Rod Barajas- I Told You So

If I have to hear one more Met fan tell me what a bargain Rod Barajas has been, I'm going to castrate....myself. The guilt of rearing a child in such a world would be unforgiving. Barajas was signed during the great Met back-up catcher sign-a-thon of 2009-2010, and began the season with a bang by hitting 11 home runs before June. Of course, home runs were really the only thing Barajas was hitting, other than fly-balls and nothing, so his on-base percentage hovered around his atrocious career norm of .283. If that OBP didn't make you vomit, surely the excitement of the typical Met fan over this performance would. One fan told me, "He's our number 8 hitter, he doesn't need to get on-base."

Excusing a hitter from doing the one thing he is intended to do is hilarious in and of itself, although this hair-brained notion did present an unintended argument- How much slugging is necessary to overlook a complete inability to get on base? Before reality set in and Barajas stopped hitting home-runs (since May 31st he has hit exactly 0) he had a more than sufficient .552 slugging percentage to go along with his sub-.300 OBP, giving him a 260 ISO. This was all a small sample size, but does the impressive power override the pathetic OBP? Barajas won't be able to sustain the power anyway (his slugging percentage currently stands at .447) so we won't know for sure just how valuable his first 2 months performance is, if extrapolated for an entire season. Historical cases have shown certain players with anemic OBP can be valuable with impressive ISO (Dave Kingman's 1976 season) but even that type of production only has a finite amount of value. In most instances players who can't get on-base generally also cannot sustain that type of power long-term, or aren't given the opportunity to show that they can sustain it because they don't get on enough.

So, for the moment, the findings are inconclusive. what we can conclusively show is that his numeric regression to his career norms indicate Rod Barajas is no Joe Mauer. Hell, this year he isn't even Miguel Olivo. Now, onto more important questions, like how does Rod Barajas continue to find work?