This is another of those posts that reinforces the greatness of baseball. It strikes me sometimes, especially when the Twins are playing reasonably well, that anyone can enjoy the game on any level — from our friends who reduce just about everything to statistics all the way over to the touch-and-feel fans whose affection for their team has nothing to do with anything that contains a decimal point.

I like numbers. But what I like about numbers and baseball is that you can find a number to praise or bury just about anyone.

Take Torii Hunter. In my heart, there’s nobody I’d rather see come up in a clutch situation — as long as he’s playing for the other team.

In my head, I know that Torii batted .278 last season. And, even better, I know that average dropped to .206 when he batted with two outs and runners in scoring position. And, further, I know that with a runner on third and two outs, Torii was 4-for-31 last season. OK, I didn’t actually know that last one until I looked it up this morning. But the point is that I could find numbers to back up what my heart was telling me — that giving Bobby Abreu two intentional walks over the weekend to face Hunter was the right thing to do. And that I wasn’t at all worried when Joe Nathan walked Abreu (unintentionally) with two outs in the ninth on Sunday. Low and away. Swing. Miss. Strike three. Ballgame!

Frankly,  given Abreu’s tendency for line drives off the body parts of Twins pitchers (Blackburn, head, 2008; Perkins, leg, 2009, I need no other justification for putting Abreu on base.

And I know that Torii’s fans can find statistics to support how wonderful he is, and maybe even how the Twins were so stupid not to match the five-year, $90 million deal he got to leave Minnesota for California. Me? I always thought in my heart that, in his Twins days, Torii kind of tuned out when things were going bad and didn’t put the same care and attention into his batting or base running. I remember several ill-chosen attempts, for example, to take an extra base on hits.  That’s a heart thing.

The head thing is that, last year, Torii had a .333 average/.396 on-base percentage./586 slugging percentage in the 90 games he played that Angels won.

In the 56 games he played that the Angels lost, those numbers dipped to .182/.252/.261.

By comparison, the Joe Mauer numbers in 2008 were  .341/.426/.497 in wins and .313/.396/.396 when they lost. Justin Morneau? .323/.409/.543 in victory; .273/.329/.447 in defeat.

Obviously, the performance of key players has a major bearing on whether a team wins or loses, and you would expect the stats-in-defeat to be lower than when a player’s team wins. (Think of the basketball equivalent: the guy who scores 30 points when his team wins and fouls out with six when his team loses.) But Torii’s 151-point difference in batting average and 325-point drop in slugging percentage? That’s pretty choice meat for my contention that he’s a great player in good times.

Sometimes, the heart and the head are in conflict. Nick Punto vs. Brendan Harris at shortstop is one of those times. There are several Section 220 commenters of sound sentence structure who are absolutely convinced that Harris should be the everyday shortstop. In my head, I like the way that Harris plays shortstop. He fields cleanly, has a comfortable arm and shows some pop in his bat. He seems like he would be a serviceable shortstop.

But when I check the revised zone rating numbers at The Hardball Times, which includes the best of all defensive stats (revised zone rating), there was no comparison between Punto and Harris in 2008. Punto’s rating was .860, putting him with the league’s top defensive shortstops. Harris’ was  .779, putting him with Juan Castro and David Eckstein.

I need to swallow the frustration of his bad at-bats and dives into first base and accept that Punto right now is the best shortstop option for the Twins, with the understanding that — on a bench with bats (not to be confused with the Jason Tyner, Luis Rodriguez and Corky Miller benches of seasons past) — the Twins should be aggressive about pinch-hitting for Punto over the course of the season in situations where a big hit is needed.

That’s my fun with numbers for today, something to chew on for the first day of the season without a game.  If you need more numbers, check out Aaron Gleeman’s take on the new reliever, Juan Morillo. The guy does throw that hard.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 20th, 2009 at 11:03 am and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.