Red Sox & Pablo Sandoval agree to 5 Year, $100 Millionish Deal

[Al Zarilla]

That's Panda in spring 2011, the year after he was benched for the 2010 playoff run. His avoirdupois nadir. 

 

[Eck'sSneakyCheese]

I don't know why, but the fact that its under 20 mil a year makes me feel better about this. Typical its not $20 its 19.99 mentality, but so be it. I hope he ends up a good fit. The rapport he has with Papi and Hanley makes me think of the Pedro, Manny, Papi days. I guess I'm starting to come around. A switch hitting 3B with a decent glove would have been a great add last year. I really hope the fluffy SOB does well.

 

[Al Zarilla]

I don't know why, but the fact that its under 20 mil a year makes me feel better about this. Typical its not $20 its 19.99 mentality, but so be it. I hope he ends up a good fit. The rapport he has with Papi and Hanley makes me think of the Pedro, Manny, Papi days. I guess I'm starting to come around. A switch hitting 3B with a decent glove would have been a great add last year. I really hope the fluffy SOB does well.

Don't think Panda quite deserves Fluffy (and he better not ever).
 

 

[JMDurron]

Imagine his disappointment when a cartoon panda doesn't step up to bat.

He hasn't actually seen the movie yet. It just sounds really cool to him. He's going to end up disappointed when Pablo Sandoval doesn't jump onto the screen to fight some cartoon bad guys later in his life.

 

[JimD]

It's fair to wonder if Pablo will feel pressure to live up to his contract, but fitting in to this clubhouse is the last of my worries. The Red Sox had a phenomenal team culture in 2013 and did not melt down this year despite a very disappointing title defense. Something tells me that the Panda will fit in with Pedey and Papi just fine.

 

[DavidTai]

He hasn't actually seen the movie yet. It just sounds really cool to him. He's going to end up disappointed when Pablo Sandoval doesn't jump onto the screen to fight some cartoon bad guys later in his life.

 
Actually, I sort of expect some sort of crazy awesome brawl when David Price tries beaning Ortiz next time.
 
We'd have what, Kung Fu Panda vs the Tigers?

 

[sfip]

Time to get down to baseball, #RedSox h/t Andrew Lee pic.twitter.com/VVGcH3T8bu
— MLB Memes (@MLBMeme) December 1, 2014






@MLBMeme You had me at all you can eat shrimp.
— Pablo Sandoval's Gut (@SandovalGut) December 1, 2014

 

[BarrettsHiddenBall]

That's Panda in spring 2011, the year after he was benched for the 2010 playoff run. His avoirdupois nadir. 

Perhaps just a coincidence, but 2011 was Sandoval's last great year at the plate.

 

[LeoCarrillo]

Forget who, but a sports writer yesterday tweeted that "Josh Donaldson is older than Pablo Sandoval."
 
Kinda helps dispel the supposition that Panda is about two years away from falling off a cliff into a useless, fat, overpaid DH. Guy is 28.

 

[Al Zarilla]

Perhaps just a coincidence, but 2011 was Sandoval's last great year at the plate.

You are right on that one, but Pablo is about to make a Damon-esque or a Dewey-esque turnaround. Actually, the book on him will probably be to pitch him inside a lot to keep him away from the wall. 

 

[Eddie Jurak]

Robert Arthur on why Sandoval may be a good fit:
 

Accordingly, for about 90% of hitters, the nastier the pitch is, the worse the hitter will do against it.  For most hitters, the relationship isn’t very strong (r~.1), but it is there, and statistically significant.  That leaves 10% of hitters who seem insensitive to the quality of the pitch.  Dial it up, and they do fine.  Throw a 12-to-6 curve painting the black, and they don’t mind.
 
Pablo Sandoval is one of the latter kind of hitter.  As far as he is concerned, any kind of pitch is a hittable pitch, no matter where or how it’s tossed...  As Jeff Sullivan wrote, the Panda lacks a cold zone; there’s no place to put the ball that’s safe against him, not even down and away.
 
But this special ability of Sandoval’s to ignore the quality of a pitch isn’t solely related to his bad-ball hitting talent.  Even if you strip away location from the equation, Sandoval still rates well (in the top 30%) in terms of his ability to defy the nastiness of the pitch.  A lot of that ability comes from his facility for handling heat, which is extraordinary. 
 

 

[DJnVa]

That's an interesting article, but I think you left out the part on why he's a good fit, at least according to the author:
 

I believe Sandoval’s idiosyncratic approach makes him an especially steady hitter, one who is nearly unaffected by the quality of the pitcher on the mound.  Some have suggested that Pablo Sandoval’s exceptional playoff statistics (.935 OPS) reveal this special ability, since even though the quality of opposition dramatically increases in the postseason, Pablo’s stats do not fall off commensurately.
 

 

Opposing managers can’t play matchups very effectively against him, because their specialist (with his unhittable out pitch) poses no more threat to Sandoval than the middle reliever’s soft fastball.
 

