The Buck Doesn’t Stop

Can He Buck the Trend?

Can’t Pass This Buck

Brother, Can You Spare a Buck?

Oh … maybe you were interested in what to expect from John Buck as a hitter?

Well, it turns out that, despite 10 years and 4,000 plate appearances, that’s a pretty darn hard thing to figure out.

Buck, you see, has flashed interesting pieces of being a valuable hitter, but he’s never really put them all together in the same year.

Cases in point:

2007:  Buck had a very strong season at the plate, with 18 homers and a .207 ISO.  It takes a lot of slugging to get over .200 ISO.  He also walked at a very nice 9.0% rate (well above average).  But!  His batting average on balls in play (BABIP) plunged into sub-arctic territory — just .243 (average is around .300).  So even though a reasonably fortunate BABIP would have given Buck a banner season, he got the opposite, and his results looked (deceptively) very tepid: .222/.308/.429.

2010: This time BABIP fortune smiled on Buck — a .335 rate, far above his career levels — and he was still putting plenty of jolt into the ball (20 HR; .208 ISO).  But!  This time, his plate skills evaporated.  His strikeout rate was high (as it has always been), and his walk rate dropped all the way down to 3.7%.  Again, even just an average walk total would have given Buck a monster year.  His career rate is 7.6%, or right around average.  But the walk drought gave him just a .314 OBP despite that .335 BABIP.  That’s what a high-K, low-BB season will do.

So, Buck had:

• a .308 OBP in 2007 made up of 9% walks, 9% XBH, 10% singles (low BABIP, high BB); and
• a .314 OBP in 2010 made up of 4% walks, 10% XBH, 16% singles (high BABIP, low BB).

That would kind of hard to do if you tried.  Either way, Buck kept falling short of being the offensive-impact catcher that he might have been, and ended up as something of an upgrade over Miguel Olivo and not much more.

The rest of the article is at Mariner Brainstorm: here.