With the constant chatter coming from some of the White Sox decision makers (read: Ozzie) calling for Tadahito Iguchi to move down in the order "to see who he really is." I thought I would take a shot at predicting what kind of numbers we can expect out of Iguchi.
It seems to me that Ozzie dislikes having actual production out of his #2 hitter, and prefers the slap-and-tickle approach from the first two batters of the game. Hence, the rampant Juan Pierre specualtion. Ozzie intends to move Iguchi down in the order not as a punishment, but "to get him more RBI opportunities." So what can we expect out of Iguchi?
Observe. There have been three big name Japanese imports the last three years. Here are their stats from their rookie campaigns.
Age AVG OBP SLG BB K A) 28 .272 .331 .396 40 97 B) 29 .287 .353 .435 63 86 C) 30 .278 .342 .438 47 114
I'm pretty sure that each of you know who these player are. But if I was to ask you to suspend that knowledge for a moment, and tell me which one of these players you thought was going to break out in their sophmore season, I think all of you would (correctly) choose player B (
Hideki Matsui) based on his superior K/BB ratio. Godzilla went on to almost double his rookie HR totals in his second season, posting a .298/.390/.522 line. Player A (
Kazuo Matsui) went on to have a collapse in his second season of Major League baseball. I think player C (
Tadahito Iguchi) will fall somewhere in between.
Taking a look at Iguchi's splits, my memory may have decieved me a little bit, as I was disappointed with Iguchi's second half. Maybe I let the generally poor 50 PAs he got in the playoffs cloud my view. I would be very happy to have him repeat his second half, doubled to make a full season in '06.
AVG OBP SLG BB K HR Pre-ASB .280 .339 .409 25 61 5 Post-ASB .276 .346 .474 22 53 10 Playoffs .191 .269 .277 2 12 1
Here are the
Bill James and ZiPS projections for Iguchi.
AVG OBP SLG HR ZiPS .283 .349 .441 15 James .283 .351 .435 15
I think it's fairly obvious that those projections are based off of one year of major league data. So I thought that our community could probably do a better job. This is something that has worked well over at
Minor League Ball in the past, and since our
Community Prospect Ranking worked so well, I thought we should give it a shot.
Directions:
In the comments section, list your 2006 projection for Iguchi. I think we should get AVG/OBP/SLG, HR, and RBI.
