Has Vavra played his way into a starting 2B job?

[Camden_yardbird]

3 hours ago, Brooks The Great said:

I'll take a .389 OBP from a bottom of the lineup hitter/bench utility guy all day and all season.

The Orioles lead the majors in pitches seen per at bat. I'm willing to bet that a vast majority of Orioles fans don't understand how unprecedented and important to the team's future success that is and will be if the team can come close to maintaining the amount of pitches the O's hitters see per at bat.

Vavra and his approach fit in well with this team and its new offensive philosphy. An offensive philosophy that this franchise has NEVER shown previously to this degree. Not even with the team was winning World Series several decades ago.

Mark "Sunflower Seed" Reynolds had a career that lasted probably a season or two too long because he could see a lot of pitches.  It's not really a new concept and not really the be all, end all we thought it was years ago.

Still not a bad thing.

 

 

[backdoorslider]

34 minutes ago, Camden_yardbird said:

Mark "Sunflower Seed" Reynolds had a career that lasted probably a season or two too long because he could see a lot of pitches.  It's not really a new concept and not really the be all, end all we thought it was years ago.

Still not a bad thing.

 

 

OBP is probably the single most important hitting stat there is. There are 27 outs. Making an out is very bad. Not making an out is very good. Baseball at it's core is about protecting outs.

Edited April 15, 2023 by backdoorslider
typo

[Frobby]

10 hours ago, Brooks The Great said:

I'll take a .389 OBP from a bottom of the lineup hitter/bench utility guy all day and all season.

The Orioles lead the majors in pitches seen per at bat. I'm willing to bet that a vast majority of Orioles fans don't understand how unprecedented and important to the team's future success that is and will be if the team can come close to maintaining the amount of pitches the O's hitters see per at bat.

Vavra and his approach fit in well with this team and its new offensive philosphy. An offensive philosophy that this franchise has NEVER shown previously to this degree. Not even with the team was winning World Series several decades ago.

I love high OBP guys, but even a .368 OBP (not sure if .389 was a mid game number or something) isn’t enough by itself, when the ISO is literally .000.   As a result he’s carrying a .299 xwOBA and 87 wRC+ that is, by definition, well below average.   I know Vavra has more power than this, and I think he has more power than he showed in the majors last year (.079 ISO).   Eventually he will need to show it to keep his spot.  I do like his approach and ability to see pitches, and I don’t disagree that those traits are desireable.  But they’re not the only thing he needs to do.

Edited April 15, 2023 by Frobby

[Aristotelian]

Heck of a double play turn here in a critical situation. https://www.mlb.com/video/cano-s-double-play-confirmed?partnerId=web_multimedia-search_video-share

[RZNJ]

19 minutes ago, Aristotelian said:

Heck of a double play turn here in a critical situation. https://www.mlb.com/video/cano-s-double-play-confirmed?partnerId=web_multimedia-search_video-share

Yes and he did a great job of going up to get that throw, coming down and getting a piece of the bag and making an accurate throw.   Frazier couldn’t have done it any better.

[Camden_yardbird]

12 hours ago, backdoorslider said:

OBP is probably the single most important hitting stat there is. There are 27 outs. Making an out is very bad. Not making an out is very good. Baseball at it's core is about protecting outs.

Seeing pitches does not equal OBP.

[sportsfan8703]

I still do not understand why Vavra and O’Hearn are playing over Stowers. Stowers must have broken a really expensive piece of analytics equipment or something.  This does not compute. 

[AnythingO's]

6 hours ago, sportsfan8703 said:

I still do not understand why Vavra and O’Hearn are playing over Stowers. Stowers must have broken a really expensive piece of analytics equipment or something.  This does not compute. 

Stowers performance breaks Sig's Bot, and I'm only half kidding.

[Aristotelian]

7 hours ago, sportsfan8703 said:

I still do not understand why Vavra and O’Hearn are playing over Stowers. Stowers must have broken a really expensive piece of analytics equipment or something.  This does not compute. 

The problem is that Stowers would have to play over Santander and Hays in order to play every day. It is better for him and the organization to have him playing AAA every day and Vavra/O'Hearn on the bench as opposed to Stowers/Vavra on the bench and O'Hearn playing every day in AAA. Stowers is better off in AAA because the O's see him as better than Vavra/O'Hearn. 

[Billy F-Face3]

It could be all purely economics. O'Hearn is making more than a million per year while Stowers is on a minor league contract. They probably figure if they're paying a guy more, they may as well get a return on their investment and see what he can do in the big leagues before they decide to part with that salary. They want to see if he was worth the investment before making any decisions moving forward. That would be my guess.

As for Vavra, I'm a little bit disheartened by his results so far. But then again, last season showed that he needed to get alot of consecutive plate appearances to get going, and once he got going, he was usually a good shot to get on base. When they sat him and sprinkled his plate appearances over a gap in time where he had a lot of days off, he struggled to get back into the thick of things. But once he got going, he became reliable and consistent and ate up pitches to wear out the opposing pitcher. When the opposing pitcher got worn out, that pitcher made mistakes that our hitters were able to capitalize on.

[RZNJ]

I think Vavra is in danger of losing some of his OF starts to O'Hearn.   Gotta hit.

[sportsfan8703]

Time for Vavra to go to AAA and get PT playing all over the field regularly. He should also be hitting leadoff. Hopefully he keeps up his previous AAA numbers and at least builds some trade value while developing into an actual utility guy.