Phillies Foul Balls

According to the reports that are floating around, the Phillies are about to sign Pedro Feliz to a two year contract. It’s tempting to leave the analysis at pointing out the fact that Baseball Prospectus’ list of comparable players to Feliz has late career Charlie Hayes right at the top. Really, it’s hard to top that for pithy indictments.

However perhaps some detail. The plus side to all of this is that the pitching staff should be happy. Feliz is unquestionably a good defender slightly better than Abraham Nunez was and worlds better than Wes Helms and Greg Dobbs have been. Right now the Phillies have an outstanding defensive infield or at least three-quarters of an infield. (Subway commercial aside, Howard’s defense is, uh, not good.) In fact the only weak defensive spots are going to be left and first so they are in good shape there.

Offensively, well, yeah, there’s the rub. While I’m usually a huge proponent of on-base percentage, I will admit that in certain circumstances a low OBP, high slugging guy can be useful in a lineup, in particular if he’s hitting behind a bunch of high OBP guys. My usual example is that in 1993 Pete Incaviglia was a useful player because he was behind Kruk, Hollins, and Daulton who were always on base. When he came back in 1996, he was a waste of a spot because they didn’t have those guys getting on base. Feliz might actually be closer to the first case here. If he’s hitting behind Utley, Howard, Burrell, and Werth that’s a lot of OBP ahead of him, so if he can pop 20 to 25 homers, he’s going to knock in a lot of runs.

That being said, my thinking for a useful low OBP high power guy is someone with an OBP around .310 to .320, not someone in the .280 to .290 range like Feliz is. That’s just really awful. Even Nunez managed higher than that last year. That being said, neither Helms nor Nunez came close to the power Feliz showed, so the only one of the three they had at third who I’d say definitely hit better than Feliz was Dobbs, and I can’t shake the feeling that last year was a career year for him.

Putting all that together, I’m not really sure this is going to hurt the Phillies all that much, if at all. Feliz is not a good overall player, but they were so unbelievably weak at the position last year, there’s really nowhere to go but up. If Feliz keeps up the defense and the power, the overall production from third might go up a little bit. Just not very much.