More on Matsui

The Mets ended this past season with three major holes in their lineup. The way they've gone about filling the hole at second base has been unorthodox to say the least. First they seemingly intentionally offered Luis Castillo less money than it would have taken to actually sign him. And now they've managed to plug up the gap in their middle infield by signing not a second baseman, but a shortstop. For the second year in a row, there's a Matsui headed to New York City and again we've got the problem of trying to project what his numbers will look like in Major League Baseball based solely on the statistics he put up in Japan.

Aaron Gleeman looked at Matsui and attempted to project his 2004 major league stats based on what happened to the numbers of Ichiro Suzuki, Hideki Matsui and Tsuyoshi Shinjo between their last year in Japan and their first year in the United States. He came up with .275/.325/.445 based on Kazuo Matsui's 2003 season in Japan and the drops in production that the three previous Japanese players experienced upon reaching the major leagues. That projection is a little disheartening and certainly doesn't look like the stat line of a player making seven million dollars a year, allegedly great defense notwithstanding.

So where's the room for optimism? Well, first of all, we're talking about the New York Mets, so I honestly don't particularly care how much money they're paying him. Even ignoring Matsui's likely positive influence on ticket and merchandise sales, his salarly is not going to cripple one of the richest and most free-spending teams in the league either now or in the future. If the Mets fail to sign Mike Cameron or Vladimir Guerrero this year, or Carlos Beltran or Magglio Ordonez next year, it's not going to be because Kazuo Matsui's big contract tied their hands. They paid what it took to sign him and that's really all that matters.

Secondly, there's the matter of Matsui's 2002 season. His .305/.368/.549 line from 2003 may look pretty good but it was actually a pretty significant dropoff from his .332/.389/.617 line in 2002. So why is a decline in production by a 27 year old a good thing? Well, if there's reason to believe his 2002 numbers were more indicative of his abilities that his 2003 numbers, that might allay concerns about paying seven million dollars and moving your top young star for a .275/.325/.445 hitter. In fact, Aaron's method of projection puts Matsui at .299/.345/.499 using his 2002 numbers. I've heard that Matsui's numbers in 2003 were down early because he was playing while still recovering from offseason surgery. I haven't been able to find any information on this, so if anyone can point me in the direction of information about the surgery or perhaps his monthly splits for 2003, I'd be very interested to see it. But just looking at his raw statistics, I see that his 2003 batting average of .305 was his lowest since 1996, when he was just 20 years old. His OBP was on the lower end of the range he'd been putting up since 1997. And while his slugging percentage was down significantly from 2002, it was still the third highest of his career and more in line with the increased power he'd been showing the previous three years than with what he'd been doing in the nineties.

What does all this tell us about what to expect of him in 2004? Well, it seems to me that, unless he's entered an extremely premature decline phase at just 27 years old, were to he to have remained in Japan, he'd likely have put up numbers somewhere in between his 2002 and 2003 statistics. His doubles, triples and home runs all saw a slight dip in 2003 from the 2002 season in which he established new career highs in nearly every offensive category. Either 2002 was a peak season that he would never duplicate, or he established a new level of production that was interrupted by injury in early 2003. Either way, there remains a lot of uncertainty about what to expect from him in the upcoming years.

Perhaps a closer look at the three players he's being compared to would yield more definite results. Of the three, Ichiro and Hideki Matsui saw far larger drops than Shinjo in both AVG and OBP. It's interesting to see the relatively small drop in production for Shinjo given that he, like Kazuo Matsui, came from the apparently tiny ballparks of Japan to the pitcher's paradise that is Shea Stadium. It's true that Shinjo didn't have nearly as far to drop as Ichiro or Hideki Matsui did, or as Kazuo Matsui does, hitting just .278/.320/.491 in his final season in Japan. And Aaron wisely points out and accounts for the fact that Ichiro and Hideki Matsui probably drew a lot more intentional walks in Japan than Shinjo and Kazuo Matsui did and a lot more than they did in the American League. But it's still interesting to note that of the three, the player whose change in environment almost exactly replicates Kazuo Matsui's was most able to keep up his established level of production upon reaching the United States.

All of this is to say that I don't know what Matsui's statistics will look like now, but I think I've got reaosn to believe that I'll be happy to see him in the Mets' starting lineup next year. As for whether I'll be happy to see him out at shortstop, well, I've rambled on enough about stats for now, and it'd be nice if I started posting here regularly again, so I'll leave the discussion of The Great Jose Reyes Position Switch until tomorrow.  ¶ joe | 5:23 PM |