Jose Reyes leaving: Sad, but not a travesty

Even dormant Mets blogs need to get in on this Jose Reyes action. For my part, I am sorry to see him go. He was homegrown, is really good at a scarce position, still on the right side of 30, and a fun guy to watch. I think from the Marlins standpoint, $106 million over six years is actually a decent bit of business. The Mets are far crappier for having lost him, obviously.

But disappointing though the fact of Reyes leaving may be, I don't see how people can be furious with Alderson. Sure, the division rival aspect makes it marginally worse, but winning an open bidding war for a hugely expensive star is not always and everywhere a blessing for a franchise, even if that franchise isn't effectively owned by the Madoff victims' trust, which of course the Mets are.

Another big consideration has to be "Is this player going to be in the core of the next contending Mets team?" For me that's a negative. The boys acquitted themselves well last season, but Santana is probably done as an elite pitcher, the guy right behind him in the rotation is R.A. Dickey, Beltran is gone, and Bay has by now put in a huge amount of really terrible work.  Even assuming very good years from Reyes and Wright next year, you've still only got a decent team, not necessarily a winning team and certainly not a plausible rival to the Phillies.

If I had my druthers, the Mets would be flush with cash, and talent under contract that's just entering its prime. But they're not. At all. So I say Sandy was right to let nature take its course on the Jose Reyes Era (2005-2011). Plus, will there be any more festive sight in baseball than Jose in that new Marlins uniform?

Batting order revisited

Sokojoe at Amazin' Avenue has crunched the numbers, and the numbers agree with Jerry Manuel and myself that hitting Luis Castillo leadoff and moving Jose Reyes down to third makes good sense.

The model that he used is a free one whose only inputs are OBP and SLG (blind to baserunning), so it's not as robust as it could be. But Sokojoe fed it two different sets of projections for each player. One from the all-seeing eye of PECOTA, and the other from a system I'd never heard of called CHONE (which, if it's named after Chone Figgins, should be pronounced "Shawn").

No matter which projections he put in, the optimal lineup came out:

Castillo
Beltran
Reyes
Delgado
Wright
Church
Murphy
Schneider

Interestingly, the PECOTA projections recommend this order despite pegging Reyes for a .374 OBP, which is 20 points higher than he's ever had before, and Castillo for a below career-average .347 OBP. So you don't even need to think especially highly of Castillo, or poorly of Reyes, in terms of getting on base. The difference in their respective slugging percentages (.307 to .478) alone is enough to make one guy the table-setter and the other guy the three hitter.

Dropping Reyes in the lineup

I like it. My first impression was that Luis Castillo was hardly an OBP monster in his own right, but then I looked it up and he kind of is. His career OBP is actually a rather whopping .367. For context, here are a few players who posted lower marks than that last season:

.361 Derrek Lee (1B)
.361 Adrian Gonzalez (1B)
.349 Jimmy Rollins (SS)

Castillo himself came in at .355 last year, just under his career mark, and that was despite having an uncharacteristically horrible batting average (.245). In years past his OBP was more a function of beating out infield singles than actual plate discipline. If he can keep last year's selectivity and get the average closer to his career .292, he could be more valuable than I was giving him credit for.

It's not that Castillo represents an "upgrade" over Reyes, exactly, no matter what lineup slot you're talking about. But it seems to make sense to put light-hitting OBP guys at the top of the lineup and power-hitting free swingers in the middle. That rule of thumb has Castillo hitting in front of Reyes every time.

The leadoff spot seems like an intuitively good place to hit your best basestealer, and Reyes did steal 56 bases last year, but he also got thrown out 15 times, more than 25% of his attempts (enough to negate most if not all of the runs created with the successful attempts). Luis Castillo stole 17 bases and got caught twice, less than 10% of the time.

So both in terms of getting on base and base-stealing effectiveness, Castillo actually looks like at least Reyes's equal. The third reason this is a good idea is that Reyes has too much power for the leadoff spot.

It's true that his slugging percentage is slightly misleading, because so many of Reyes's extra bases are collected because he's fast enough to take them, not because he's hitting the ball so hard. He managed to actually clear the fence with only 16 home runs last year, in 688 at-bats. But even after discounting his doubles and triples to a certain extent, you're still looking at a player who hits hard line drives very often. He was also, let's not forget, still just 24 last year, which means he's almost certainly becoming a more serious home run threat.

The best argument, as I see it, for leaving Reyes is to have the team's best hitters come to bat as often as possible, which makes, say, Reyes-Beltran-Wright-Delgado more appealing than anything that starts with Castillo. But since Castillo is going to need to fit somewhere on the lineup card every day, even in the best of circumstances, I do think he would work fairly well as a table-setter for the more devastating bats.