Milwaukee Brewers Blog - Between the Green Pillars : Rickie Weeks

Time to move Rickie down in the order (and that's a good thing!)

badger80 — Thu, 14 May 2009 15:58:00 GMT

Tim (Chicago): Rickie Weeks is playing over his head right now .274/.338/.504. What's his ceiling, .240/.360/.420?

Keith Law: His ceiling is higher than what he's doing right now. You are severely underestimating his tools.

No matter how Rickie Weeks is playing, the guy gets the most coverage of any player on the team. Even if Ryan Braun is the superstar, Rickie Weeks is the lightning rod. It's a lot more fun to talk about Weeks when things are going good, and right now he's starting to live up to the lofty (and somewhat unrealistic) expectations. It might be a bit greedy, but watching Weeks hit the ball right now makes me wonder if they might be able to get more production out of his bat.

Bill James ran the numbers on the the percentage of at bats each position in the line up sees runners on base:

Leadoff                  33%
2nd                       43%
3rd                        48%
Cleanup               50%
5th                        48%
6th                        46%
7th                        46%
8th                        46%
9th                        45%

It jumps out that the lead off spot sees the least at bats with runners on by a significant margin. In 500 at bats over the course of a season, the lead off hitter will see 50 fewer runners on base, so it may be time to look at moving Weeks down in the order to take advantage of the way he's hitting the ball. It's great to see him lead off games with a home run, but it may be more beneficial to move him down even one spot in the order and hope to turn a couple of those solo home runs into 2-run shots.

The Brewers don't have a prototypical lead off hitter on their squad. Corey Hart is the guy who most likely would get moved into the lead off spot in the past. Hart's patience at the plate has returned this season, so it makes him a decent candidate to move to the top of the order. He hits with power, but his home run total will probably end up in the mid-20s. The Brewers won't waste a ton of power in that spot. JJ Hardy is similar to Hart, and after his slow start Hardy is starting to get on base with some regularity. In the last 14 days, he's hit .361/.442/.667. To say that Hardy is a streaky hitter is an understatement. When Craig Counsell gets the platoon start at third, he may be the best candidate to lead off. He works pitchers and just gets on base. No power and decent speed. Does he really need to bat second to "advance the runner" for Ryan Braun and Prince Fielder? Those two don't struggle knocking guys in from anywhere in the diamond.

Really we're talking about Weeks knocking in a handful of extra runs by moving him down one spot in the order. That may not be worth one extra win on the season. There is no problem leaving him in the lead off spot, but the option is there to try and take advantage of potentially dynamic bat by dropping Weeks one spot in the order.

What Is Going On With Rickie Weeks?

Ryan Topp — Wed, 06 May 2009 16:32:00 GMT

Something is going on with Rickie Weeks' offensive game. He isn't at all the same player he was through the first 4 years of his career. It's not that he is having his "best" run as a hitter, because he's had 1.000 OPS months before and he isn't in that territory this season. His on base percentage is actually down from where it has been at times in his career. His power is as good as it's ever been, but not outrageously so. He is, however, hitting for more average than just about any time in his career. His AB's are very different than in the past as well. So what is going on?

A cruise around ESPN.com's Baseball Prospectus section led me to this article on the evolving and improving game of Kevin Youkilis that might help to discover some answers. The basic point is to figure out why, while several of Youk's more basic measures of plate discipline regressed (OBP, pitches per plate appearance), his overall productivity went up. Their hypothesis is that he has learned better which pitches to attack early in the count and has increasingly done so, to his benefit.

Unfortunately it's an "insider" feature, but here is the first key portion of how his game changed in a seemingly negative way while actually improving and how it relates to Weeks:

There is some truth to the hypothesis that he has become more aggressive over time. For example, in his first exposure to the majors, he had just 39 plate appearances that resolved early in the count -- on the first pitch or at 1-0 or 0-1. These accounted for 15.7 percent of his plate appearances. Discounting his abortive 2005, his percentage of early-resolving plate appearances grew each season, reaching 22.2 percent last year. This seems to be an extremely successful adaptation for him; in 2008, Youkilis hit 12 of his 29 home runs by swinging early in the count, batting .439 in the process. There was a concomitant drop in the percentage of his plate appearances ending in a walk, sinking from 13.3 percent in 2004 to a bare 8.9 percent last year. His pitches per plate appearance bottomed out at 4.02.

So how does Weeks stack up? Well, for his career, 22.7% of his PA's resolve in those "early count" situations, which is a higher baseline than Youkilis was working with. Looking at the year by year results something jumps right out:

2005: 20.5%
2006: 23.7%
2007: 20.0%
2008: 23.8%
2009: 31.9%

See it?

