Sandy Leon's very own thread

DavidTai

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I remember Sandy Leon being discussed as a prospect for Washington a few years back, trying to find his hitting groove, as there was one year he was averaging a .370something OBP.

I'm looking at Sandy Leon's minor league stats, and his OBP isn't too bad for four seasons in AAA.

Four seasons at AAA, a .255 / .343 / .376 for a .720 OPS (over 498 plates appearances.) I think I'd be ecstaticif he could match this the rest of the way.

Why not at least give him the rest of this season before deciding?
 
Lose Remerswaal

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Snodgrass'Muff said:
He is also the newest member of the Hartford Yard Goats. My fantasy team, not the real minor league team in the armpit of New England.

In all seriousness, if you have told me in April that Sandy Leon would be playing well enough to be used as a backup catcher at all, never mind a fantasy baseball catcher, I'd have asked you what you were smoking. This is an absolutely incredible run he's on. He'll turn back into a pumpkin eventually, of course, but I'm no longer certain he'll never be good enough to be worth having on a major league roster for an extended period of time.
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I can't wait to see his Strat-O-Matic card.

RustyKuntzwasnotastripper said:
How much longer before we seriously consider him to be the catcher of the future instead of Vasquez or Swihart? I always thought it would be nice if Vasquez had Swiharts offense. So far Sandy is better than that.
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Not in our lifetimes.
 
simplicio

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That's a nice story but there are a lot of guys that hit very well out of a crouch, off the top, Buster Posey and Paul Goldschmidt. Who really knows why somebody takes off hitting. Jose Bautista was another guy that made a complete turnaround at age 28 or 29. Of course, I'll take it (Leon's turnaround). Maybe he had lasik last offseason and didn't connect those dots.
 
Papelbon's Poutine

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Certain players can hit well out of a lot of different stances. The point is finding the one that best suits the particular player and to make changes that address what coaches think is holding them back. Much like Batista and his coach did. Leon doesn't need to keep hitting like Ted Williams to mean that they made a positive adjustment that may hold long term value.
 
moondog80

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Triple and a HR last night, up to 435/473/725. He's 7th in the majors in WAR amongst catchers, with only 74 plate appearances -- nobody else in the top 25 has less than 100.

He will regress of course (.529 BABIP), but if he goes 0 for his next 40 with zero walks he's still hitting a respectable 275/307/459 through 114 plate appearances. It's like watching JBJ last August.
 
YTF

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SSS and all, but how fun is it that offensively he's more than we hoped for from Swihart and defensively he's every bit of what we expected from Vasquez? It's just been so much fun watching Leon on both sides of the plate.
 
sean1562

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So how do you guys see his future with the team? I understand he could easily crater and return to the sub.500 OPS guy of the past, but he has been amazing and it seems to suggest he is a different player. When does he realistically become part of the long term catching plans?

Edit: it has come to the point where he is the first thing I look for in every days box score.
 
Rovin Romine

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sean1562 said:
So how do you guys see his future with the team? I understand he could easily crater and return to the sub.500 OPS guy of the past, but he has been amazing and it seems to suggest he is a different player. When does he realistically become part of the long term catching plans?

Edit: it has come to the point where he is the first thing I look for in every days box score.
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He's a good receiver. He's 27 years old. And he's hitting like nobody's business in 120 PAs.

I think at this point he's displaced the 35 year old Hanigan - it's good odds Leon won't be worse than Hanigan going forward, even when he falls back to earth. Swihart and Vazquez both have options, and both have injury issues. For 2017, I think, barring further injury, or Leon completely losing it in the final games, you go into spring training with the idea of going with Leon and the hotter of S/V. Or all 3 if they're all hitting well.
 
Red(s)HawksFan

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Rovin Romine said:
He's a good receiver. He's 27 years old. And he's hitting like nobody's business in 120 PAs.

