Previewing the 2010 lineup

J.J. Hardy (right) isn't the ideal No. 2 hitter. His career OBP is .323, and he has stolen all of five bases in 571 major league games.

But that's probably where he's going to hit for the Twins.

A reasonable projected lineup:

1) Denard Span, CF
2) J.J. Hardy, SS
3) Joe Mauer, C
4) Justin Morneau, 1B
5) Jason Kubel, DH
6) Michael Cuddyer, RF
7) Delmon Young LF
8) ?????, 3B or 2B
9) Nick Punto, 2B or 3B

Bill Smith, the Twins general manager, apparently said something during Friday's conference call about the Hardy-Gomez trade that suggested Joe Crede is a possibility for 2010 after all. I suppose there's a price tag at which it's worth it to go that route again.

In which case you can plug Crede into the eighth slot. And then Hardy has to hit second, as Young and Crede are even less qualified for the job than he is, and there's no way to justify moving Punto to a maximum plate appearance slot.

If not Crede, then who? Danny Valencia? Matt Tolbert? Brendan Harris? Alexi Casilla? They shouldn't hit second either.

If Hardy hits as he did in 2007-08, his thump will more than make up for his lack of walks. if he hits as he did last season, it's a problem.

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Comments on the trade from around the blogosphere:

Rob Neyer: ... Between the money they won't be spending on (Mike) Cameron and the money they won't be spending on Hardy, the Brewers have gained a fair degree of payroll flexibility, which is the lifeblood of every financially challenged general manager.

And of course you have to love this deal for the Twins, who got a player they really wanted (for good reason) in exchange for a guy they didn't really want at all.

Seth Strohs: I LOVE it! What (a) great move! In essence, the Twins solved two problems with one move. First, it solves the SS situation for the next two years. ... the Twins will not bring back Orlando Cabrera, which is a huge positive, offensively and defensively. ... Secondly, the OF situation is set.

Aaron Gleeman (via Circling the Bases): Some trades just make sense and this is one of them.

The Gomez-Hardy trade, continued

Some questions raised by today's trade:

1) One I doubt I'll ever know the straight answer to: Did the Twins decide to trade Carlos Gomez (above) for a shortstop, or did they try shopping Delmon Young too?

They clearly weren't going to trade Young for J.J. Hardy, because the Brewers have Ryan Braun in left and Corey Hart in right. They needed a center fielder to stick in between them, not another corner outfielder.

I never decided firmly in my own mind who is better, Gomez or Young, although I leaned more often toward Gomez for the speed and defense. Neither man has mastered the strike zone or appears likely to; Young, at least superficially, appears more capable of hitting with the flail-at-everything approach.

2) What next for Orlando Cabrera?

The veteran is clearly in the nomad phase of his career. Now 35 — his birthday was this week — he was, by at least some defensive metrics, the worst defensive shortstop in the majors last season.

Somebody's going to sign him, but it won't be Minnesota.

3) Who's the reserve CF?

This trade means a regular outfield of Young-Denard Span-Cuddyer, with Jason Kubel probably wedging in some playing time in the corners when Joe Mauer DHs. (Side issue: Jose Morales, the switch-hitting heir apparent to Mike Redmond as the backup catcher, is regarded as a better hitter left-handed, so if they schedule Mauer's semi-days-off to coincide with Morales' strong side, it will be against right-handed pitchers — and they'll want to keep Kubel's bat in the lineup.)

There's no backup CF in that crew. The best options (for 2010) in the minors are Jason Pridie and Dustin Martin, neither of whom impressed in Triple A last season. The Twins generally prefer to fill such gaps in house, but this one might be an exception.

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A few relevant pieces of information:

* Hardy, because the Brewers sent him to the minors for about three weeks, will not be eligible for free agency until after the 2011 season.

* Gomez is arbitration-eligible now, won't be eligible for free agency until 2013. His agent is Scott Boras.

* Hardy had a poor season at the plate, but his defensive metrics remain high.

* The Johan Santana trade now amounts to two years of Gomez, Jon Rauch, J.J. Hardy and whatever Delois Guerra amounts to. I think it's looking better.

Go-Go gone-gone; Twins land Hardy

J.J. Hardy, 2008 NL Gold Glove shortstop and twice a hitter of 20-plus home runs, comes to the Twins in return for Carlos Gomez.

Initial reactions, to be updated later:

Hooray: That Orlando Cabrera's subpar defense won't be back;

Boo: 1) At this point, Hardy is likely to be the No. 2 hitter, and his on-base percentages, even in his good seasons, doesn't really fit there.

