On Wigginton

John Perrotto thinks Wigginton deserves a second chance.

The always-streaky guys make me nervous, I admit. I discount them compared to players who put up similar numbers day after day. I'd rather have a 20 home-run guy deliver the big knock once every eight games than 15 times in one month, three in another, and two in the other four months.

A red-hot player can carry a team for a week or two, as Wigginton did for the Mets last year, but a stone-cold player can really kill a team as well. So the prospect of intense production doesn't excite me unless it's consistent.

I'm also of the belief, and there may be no way to support this objectively, that the score of the game affects the difficulty of the game for some players. Kip Wells has said, in the past, that it's a lot easier to pitch when you are ahead. This makes perfect sense. And we see it all the time. With a big lead, a starter can just throw strikes - or batting practice, even - and not worry about the occasional home run. The corollary to this should be that it's easier or harder to hit in certain situations.

There was a time when all the young Excel guns distinguished themselves by pissing on the concept of "clutch hitting," but it's hard to follow one team day after day and not develop opinions, fair or not, of differing abilities to deliver in the clutch. Likewise there seem to me to be players who are adept at "piling on," that is, having a big game when everyone else is having a big game. Some guys need to underestimated to suceed. If I gave it more thought, I could probably come up with other categories of hitting. Maybe hitting with a huge lead or a huge deficit could be studied as "blowout hitting" or "exhibition hitting." Someone has probably thought of this already.

Wigginton hit well in limited platoon work in May but I wasn't impressed by the context of the hitting. But if you run through his game log you can see how he didn't contribute as much as the numbers suggest. This is especially clear if you look at his two big games.

He had three hits and homered in this 16-2 romp at Arizona on May 8. He was studly but we didn't need the second half of that studliness. In terms of how much his production actually contributed to wins and losses, you could pretty much wipe those numbers off his record. Or, at least, you could discount it considering the sad shape of the back half of Arizona's bullpen on that day. That three-hit day is like rushing for 100 yards in the second half of a blowout football game when the opposing D has quit. It's not the same as rushing for 100 yards in the second half of a playoff game.

Another one of his "big days" was May 25 against the Cardinals. No hits until the team is already down 6-0. For all I know, the Cardinals decided to give him some pitches to hit. If I'm Tony La Russa, and I see the other team has a 628 OPS third baseman, I suggest to Mark Mulder - with a 6-0 lead - that it might be smart to make him look good. This would increase the chance that he's still starting the next time the Cardinals play him.

Some players, I imagine, are too concerned with their ERA to participate in such shenanigans. We know for a fact, however, that others - often the "smartest" players - do engage in this kind of behavior. I remember reading an interview with Greg Maddux - or was it a Gammons love poem? - arguing that he'd never pitch a no-hitter because he's too eager to use such opportunities - pitching with a huge lead - to set up the next time he sees the opposing hitter. Maddux was known for pitching to players in some way that invited them to think they could get the better of this or that pitch the next time they saw him. So why wouldn't a team with a huge lead on the division - like the Cardinals - use those opportunities to pervert the other team's data set? I know I would do it.

So Wigginton had twelve hits in May. Three in the 16-2 win and three in the 11-5 loss.

I expected him to improve this year. It's not totally right to dump on a guy who just got demoted to the minors, and it's not exactly fair or scientific to isolate these games and say his hits were not as good as hits in a 1-0 squeaker. If we did that for all the players, though, we might come up with some interesting measures.

Still, those two performances were his only three-hit performances on the year. If he's going to live and die with the streaky, those three-hit games are real important in his case for more playing time. And if those games don't function, logically, as evidence capable of summing up his entire 2005 season, they do work metaphorically.

It was too little, too late with that guy. The thing that most impressed me about his few good games in May was the manager's reluctance to get excited about them. This team needs more consistent production from players holding down more than a platoon role.