Losing Nick Johnson

Written by Greg Fertel | 08 May 2010

While I am forever optimistic regarding the health of Yankee players, I still probably knew that the Yankees were going to lose Nick Johnson at some point this season. How long he'll be out is currently unknown, but at the very least, he'll be missing fifteen days.

Even though the Yankees lost their DH, they called up a light-hitting infielder in Kevin Russo because they needed a backup infielder with Ramiro Pena in the lineup and Robinson Cano currently day-to-day. This call-up doesn't do much to help the Yankees' DH problem, and Marcus Thames will probably be there every day while the roster is situated this way.

Hopefully, Cano's injury is nothing serious and he can get back into the lineup within a few days(he currently hopes to be back tomorrow). When this happens, I expect the Yankees to send Russo down and call up Juan Miranda to platoon at DH with Thames. Miranda has always excelled against right-handed pitching, but there are reasons that his major league time has been limited.

Miranda struggles against left-handed pitching and is a poor defensive first baseman. He cannot play any other positions, meaning that a team typically would lose flexibility by having a guy like Miranda on their roster. From a flexibility standpoint, Miranda would be no different than Johnson in this case. Johnson rarely plays first base and certainly can't play any other positions.

Given that Thames and Miranda both are strong platoon players, I wonder how they project to fare in comparison to Johnson. I'm going to use a methodology similar to what I did when I took a look at the Brett Gardner/Thames platoon situation. In this piece, I estimated that Thames could be expected to produce a solid .351 wOBA against lefties.

Projecting Miranda is a bit trickier and has a much lower confidence level. With Gardner, I decided to use his Major League Equivalencies(MLE) because I was using both major and minor league numbers.

With Miranda, I am just going to use the CHONE projection system and his minor league splits to find out how he'd fare in a platoon situation.

This is a 17.4 percent platoon split for Miranda. The league average rate is only 8.6 percent. The equation to regress Miranda's number toward league average is as follows:

(.174*410+.086*1000)/(410+1000) = 11.2 percent

Overall, for 2010, CHONE projects that Miranda would produce an above-average .341 wOBA. Applying this new split and weighting the wOBA number somewhat appropriately(this means I just made up the number of PA that CHONE would expect Miranda to have against lefties and righties), I'd expect Miranda to produce a .361 wOBA against right handed pitching in 2010.

So both Miranda and Thames project to be above average in their prospective roles, but still don't compare to Johnson. ZiPS projects that Johnson will have a .378 wOBA going forward, which tops both.

Per 100 PA, it looks like the Miranda/Thames platoon will cost the Yankees around 1.8 runs. This isn't too many, but would add up if Johnson missed significant time. This is also before figuring into the fact that these players might not play as well with such sporadic playing time. Hopefully Johnson returns soon and gets himself on track. But if he doesn't, the DH platoon could still be pretty effective.

Photo Credit: chris.ptacek