I was reading this article about the Tigers cutting Alex Sanchez, and found this astonishing quote:

“The [lack of] walks didn’t bother me as much as the lack of runs scored,” president/general manager Dave Dombrowski said. “So what does that mean? Maybe you’re making too many outs on the basepaths, stealing, not running as well as you should, not having the instincts at times that you would like to have. I know we’re in an era of on-base percentage, and I love it too, but runs scored to me is an even bigger stat than that. We wanted to improve upon that.”

This is a major-league GM saying this! Now, let me clarify myself on a couple of points:

1. I don’t have a problem with the Tigers cutting Sanchez. The problem is why, as explained by Dumb-rowski.
2. I understand that there are some intangible, or more accurately, un-quantified components of baserunning that factor into a player’s value, such as “instincts” and running into outs.

However, Dombrowski hangs himself with the last sentence: runs are a bigger stat than OBP. Does he really think this? If I were a Tigers’ fan, I would hope not.

For the record, prior to reading that article, I completed the annual SABR season prediction survey, and I picked the Tigers fourth in the AL Central. The Royals are looking pretty good now, though!

This entry was posted by Pip on Tuesday, March 15th, 2005 at 4:22 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.