I think at this point he's displaced the 35 year old Hanigan - it's good odds Leon won't be worse than Hanigan going forward, even when he falls back to earth. Swihart and Vazquez both have options, and both have injury issues. For 2017, I think, barring further injury, or Leon completely losing it in the final games, you go into spring training with the idea of going with Leon and the hotter of S/V. Or all 3 if they're all hitting well.
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For what it's worth, Vazquez has no more options after this season. So if they go into 2017 with the combination of Leon, Vazquez, and Swihart as their catching crew, Swihart is likely to be the one in Pawtucket to start the season. That's barring injury or a decision to use him in a super-utlity role as the 4th OF and the 3rd catcher.
 
Byrdbrain

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Barring a trade or something unexpected I would think that the ML catching combo would be Leon/Vaz with Swihart proving himself in AAA.
Leon has at least given himself a shot at earning 3/5 of the starts and if midnight strikes and goes back to what he was then he can be the backup.
If Swihart forces the issue or if Vaz continues to not hit then they can adjust from there.
 
Rovin Romine

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Red(s)HawksFan said:
For what it's worth, Vazquez has no more options after this season. So if they go into 2017 with the combination of Leon, Vazquez, and Swihart as their catching crew, Swihart is likely to be the one in Pawtucket to start the season. That's barring injury or a decision to use him in a super-utlity role as the 4th OF and the 3rd catcher.
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Thank you for the catch.
 
grimshaw

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In terms of off-season possibilities:

Wilson Ramos is far and away the prize FA who picked a great time for a career year. But can't see the Nats letting him go.

The others are various flavors of mediocrity:
Wieters who has been awful ever since his major injury
Nick Hundley - meh
Alex Avila - meh

Via trade - Possibly Welington Castillo who is basically a bridge guy in AZ, or Montero who is part time with Contreras up.

Even if Leon is a .650 OPS guy going forward, that's got to be Vazquez' ceiling.
It's probably a spring training battle at worst between those two, but I think it's 60/40 Leon, though I could also see a time share if Vazquez' arm appears to be 100%.

Christian is running out of time in the "he just needs at bats at the MLB level" portion of his career.
I wonder if he plays in the AFL as a DH.
 
mfried

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I think it would be cool to have two switch=hitting catchers (SL and BS). Swihart's right side struck me as his stronger, while Sandy shows little difference to the naked eye. The pinch-hitting flexibility would be very cool.
 
dhappy42

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Leon's .382 BA is obviously a small-sample fluke. A .450 BABIP is unsustainable. But his 21 XBH, including 7 HR, suggests there's more to it than that. Has the off-season revamping of his swing turned him into a .280/20 HR hitter? If not, where do you think he settles? And why?
 
Cesar Crespo

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It's hard to believe it's real when he was awful in Pawtucket earlier this year, but do sub .700 OPS players really put up 1.100 OPS stretches for 150+PA? His career line is now .264/.329/.394, which I'm guessing we would all take. Are there really any comps to Sandy? JBJ had a bigger sample size and better minor league track record, guys like Jeremy Hermida started hot and fizzled out.
 
Buzzkill Pauley

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Was working on this response while the other thread was getting locked.

Leon's gone from a -6.3 wFB fastball hitter to a +6.0 wFB fastball hitter. But he's still getting fed 60% fastballs, because pitchers are still busy trying to figure out how to write a book on Mookie (+21.3) and Xander (+16.4) and JBJ (+10.9) that allows their elbow to not fall off while they also pitch to Papi (+20.7) and Pedey (+8.0).

Bogaerts and JBJ were on fire for the first two months, and both are around 51% on the year, while Betts was overshadowed a little in April and May so just now has started coming down below 50%.

Likewise, pitchers will adapt to Leon.
 
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Plympton91

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That's interesting, and Leon's solid plate discipline, which he had maintained even while his AVG and ISO plummeted, may help him there. FWIW, he has 7 BB in his past 9 games. If the ability to hit fastballs is real, and he maintains the ability to not swing at junk, then he may replace some power on lost fastball opportunities with walks, remaining solidly above average overall.
 
