For many people the idea that Kendrys Morales will play most of his games at designated hitter has become basically a foregone conclusion. Morales came over for Jason Vargas after a year in which he played 92 games at DH.

Morales and his first base defense have been scoffed at, and written off. We’ve assumed he’s a butcher at first base, but that’s really not true.

One of the things that fuels this belief is that I think we assume that Kendrys Morales is fat, and that fat guys can’t play good defense. There’s logic behind this. According to Body Mass Index Kendrys Morales is obese. Don’t get me wrong, Morales isn’t modeling a two piece swimsuit any time soon, but Body Mass Index is a system of measure that really shouldn’t apply to professional athletes. Professional athletes are outliers, and Marshawn Lynch is also considered obese by BMI standards.

Morales moves substantially slower than Lynch, and one of the hallmarks of a bad fielder is being slow. That’s why it’s important that we compare apples to apples. Usain Bolt and Yuniesky Betancourt weigh basically the same amount, but they play different sports and are similar only in the way that a greyhound is similar to a bag of liposuction fat: they were-from/are both living creatures on this earth. Betancourt is the liposuction fat. I don’t know if they put liposuction fat in bags.

Most first baseman aren’t small guys. A lot of them may be less stocky, they may be equally stocky. Morales, is certainly stocky, and while height and weight likely correlate well with body fat percentage, and body fat percentage likely correlates well with speed, which correlates reasonably well with fielding ability, the amount of outliers increases at each level.

We also think that Morales is… Continue reading →

The Mariners made a trade this afternoon that is quite frankly phenomenal. There’s no sense being poetic or cryptic over the Jason Vargas for Kendrys Morales swap that the Mariners pulled off today, and it probably isn’t difficult for anyone to see the benefit, or how the Mariners got objectively better.

In a post in early November I detailed my Mariners offseason plan that was an alternative to the one that Dave Cameron posted over at U.S.S. Mariner. In my post, one of my ideas was to trade for Kendrys Morales:

Trade Chone Figgins, cash, Shawn Kelley, and a mid-level prospect for Kendrys Morales

Despite the assumption in that post that the Mariners would pay Figgins entire salary, the biggest pushback I got was that it would be impossible for the Mariners to trade Figgins for Morales, ignorning the additional value in this trade in the form of Shawn Kelley and a prospect. And this certainly wasn’t a trade that I expected to be fair. The Angels have more to gain from a marginal value gain than the Mariners, who weren’t “One Josh Hamilton” away from a playoff surge. Even before they signed Hamilton the Angels had a log jam in their lineup. I wrote this in November:

Morales is coming off the first full season he’s played since 2009. He broke his leg celebrating a walk off homerun halfway through 2010, and missed all of 2011 because of complications from the same injury. Last year he became the third man where the Angels should really only field two guys: their first base and DH positions.

That logjam got no more clear when the Angels inked Hamilton, but it finally forced their hand that they’d have to trade from their surplus of position… Continue reading →