Eric's Giants Blog

The obsession with Pedro Feliz

There's a temptation to just write this off as desperation, but it really does appear that Giants management, Felipe Alou and even Giants fans believe that Pedro Feliz is actually a good player, and that getting Feliz more ABs is going to help the team. Sometimes I feel like I'm living in an alternate universe where none of what I know to be true is actually fact. Let's address the positives first:

1. Pedro Feliz is currently hitting. .292: It's true, Mr. Feliz is hitting .292 (19 for 65).
2. Pedro Feliz hit 16 home runs in only 235 ABs in 2003.
3. Pedro Feliz is young and cheap.

Responding to each of these, with negatives attached:

1. There is nothing in the history of Pedro Feliz that indicates that he's anything approaching a .300 hitter in the major leagues. In 673 ABs thus far he's hit .247. In 7 seasons in the minors Feliz hit .268 over 2,433 ABs. So let's review - hit .268 in the minors, hit .247 in the majors over 3 seasons (albeit in limited playing time), hitting .292 in 65 ABs in April. Right, so if there's going to be a reason to play Feliz it had better not be his batting average.

2. It's true, he hit 16 homers in 2003 and had a slugging percentage of .515 doing it. He also made an out 177 of the 268 times he came up to the plate (72.2% out percentage to go with his .278 on-base average). I believe 2003 represents Feliz' career season. His home run power is real, and pitchers hadn't realized yet that he has utterly no strike zone judgement, and occasionally threw him a pitch to hit. He's sort of the anti Barry Bonds: it makes no sense to throw Barry a strike because it's better to walk him, and if you throw him one he'll whack it out of the park. Well, Feliz will also wack it out of the park, but if you throw him balls in the dirt you won't walk him - he'll swing harmlessly over them and get himself out.

3. Well, he's cheap. Feliz aged during the post-9/11 revelation of true player ages. In fact, he's 29, not 26 as originally thought. At 29 it's unlikely that Feliz develops into anything other than what he currently is (and no, I'm not saying here that a player can't develop plate discipline or strike zone judgement later in a career, because it has happened before), and what he currently is is a player who can't tell a ball from a strike and never has been able to.

His age puts in greater perspective his minor-league career season in 2000. That year, hitting in a hitter-friendly league in a small ballpark, Feliz put up the following traditional stats, and put himself on prospect lists:

.298, 33 HR, 105 RBI

Ordinarily if I saw a minor-league player in the Giants system put up those kind of numbers I might get pretty excited too (in fact, I was, at the time, hopeful that Feliz was going to develop into a good major-league player at that time). There are problems with using that season as an indicator of trend, though. First of all Feliz was 26 that season, not 23 as originally thought. Why is this so signficant? Because at 26 a guy having that season in AAA could be a late-bloomer, but could just as easily simply have had a fluke season. At 23 the likelihood is that a guy has broken out. Feliz had never hit for either average (career high to that date was .272 in 1997 at single-A Bakersfield) or power (career high slugging % to that date was .437 for AA Shreveport in 1999), so chances are his 2000 season wasn't predictive. Secondly, so much of his performance was based on a batting average spike, which tends to be the statistic most prone to fluctuation. And finally, even in that season Feliz swung at everything, just like he'd always done. He drew 30 walks in 533 plate appearances (which was and remains a career high). If it looked like Feliz had learned to distinguish balls from strikes and the result was better numbers, I'd believe in that 2000 season, but to my eye Feliz continued to swing at everything - he just happened to connect more often. While there are players who can get away with this (Alfonso Soriano, early-career Vladimir Guerrero, Miguel Tejada) these are all guys who utterly destroyed the minor leagues and are some of the most amazing atheletes in the game. Pedro Feliz can't get away with it.

So yes, Feliz is hitting .292 right now, and for his near-.300 (over .300 at the time) batting average, Mr. Genius Sabean has declared that Feliz will play every day. Looking behind his batting average, here's what Feliz is actually doing this season so far:

.292 AVG (19 for 65), .303 OBP (1 walk), .415 SLG (4 extra-base hits)

The batting average is the only thing Feliz is bringing to the table. All of his OBP and SLG are based on hitting singles. He's a .250 hitter (at best) in the majors. Do we really want to see what he's doing to do to the Giants offensively if they wait around for his batting average to drop to .250? This guy is supposed to help on offense? Goodness.

It's not like he's even good defensively.

posted by Eric @ 6:19 AM