Cesar Crespo

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Posted this in the locked thread, but his career line is now .264/.329/.394 and I'm sure we would all happily take that. The only real difference is the power. He is already at a career high in HRs for a season with 9 (2 in AAA, his previous high was 6). He has 21 xbh in 153 PA at the MLB level this year, which he has only done two other times in the minors. Once in 2011 with 416 PA and 28 xbh, and again in 2012 with 231PA and 22xbh.

His ISO is not going to .272 all year long, but if he can put up an ISO in the .120-.150, he should be above average for the position.
 
Todd Benzinger

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Grimshaw above writes that if Leon can produce a .650 OPS going forward, that is Vazquez's ceiling anyway...

Why do people think that Vaz will never be a decent hitter? Kind of reminds me of the chorus of people who were desperate to dump JBJ before this season. In fact, Vaz's numbers in AA & AAA are similar to Sandy's--solid OBP, sub-400 slugging. Many catchers develop late on offense, especially in slugging. If Leon has plausibly blossomed into a solid hitter going forward, why shouldn't we be a little patient with Vaz and see where he ends up? Not only is he a young, defensively talented catrcher, but he just had TJ surgery and missed a year. Give the guy a chance--he's actually doing OK in AAA this year. And he (like Leon) is hitting the age when catchers do develop their hitting.

If Leon can keep hitting enough to stick in the majors, a Leon/Vaz catching tandem could be very good going forward.
 
grimshaw

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Todd Benzinger said:
Grimshaw above writes that if Leon can produce a .650 OPS going forward, that is Vazquez's ceiling anyway...

Why do people think that Vaz will never be a decent hitter? Kind of reminds me of the chorus of people who were desperate to dump JBJ before this season.

If Leon can keep hitting enough to stick in the majors, a Leon/Vaz catching tandem could be very good going forward.
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.650 was a number that probably shouldn't have been thrown out - but what do you think his ceiling is?
Two days before his 26th birthday his career minor league ops is .738. But who here is actually giving up on him? I said I thought it would be a time share if Vazquez put up a spring training battle. Not every young guy coming through the system has to be a starter or bust. I think he's useful but he has an uphill battle now to get his starting job back - and that's before adding Swihart's name to the mix.

The Bradley/Vazquez thing is apples and oranges. Vazquez was never considered close to the prospect Bradley was, so him stumbling this year, especially being hurt is disappointing but not completely unexpected.
 
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effectivelywild

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bosox79 said:
It's hard to believe it's real when he was awful in Pawtucket earlier this year, but do sub .700 OPS players really put up 1.100 OPS stretches for 150+PA? His career line is now .264/.329/.394, which I'm guessing we would all take. Are there really any comps to Sandy? JBJ had a bigger sample size and better minor league track record, guys like Jeremy Hermida started hot and fizzled out.
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Man, can someone contact Eric Van? I know he used to love to do these analyses on players where he would calculate the odds of a "true talent" sub .700 OPS player putting up a stretch like Leon is now. I miss those exercises in using suspicious statistics to try to draw meaning out of a SSS
 
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Plympton91

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There really isn't a large enough sample size to test the "before" Sandy Leon either. He only had about 235 major league plate appearances prior to that with an OBP of .251. But, his career minor league OBP was .325, and his combined AAA OBP is .343 in about 500 PA. His current OBP is .437.

I hassled EV big time about how worthless these are because the underlying assumptions that make the test valid probably don't hold, but what the hell. I like playing with numbers

It's actually pretty likely that a guy with a "true" outcome of a .343 OBP--if you take his AAA OBP as the true outcome--would have a 153 PA stretch where he had a .437. The p-value there is only 0.049. Only Marginally significant even with this methodology that is an overstatement of our knowledge of the true stat and true distribution.

It's also quite possible in this framework for a player with a true OBP of .343 to have a 235 PA stretch with a .251 OBP. There the p-value is 0.013. So 1/100 and probably more likely than that.

