Single Tool Players Part 3/5: Contact

Welcome to part three of my seemingly never ending series of articles pertaining to single-tool players. If you missed the primer, part one, or part two please click on the corresponding link to the left of this word. Now that you are all caught up let us continue on this path of saber-enlightenment with an examination of those players who make great contact, but do not happen to be talented in any other fashion.

Much like parts one and two of this exercise I ran a MySQL query against a database pulled from Fangraphs of all players from the 1871-2012 MLB seasons. I look for a set of all players who are in the 75th percentile of the tool that I am examining and in the 25th percentile of the four other tools. This is not fool-proof as part two of the exercise determined. However, for the purposes of this unscientific exercise I believe that it gets the point across quite nicely. As always for your viewing pleasure I will include the very exciting interquartile ranges for the five tools. It’s important to me to be as transparent as possible about my process so that my readers have the ideal tools for tearing me apart.

So we are looking for a player who makes contact at a clip of 86% or higher who can’t throw, run, field, or swing very hard. My first, and likely your first, guess would be a catcher. Well, my good friend it looks like we would both be extremely correct!

You will likely immediately notice the lack of data for these players on their ARM and UZR. Unfortunately, catcher defense is not measured by UZR or ARM. In the case of Abraham Nunez he has no ARM rating because he never played in the outfield during his career. Since Nunez is the least awful hitter of the three let us eliminate him right away. That leaves us with the match up of a lifetime. It leaves us with the most raw, unadulterated, and impassioned match up between any two players that one could image. Yes, everyone it has finally happened. We finally have MIKE REDMOND vs. JOSH THOLE.

I spent over eleven minutes making this. I wish that I could say that I regret them.

Like most great comparisons throughout mankind’s history it is unlikely that we come to a definite consensus of which of these two titans of contact will take the crown of the single-toolsiest player. However, I will do my best to crack the code that has so benevolently presented itself to me. It is tough to quantitatively compare their defensive capabilities as catcher defensive is still in the process of being rendered into cold statistics as the rest of baseball has. Still, there are plenty of traditional statistics that hold value for measuring a catcher’s arm strength and overall defensive capabilities. Josh Thole has a career CS% of 25% which is…terrible. Mike Redmond, on the other hand, has a career CS% of 31.7% which would place him squarely in average territory most seasons. Additionally, Redmond accomplished his superior CS% in many more attempts (559 vs. Thole’s 187) which I suppose counts for something. Redmond also fairs much better throughout his career in Fangraphs’ Fld rating which measures fielding runs above average amassing 8.2 runs over his career versus Thole’s -4.6. However, it does not contain any of Mike Fasts’ excellent work on pitch framing. That is not to say that Fasts’ work should be taken at face value quite yet, but it is one of the more ambitious attempts of measuring the currently unknown value of catcher defense that is publicly available.

Now, clearly Redmond is the better defender and has the stronger arm. He has also shown slightly less power and about even performance on the basepaths when compared to Thole. It is also important to note that Redmond also has a slightly higher Contact% throughout his career. I want to call this one a draw because they are so evenly matched in their mediocrity, but I just could not bring myself to do so. Instead I am simply going to choose the winner based on which of these two players has the most entertaining photo on Google image search.

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Ladies and gentleman we have our winner… Mike Redmond!

Mike Redmond showing off his superior defensive skills.

Thank you all for reading and remember that even if you are a millionaire athlete you can look like idiot in a candid photo that you did not know some predatory photographer was taking. On the plus side that photo may one day lead to you beating Josh Thole in a meaningless contest. Oh, the intricacies of life are what make it worth living.

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