2) Ron Gardenhire wanted to cement Denard Span into an outfield slot. Now he's got it: Center. I think Span is a better fit in left. Defensively, an outfield of Span-Gomez-Michael Cuddyer is a lot better than one of Delmon Young-Span-Cuddyer. But now that the Twins won't play most of their games on artifical turf, that may not matter as much.

There are (lifting a thought I have in my current draft of the Monday column) three priorities to the Twins offseason:

° re-sign Joe Mauer;
° revamp the infield;
° stabilize the rotation.

This is step one of the second priority. And it's a good one.

The death of a theory

Don't you just hate it when the facts get in the way of a perfectly good theory?

There were a ton of switch hitters in the playoffs this year:

* The Yankees had four of them in their regular lineup: Mark Teixeira, Jorge Posada, Nick Swisher and Melky Cabrera.

* The Phillies, their World Series opponent, opened their lineup with a pair, Jimmy Rollins and Shane Victorino.

*The Angels — vanquished by the Yanks in the ALCS — had three switch hitters playing full time — Kendry Morales, Chone Figgins and Erick Aybar — and two more (Macier Izturis and Gary Matthews Jr.) who had more than 300 at-bats.

*The Twins — vanquished by the Yanks in the ALDS — filled the bottom of their lineup with switch-hitters (Jose Morales, Matt Tolbert, Nick Punto) for their their Sept.-Oct. drive to the division title.

So it occurred to me: Perhaps this is the next wave of platoon strategy.

Backing up a bit:

The reality of the platoon advantage — that right-handed hitters do better against left-handed pitchers, that left-handed hitters do better against righties — has been known at least as long as the major leagues have existed. (There was a switch hitter — Bob “Death to Flying Things” Ferguson — in the National League in its 1876 inaugural season.)

For most of baseball history, platooning has been played out in offensive strategy. In the past couple of decades, managers have turned it around — cramming their rosters with specialty relief pitchers.

It’s an ugly, time-consuming strategy, and Bill James, among others, argues that it’s counter productive. But it has taken root, and even the team James works for is committed to it.

Managers do it because shuffling a half-dozen relief pitchers in and out like a military march — left, right, left, right — negates traditional platoons.

It’s difficult to commit two players to a platoon at third base if you’re carrying 12 pitchers on a 25-man roster. It’s just as difficult to make it work if the opposition can repeatedly swap out its pitcher.

But switch-hitters — at least legitimate switch-hitters — carry their own platoon advantage. They are resistant to the LOOGYs and ROOGYs populating today's bullpens.

So, goes my notion, perhaps this wave of switch hitters in the playoffs is a deliberate strategy.

I tested it by crunching some numbers. I figured out how many plate appearances came from switch hitters in both leagues this year, team by team. Then I set out to do the same for the 1987 season — '87 because that was at the end of the Earl Weaver era (Weaver being a major proponent of massive platooning) and just before Tony LaRussa and Jim Leyland started filling their rosters with multiple spot relievers.

I quit doing '87 when it became obvious that switch-hitters got more playing time that year than today.

AL, 1987: 16.6 percent of at-bats were from switch hitters. AL, 2009: 15 percent. NL 2009: 15.5 percent.

And if the Yankees seem impressive with their 37.4 percent of plate appearances coming from switch-hitters this year, consider the 1987 Cardinals (Vince Coleman, Ozzie Smith, Tom Herr, Willie McGee, Terry Pendleton, Jose Oquendo) — 57.7 percent of their at-bats came from switch hitters.

Plus ... the Yankees didn't set out to build their lineup around switch hitters. Xavier Nady was supposed to be the regular right fielder, but he got hurt. Brett Gardner emerged from spring training as the center fielder, but he didn't hit and he got hurt. That opened the playing time for Swisher and Cabrera.

More to the point, switch-hitting is difficult. HITTING is difficult — doing it well from one’s weak side is nearly impossible. Figgins and Morales, for example, are markedly better hitters left-handed than from the right side. A LOOGY — a Left-handed One Out GuY — still has the edge against those guys.

Then there’s this: The National League team with the highest use of switch-hitters this year was San Francisco. The problem was, other than Pedro Sandroval, their switch-hitters were notably unproductive.

Being able to switch hit is good. It’s far better to hit, period.