It is much less likely that a guy with a "true" outcome of .251 (his MLB OBP coming into 2016) would have a similar stretch with a .437 OBP. The p-value there is only 0.0002. That's also an overstatement, possibly wildly, but well there's a lot of smoke there.

So, even taken with appropriate grains of salt, it's really unlikely that Leon is the hopeless player he looked like in part time major league action during 2014 and 2015. In all larger sample sizes encompassing more regular play in the majors and minors he's done better. Plus, both his terrible 2015 and his out of this world 2016 are not really statistically different from his AAA line. (We can say this even though the test is flawed because the bias in the test works against the conclusion. That it's not significant using questionable assumptions means it's definitely not significant using the right ones, which would increase the variance not decrease it.)

Thus, taking his combined AAA line as close to his true underlying talent is not a bad starting projection. Perhaps appropriately regressing to a MLE.
 
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effectivelywild

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Plympton91 said:
There really isn't a large enough sample size to test the "before" Sandy Leon either. He only had about 235 major league plate appearances prior to that with an OBP of .251. But, his career minor league OBP was .325, and his combined AAA OBP is .343 in about 500 PA. His current OBP is .437.

I hassled EV big time about how worthless these are because the underlying assumptions that make the test valid probably don't hold, but what the hell. I like playing with numbers

It's actually pretty likely that a guy with a "true" outcome of a .343 OBP--if you take his AAA OBP as the true outcome--would have a 153 PA stretch where he had a .437. The p-value there is only 0.049. Only Marginally significant even with this methodology that is an overstatement of our knowledge of the true stat and true distribution.

It's also quite possible in this framework for a player with a true OBP of .343 to have a 235 PA stretch with a .251 OBP. There the p-value is 0.013. So 1/100 and probably more likely than that.

It is much less likely that a guy with a "true" outcome of .251 (his MLB OBP coming into 2016) would have a similar stretch with a .437 OBP. The p-value there is only 0.0002. That's also an overstatement, possibly wildly, but well there's a lot of smoke there.

So, even taken with appropriate grains of salt, it's really unlikely that Leon is the hopeless player he looked like in part time action during 2014 and 2015. In all larger sample sizes encompassing more regular play in the majors and minors he's done better. Plus, both his terrible 2015 and his out of this world 2016 are not really statistically different from his AAA line. (We can say this even though the test is flawed because the bias in the test works against the conclusion. That it's not significant using questionable assumptions means it's definitely not significant using the right ones, which would increase the variance not decrease it.)

Thus, taking his combined AAA line as close to his true underlying talent is not a bad starting projection. Perhaps appropriately regressing to a MLE.
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I've always wondered as someone who also plays with numbers a lot----how do you get to those p-values? I think the p-value is where EV used to really go nuts, especially with much smaller sample sizes. But I do think that its worth at least considering that Leon is not the guy we thought he was coming into the season. That's not saying that he's actually the guy he looks like now(because unsustainable BABIP and regression to the mean, etc), but that some sort of middle ground could be his true talent level is actually I think pretty reasonable. If we attribute both his his and lows to the natural fluctuation you could expect in a developing player (especially one tinkering with his stance) then I think you can at least make a argument that he is not as good as he looks now but not as bad as he looked before. And as it turns out, if he can find a reasonable middle ground, that's a solid ballplayer.
 
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Plympton91

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It just a 2 sided t-test of equal means in two different binomial distributions. The p-values are completely bogus, biased way, way too low. If you wanted to look at game logs over the past 3 years you could look for a time series break using a Chow Test, which would be more accurate but I'm lazy.
 
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dhappy42

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effectivelywild said:
I've always wondered as someone who also plays with numbers a lot----how do you get to those p-values? I think the p-value is where EV used to really go nuts, especially with much smaller sample sizes. But I do think that its worth at least considering that Leon is not the guy we thought he was coming into the season. That's not saying that he's actually the guy he looks like now(because unsustainable BABIP and regression to the mean, etc), but that some sort of middle ground could be his true talent level is actually I think pretty reasonable. If we attribute both his his and lows to the natural fluctuation you could expect in a developing player (especially one tinkering with his stance) then I think you can at least make a argument that he is not as good as he looks now but not as bad as he looked before. And as it turns out, if he can find a reasonable middle ground, that's a solid ballplayer.
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Somewhere in the middle? There's a lot of middle between .180 and .380.