It's early, but that is a monumental leap in the number of early ending PA's and it all happened at once. So in that sense, Weeks is like Youkilis. Has this been a similarly successful change for Weeks? In those early ending plate appearances, Weeks is hitting .400/.432/.800 with 3 homers, 3 doubles, a triple and 2 HBP (the reason why his OBP is higher than his BA). When he's attacking those early pitches, it's paying off for him in a big way, which is probably a sign that he is looking for a specific pitch to hit in that case, which is just what you would want from him.

Another way to see Youkilis' transformation into a more aggressive hitter is to see the percentage of pitches that he swung at. Not only has he swung at more pitches outside of the strike zone over time, increasing his percentage of such swings from 15.1 percent in 2006 to 20.9 percent last year, but his overall percentage of pitches swung at rose from 37 percent in 2004 to 41 percent last year.

Ditto for Weeks. According to his fan graphs page, Weeks has increased the percentage of pitches he swings at outside the zone from a steady 19.6 career percent (he's never been more than a percent different than that from 2005-08) to 26.5 percent this season and his overall percentage of pitches swung at this season is up more than 4 percent from his career number. That is just the beginning of the info to be gleaned looking at swing percentages.

While the percentage of pitches inside the strikezone that Weeks makes contact with is only 4 tenths of a percent different from his career average (84.2 compared with 83.8 career), he is making more and more contact when he swings outside the strikezone over time. In fact, it's risen each and every year, from a low of 39.0% of the time in 2005 to 59.1% of the time this year so far. So not only is Weeks swinging at more pitches outside of the strikezone than ever before, he is also making more frequent contact on those swings.

In the end, Weeks isn't seeing drastically more balls inside the strikezone than normal this year, with 53.1 of pitches being in the strikezone this year compared with 52.1 percent for his career. He is just attacking pitches earlier and expanding his zone a bit to hit pitches he can make contact with. It's a long season, and we're going to have to wait to see if this sort of "progress" will ultimately result in more production and eventually pitchers working around Weeks more than they have thus far. The data we do have, though, suggests that this is not at all the Rickie Weeks that we all came to know and love as Brewer fans.

This isn't to say that Weeks is morphing into an MVP cannidate the way that Youk did, but it's interesting how parallel they have been in regards to attacking earlier in the count and expanding their strikezone at the right moments. One has to wonder if there might be some connection between Dale Sveum taking over as hitting coach and his having spent a lot of time working as a coach in Boston, where they work hard with players on being aggressively selective. In any event, it looks like this is having a positive impact on Weeks' game, even if his OBP is down a bit in the early going. How nice would it be to never again hear misplaced complaints about Rickie Weeks' supposed uselessness?

Rolling The Dice On Rickie

Ryan Topp — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 22:56:24 GMT

Just in case you weren't sick to death of the topic of Rickie Weeks, Tom Haudricourt put together a story detailing what is being done to solve the problems of the sometimes frustrating, occasionally brilliant, Weeks:

"They're very straightforward," said Weeks, 26. "That's what I want. Just tell me."

Sveum, in his new role as hitting coach, and Randolph, who doubles as bench coach and infield instructor, have been doing exactly that.

Not coincidentally, both coaches are tackling Weeks' major foible: his tendency to rush things. At the plate, he often gets his bat in and out of the strike zone too fast to assure consistent contact. In the field, he speeds things up to the point of making senseless errors, with both his glove and his arm.

(snip)

"We're trying to get him to slow things down, smooth things out, so the rhythm of the position becomes second-nature to him. He's very athletic, very energetic. Sometimes at that position there's a clock that ticks. I think his clock is a little ramped up. But he's working his butt off and has responded very well."

Sounds harmless enough, right? This is nothing new, either, as previous coaches have said pretty much the same thing about Weeks' tendency to try to do too much, too fast. That is all well and good and something which can only really benefit the young man's game. Then we get to the info about a few small "tweaks" being made to his approach at the plate, and things start to get a little scary:

Sveum, blunt as always, has put several players up on the rack for overhauls of varying scopes this spring. The tune-up list with Weeks seems alarmingly high for a player with 1,615 major-league at-bats under his belt, but Sveum is determined to extract the offensive weapons from Weeks that made him a dynamo in the college ranks and minors.

Sveum's checklist includes getting Weeks to soften the Gary Sheffield-like "waggle" with the bat as he awaits a pitch, straightening up in the box, lowering his hands a bit, shifting his weight better from back to front and creating more of an arc in his swing.

Other than that, let's keep everything else the same.

