Bring Davey Home

Davey Lopes is now on the free market, having recently parted as the Phillies 1st Base coach, and Ken Gurnick points to LA as a possible destination. Baseball Musings discusses his worth.

The Phillies were are incredibly good base stealing team in 2010, swiping 108 bases while getting caught just 21 times. If you use 0.3 runs as the value of the stolen base and -0.6 runs as the value of a caught stealing, as Thorn and Palmer did in The Hidden Game of Baseball, the Phillies scored about 20 runs on their steals, worth about two wins. Of course, it’s difficult to separate Davey’s coaching from the talent of the players, but it seems to me two wins is nothing to sneeze at and Davey probably deserved a hefty pay raise.

Considering how bad we were on the basepaths this past season he could prove very valuable to us. The Dodgers were caught stealing 50 times- tied with San Diego for worse in the National League.

Besides, I have a soft spot for the nostalgic.