If Leon, with his new swing and approach, is a .280 hitter who hits 15-20 HRs a year, that's Salvador Perez territory.
 
threecy

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Plympton91 said:
So, even taken with appropriate grains of salt, it's really unlikely that Leon is the hopeless player he looked like in part time major league action during 2014 and 2015. In all larger sample sizes encompassing more regular play in the majors and minors he's done better. Plus, both his terrible 2015 and his out of this world 2016 are not really statistically different from his AAA line. (We can say this even though the test is flawed because the bias in the test works against the conclusion. That it's not significant using questionable assumptions means it's definitely not significant using the right ones, which would increase the variance not decrease it.)

Thus, taking his combined AAA line as close to his true underlying talent is not a bad starting projection. Perhaps appropriately regressing to a MLE.
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When a player makes a dramatic mechanical change to their approach, I think there exists the possibility that the bulk of their previous statistics get thrown out the door in terms of projections.
 
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Plympton91

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threecy said:
When a player makes a dramatic mechanical change to their approach, I think there exists the possibility that the bulk of their previous statistics get thrown out the door in terms of projections.
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That's ostensibly what you're testing with the Chow Test. If the change in mechanics made a real difference, the test should show a significant change in results around that date. The t-test of the change this year to the 2014-15 average is suggestive that a break occurred, but it's biased by a lot of assumptions that aren't valid. The p-value of the Chow Test will be orders of magnitude lower.
 
grimshaw

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Al Zarilla

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grimshaw said:
The only quote I could find was from John Farrell from the WEEI Full Count link within the fangraphs article. http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/the-man-whos-saved-the-red-sox-at-catcher/

“Probably confidence,” said Farrell of the difference in Leon this season. “I can’t say that the swing has changed all that much. He’s not missed pitches when they’ve been on the plate.”
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I wouldn't have said what Farrell said. If Sandy feels like his big turnaround is because of a stance/swing change, and his manager says he doesn't see much change in it, doubt could creep into the guy's mind and ruin the whole thing. Like Yogi said, 90% of baseball is mental, and the other 50% is something else.
 
soxhop411

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Quintanariffic said:
Pretty sure there was an article last month on how he made a mechanical adjustment playing winter ball in VZ for Carlos Guillen.
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With help from Guillen, Leon made an adjustment to his stance, standing taller at the plate rather than crouching. But the biggest difference, according to Perez, was his mindset. Two years ago, when Perez managed Leon on a winter league team in Zulia, Venezuela, he saw a passive hitter who allowed opposing pitchers to dictate his at-bats.

http://espn.go.com/blog/boston/red-sox/post/_/id/50066/mlbs-most-unlikely-success-story-of-16-red-sox-catcher-sandy-leon?ex_cid=espnapi_public
 
effectivelywild

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Back when this whole discussion started, I think the argument that "new stance leads to better results" was discounted because he had also been less than impressive with the new stance in the minors. However, as his resume this year in the majors grows, its hard not to wonder if the new stance is helping
 
dbn

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Sandy Leon has a 1.088 OPS so far in 2016. Bootstrap resampling of his PA data tells us that the 1-, 2-, and 3-sigma lower confidence intervals for his OPS over that time are 0.968, 0.855, and 0.750, repectively.

Those numbers are a purely statistical look at his performance, and know nothing about opposing pitcher quality, the "book" on him, adjustments to his stance, etc., etc., etc. All that aside, it's possible but unlikely that he has been a sub-0.750 OPS player that has hit as well as he has based on a statistical fluke.

tl;dr: it's not chance; something is different.
 
soxhop411

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grabbed an AB from 2015 and from 2016..




More coming soon
 
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