 

 

[EricFeczko]

From the article: 

 
Of course, Sandoval is not alone in this capacity to ignore the quality of the pitch.  Others (in 2014) include Andrelton Simmons (71 wRC+), Elvis Andrus (79 wRC+) (who Gennaro also identified), David Freese (106 wRC+), and Gregor Blanco (107 wRC+). 

Bolded parentheses above contain my edits. wRC+ numbers are for 2014 only.
 
The article is interesting but flawed. The premise is threefold: 1) being affected by pitch quality is a quantifiable ability that affects "hitting". 2) being affected by pitch quality predicts average or better (relative to the player's own regular season performance) playoff performance. 3) Pablo Sandoval is one such player
 
The problem is that the article doesn't support its premises. Let's start with the first:

 
Accordingly, for about 90% of hitters, the nastier the pitch is, the worse the hitter will do against it.  For most hitters, the relationship isn’t very strong (r~.1), but it is there, and statistically significant.  That leaves 10% of hitters who seem insensitive to the quality of the pitch.  Dial it up, and they do fine.  Throw a 12-to-6 curve painting the black, and they don’t mind.

Statements like the one above are poor support for a relationship between pitch quality and performance. The first problem is stating that the correlation is statistically significant. Statistical significance means that the relationship is likely non-random, it doesn't tell us how big the relationship is (i.e. the size of the effect). The effect size (represented by the correlation coefficient, "r") shown is miniscule. An r of 0.1 indicates that 1 percent of "hitting" performance can be explained by the nastiness of the pitch.
Second, I have no idea what correlation is being calculated here; how is hitter performance being measured? Was the correlation done with OPS, isolated power, contact/whiff rate? How was nastiness measured? Some combination of speed, break and location isn't very informative in and of itself. Without knowing that, such a statement is impossible to interpret and can only be taken at face value. Worse, such statement is less credible because of what the author says in the above paragraph:

 
For most hitters, pitches that are especially hard-breaking, or fast, or located at the edge of the strike zone, are bad news.  On average, for every mile per hour harder that a pitch is thrown, a hitter is 1% more likely to whiff.  This escalates at the extremes of velocity, so that pitches thrown faster than a hundred miles per hour are upwards of 30% likely to be whiffed on.  Similar patterns hold for extreme horizontal or vertical breaks, like you might see with Clayton Kershaw’s curveball, and for pitches thrown at the edges of the strike zone.

If the components of "nastiness" show relationships between batter performance and whiff rate, but the combination of the three shows basically no relationship (see the first problem). Then perhaps their formula for combining the three needs to be examined.
 
Let's assume they get the first one right. The second premise is flawed from the start. Even if pitcher ability is not predictive of a given player's performance, this does not mean that the player will hit better in the playoffs than in the regular season. Many players can be streaky in their performances, and based on Panda's track record (regular season performance range is 96-146 wRC+), it doesn't seem like he's any better. As noted above, 1% of the variance in hitting performance is not a big effect.
 
I think they have some better evidence that Pablo may be such a hitter, but what they present is better suited to the concept that Pablo is extremely good at making contact, and has no weak locations at the plate. To me, this is both a good thing and bad thing. The fact that Pablo can make contact on the outside part of the plate may mean that he can hit flyballs to the monster and boost his doubles. This line of reasoning comes from an interesting article that Makman posted in another thread. What troubles me is that this suggests that Pablo Sandoval depends on his ability to make contact outside the zone in order to be a productive hitter; such a skill tends to age rapidly.
 

 

[glennhoffmania]

In an interview on the MLB Network today, Sandoval said that, contrary to what most people think, he didn’t even let the Giants make a counter offer before signing a five-year, $95 million contract with Boston during the offseason.
 
“I left more money out there,” Sandoval said. “I didn’t let the Giants make the final offer. I just wanted to get out and try new things, try a new challenge. I just want to be a part of a new challenge.”
 
 

 

Giants assistant general manager Bobby Evans addressed the comments on KNBR Tuesday.
 
“We told him that we were at $95 million and that we had a little more in the tank… and he did opt to accept the Red Sox offer without allowing us to make that final move,” Evans said on KNBR Tuesday. “He could have gotten a little bit more from us… he opted to take the deal with Boston.”
 

 
Link

 

[Plympton91]

I heard that interview, another thing he said was that he was a Red Sox fan growing up, and that his football idol was Tom Brady.

 

[Rasputin]

So in this past offseason, we have had Sandoval decide to take less money to come here, and Hanley Ramirez call us up and say he'd basically do whatever it took to come here.
 
I think if I were a Yankee fan, I'd be pissed.

 

[EvilEmpire]

So in this past offseason, we have had Sandoval decide to take less money to come here, and Hanley Ramirez call us up and say he'd basically do whatever it took to come here.
 
I think if I were a Yankee fan, I'd be pissed.

I'm not happy about Ramirez, but Sandoval? I'm glad he is on the Red Sox. I think the Sox would have been hard in on Headley if he wasn't. So I am well pleased and looking forward to the many pounds Sandoval puts on as he looks longingly at the DH slot after Papi retires.