Damn Yankees

The World Series turned out pretty much as I expected — the Yankees' left-handed starters, CC Sabathia and Andy Pettitte, made two starts each against a Phillies team with little right-handed power, and the Yanks won three of the four.

I have generally found it impossible to root for the Yankees. The Steinbrenner era, which started in 1973, just four years after I started paying attention to baseball, was one of escalating bullying, smugness and excess. Joe Girardi, the current Yankees manager, said during this Series that George Steinbrenner "deserves" another World Series title; I have my own notion of what his life deserves, and of which circle of the inferno it entails.

But "deserve" has little to do with it. The Yankees outspent everybody by a wide margin yet again, and should have won this championship. But it didn't have to go their way.

Girardi (above) deserves credit for making things go their way. I suspected when he was hired that he was too tightly wound, too intense, to do well in the Yankee job, that in that particular environment the manager needs to ease the pressure, not apply more. Perhaps in the long run that will prove true.

For this year, in this postseason, he recognized the one glaring flaw in his highly-compensated roster, and smothered it. He had three starting pitchers worth any sort of confidence — Sabathia, A.J. Burnett and Pettitte — and a stable of young middle relievers.

So he used just the three starters — becoming the first manager since the playoffs went three series deep to win the championship with just three starters — and refused to lean heavily on any reliever not named Mariano Rivera. Everybody else was shuffled in and out.

The Yankees are not a particularly good defensive team, but they don't have to be. They're not, despite the great baserunning play in Game Four by Johnny Damon, a particularly speedy bunch, but they don't have to be. They have a deep lineup, laden with legitimate switch-hitters — the Yankees, according to Baseball Info Systems, had the platoon advantage in 73 percent of their plate appearances, which is a very very high number — and Girardi wisely is content to follow the old dictum credited to Hall-of-Fame manager Bill McKechnie: "If you take care of the percentages, the percentages will take care of you."

Two-hundred million and then some will take care of a lot of percentages.

The Iwamura deal

Few trades or moves are announced during the World Series — Commissioner Bud frowns on it even as he consumes a good fourth of the time between the end of the regular season and the opening of spring training with repeated off days.

It's the hot stove league equivalent of Jorge Posada going to the mound eight times in an inning, four times in one at-bat. Wasting time for the sake of wasting time.

But stuff is happening behind the scenes. Teams are talking, deals are being struck. And one such deal — which has a quick timeline to be consummated — has leaked out: Tampa Bay sends infielder Akinori Iwamura (above) to Pittsburgh for reliever Jesse Chavez.

Three comments:

* A couple of offseasons ago, when the Twins made the Delmon Young trade, I said that if the Twins were going to trade for a Tampa Bay infielder I would rather it be Iwamura than Brendan Harris. And when word popped out Tuesday afternoon that the Rays were about to trade Iwamura, my initial thought was: To the Twins, I hope.

But on further reflection, I decided he wouldn't be an ideal fit.

His stat line, to be sure, plays better at the top of the order than does Orlando Cabrera's. And the Twins could, depending on who else they have on the roster, deploy him at either second or third.

But he's a left-handed hitter, and adding him would mean a lineup with lefty bats one through five — Denard Span, Iwamura, Joe Mauer, Justin Morneau, Jason Kubel.

* This is essentially a salary dump. The Rays hold (the trade isn't official until Commissioner Bud says it is, and he's not OKing anything until after the Series) a $4.85 million option on Iwamura with a $650,000 buyout. And they have to exercise that option by the day after the World Series. They have cheaper talent on hand to plug in at second base — more on them later — and didn't want to commit the money to Iwamura without a trade in hand.

That the Rays are dumping salary one offseason after a World Series appearance says something about the economy in southwest Florida (which is bad) or the long-term viability of major league baseball in Tampa-St. Petersburg (which has been questioned before). Iwamura is at least an average second baseman; I would have thought he could bring more than a marginal reliever.

*Ben Zobrist, who hit 27 homers while splitting time at various positions, is getting the quick attention as Iwamura's successor at second base. But don't discount rookie Sean Rodriguez, part of the Rays haul from Anaheim for Scott Kazmir. If manager Joe Maddon is hell-bent on fixing Zobrist into one spot in the field, it might be right field.

Newspapers and the World Series, Part II

A few days ago I noted that neither of the Twin Cities metros were staffing the World Series, and I speculated that they were not alone in skipping the event.

I'll say not.

According to Murray Chass — who used to cover baseball for the New York Times before losing his job in an economic move — 29 of the 60 papers that cover major league teams home and away are skipping this year's World Series.