Haudricourt is right, that is a pretty long list of "to do's" there. Not to jump on Sveum, who is, after all, new on the job, but I think it's fair to wonder if this is the best idea. Surely Weeks could use some tweaks to his approach to help harness all of that potential he has to be a high OBP/SLG player. It's hard to argue with any one of those changes, and Sveum would certainly know better than I would what he needs to do. The problem is that he is asking him to change so much all at once.

A person who has never seen a baseball game reading that article would have to assume that Weeks must be a pretty bad hitter to warrant that kind of overhaul. Weeks isn't that bad, though. Those that like to focus on batting average and strikeouts as measures of a player are apt to find Weeks wanting. Of course, batting average and strikeouts aren't very useful measures of a player offensively.

The more advanced metrics look at Weeks' OBP (career .352) and solid power (.406 career slugging) and compute that he is, in fact, of offensive value. Baseball Prospectus puts his career EQA at .270 (where .260 is "average") and has him with a WARP3 of 3.5 and 3.0 in 2007 and 2008, respectively. What that roughly means is that he's a useful player. Not the star that most envisioned at this point in his career, but solid.

Asking Weeks to make all of these changes to his game all at once is very likely to result in yet another slow start to a season for Weeks while he is trying to get the feel for his new approach. Over the past few years he has spent essentially the entire season trying to rehab his numbers from "ugly" to "passable" and generally succeeded, though taking a lot of heat in the process. It is also possible that Weeks doesn't need to make radical changes to tap into that potential, just experience and health. If that is the case, this would be counterproductive, as it would set back the clock on those developments. At the very worst, it risks permanently wrecking an average player's career by messing up his approach at the plate to the point where he no longer knows which end is up.

This is a tough call to make, because while Weeks is a serviceable major league second basemen, he has the potential to be much more. That justifies taking a certain amount of risk with his game. Ultimately, though, while each of the things on Sveum's list seems reasonable enough, he is running a major risk of "overload" here. Sveum would probably be best served by trying to make these changes over the course of a season, not during spring training. That would allow him to evaluate each separately and keep what works and toss what doesn't.

This is the definition of "high risk, high reward" and Sveum is probably staking a good portion of his career on the gamble. For the sake of all involved, let's hope he's right.

Four Things To Watch

Ryan Topp — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 08:50:02 GMT

As of the close of business on August 19th, the Brewers record stands at 72 wins and 55 losses. That puts them 6 games behind the first place Chicago Cubs in the central division and 2.5 games ahead of the St. Louis Cardinals in the National League wild card race. There are 35 games remaining in the season, 20 at Miller Park and 15 on the road. Whether the Brewers will be playing in October will depend on what happens in that time, and I think that what happens in that time will be defined by the following .

The health and productivity of the Brewers twin aces. I posted last week on Yost's overuse of Sabathia and Sheets and since then we've seen CC throw 130 pitches in what became a 9-3 win, obviously not a good sign from a useage standpoint. A lot has also been made of Ben Sheets fall from grace of late. While it is true that Sheets has not pitched as well as he did in the beginning of the season, his struggles are vastly overrated by virtue of the fact that he's having trouble getting the all important "W". In reality, he's mostly been just bad enough not to win, with a couple of exceptions. If the Brewers are going to the playoffs, these two will have to be a big part of it. I'm honestly more concerned about health than production, but both will be necessary.
The health and productivity of Ryan Bran and Rickie Weeks. Obviously, people look at Braun as more critical to the teams success, and that is correct. This rib cage thing needs to be taken care of because the offense needs his power in the middle of the lineup. Weeks has taken a lot of heat for everything from his batting average (too low) to his strikeouts (too frequent) and his ability to turn double plays (shaky, at best). Still, the fact remains that when he was hurt, Weeks was performing well with the stick and that his loss moving Ray Durham to the lineup everyday hurts the depth of the bench quite a bit. This team's best chance to win lies in both Durham and Weeks being available.
The bullpen's ability to get outs in close games. The pen has had a lot of time off from pitching in close games of late, because the starters are going deep into games often and the offense has been providing breathing room in a good number of wins. There is going to come a time in this last 35 games where the bullpen is relied on to extend a winning streak or to stop a losing trend. Davis Riske, Carlos Villanueva and Eric Gagne will need to hand over some slim leads and Salomon Torres will need to convert them into wins. How reliable these guys are down the stretch will go a long way towards determining this teams path.
It would really help if another player of great ability got really hot. Right now, Sabathia is carrying the team in a lot of ways. Chances are good that his current level of performance will not hold for the rest of the year, just because it is so exceptional and few have ever been able to be that good for long stretches. Someone else stepping up with a run would go a long way towards locking up a playoff spot.