teammates are hardly unknown, of course, but gnawing off a hunk of flesh in the process is generally frowned upon. Dodgers GM Nick Colletti initially described the event as "not constructive," but by Wednesday evening he had taken it seriously enough to suspend Olivo.

All of which is attention-grabbing, but it's merely the prelude to a less salacious topic: What matters to teams when they evaluate catchers.

Alex Guerrero is a Cuban
infielder in his first year
in American ball.

Olivo's career is illustrative of something. He has a career slash line of .240/.275/.417; he's had eight seasons with double-digit home runs (high of 23); he's played for seven teams, two of them twice; he routinely puts up ugly walk-to-strikeout rates. And he's a terrible receiver. He's had five seasons in which he met Baseball Reference's criteria as a regular catcher, and he has led catchers in passed balls allowed four times.

I've written a few times about passed ball and wild pitch rates in connection with the Twins catchers over the past year. Olivo has allowed exactly 100 passed balls and 394 wild pitches in his big league career; that's about .42 WP per nine innings and about .52 WP+PB per nine innings.

That's bad, but not quite as awful as I expected it to be after crunching the numbers. It's quite possible that Josmil Pinto, given regular playing time, could rack up similar passed ball/wild pitch totals.

Olivo, however, got that playing time despite (a) being an awful catcher and (b) not really being a productive hitter. Yes, he has hit 145 homers; he also puts up walk-to-strikeout rates like 20 BB, 140 Ks (2011). He got 25 at-bats with the Dodgers earlier this year, and fanned in 12 of them.

It's not a skill set that appeals much to me, but Olivo's gotten a full career out of it, even if he never stayed in one place for long. The moral of his story: A catcher with one strong tool can last a long time.