Greetings from hazy Southern California, where last night we had the unfortunate pleasure of watching the Indians fall to the Angels in Anaheim.

But rather than try to come up with something interesting to say about yesterday's game, I want to bring up another Indians-related debate. Over the last 3 days, I've had at least two conversations with people who feel that Victor Martinez is killing the Indians with his poor baserunner-catching skills. If I'm not mistaken, this has been a general gripe of many fans and media members throughout the season. Usually, the proposed solution to this supposed problem is to let Victor play more first base.

Certainly, Victor has been bad at catching opposing base-stealers in 2006. He has caught 11 out of 73 runners, for a percentage of 15.07%. The major league average caught stealing percentage is currently 28.67%. No qualifying catcher has been worse than Victor at catching would-be base-stealers this season.

The part I disagree with, however, is the idea that all this has been costly enough to "kill" the Indians, so to speak. Let's give ourselves a rough idea of what Victor's arm has cost the Indians this year, using the 2006 run expectancy table.

The table tells you, for every possible bases/outs situation an offense can find itself in, how many runs go on to score that inning, on average. For example, in 2006 (so far), teams that have runners at first and third with no outs average about 1.87 runs by the time the inning is over. This type of information is valuable because it can help us evaluate certain in-game strategies--stolen bases, for example. If you have a runner at first with nobody out, you can reasonably expect to score .93 runs in the inning. If that runner successfully steals second, your "run expectancy" has changed: you can now reasonably expect to score about 1.17 runs in the inning. So in a sense, that stolen base helped your team by about .24 runs. On the other hand, if the runner had been caught stealing second, your team's run expectancy for the inning would have gone down to about .30--so in a sense, that caught stealing hurt your team by about .63 runs.

In most recent seasons, the cost of a caught stealing has been about three times the benefit of a successful stolen base; that's why you hear stats analysts say a baserunner needs to be at least 75% successful on steals to actually help his team score runs. In other words, he needs to be successful at least three times for each time he gets caught just to break even.

It turns out that a successful stolen base in 2006, depending on the bases/outs situation, can be worth anywhere from .01 to .39 runs, while a caught stealing in 2006, depending on the bases/outs situation, can cost anywhere from .24 to 1.06 runs. Since I'm only interested in a rough estimation, however, I'll say that a successful steal is worth .20 runs to the offense (which is more or less the average for the common types of stolen bases, anyway), and that a caught stealing is worth .65 runs to the defense (again, loose averages).

In these terms, Victor Martinez, in 2006, has hurt the Indians to the tune of about 12.40 runs with his 62 allowed stolen bases, but helped the Indians to the tune of about 7.15 runs with his 11 caught stealings. That's a net cost to the Indians of about 5.25 runs.

For comparison's sake, the average major league team in 2006 has allowed 52.83 stolen bases (costing themselves about 10.57 runs), but caught 21.23 would-be base-stealers (saving themselves about 13.80 runs). Thus, the average major league catching staff has saved its team about 3.23 runs with its baserunner-catching abilities so far in 2006. In other words--and again, this is a very loose estimation--Victor Martinez has prevented about 8.48 runs fewer with his arm than the Indians would have prevented by now with a major league average catching staff.

That's less than a win worse than average (not replacement level, but average). And if you don't believe Victor Martinez has been worth at least that with his bat, perhaps you'd like to join a fantasy league with me...

The conclusion I draw from this is that Victor's arm, while poor, does not cost the Indians very much. On top of that, moving him to first base does hurt the Indians' offense, in that the alternative at catcher is a worse hitter than the alternative at first base. On top of that, I don't think there's any reason for us to believe that Victor's defense at first base is any good, so even if we move him, he could still be hurting the team defense (even if it's to a slightly lesser degree, which is not a given).

Eric Wedge, of course, has been starting Victor at first base a fair amount. If the reason for doing this is to try to improve team defense, then I'm fully against it. If, however, the reason is to give Victor's knees an occasional rest, then the idea may have a little merit. At the very least, I don't believe Victor should be playing first base as often as he has been lately.

End of rant. We probably won't be attending any more Indians games while in California, since we already have tickets to Padres and Dodgers games--and hey, the Indians have been pretty depressing to watch so far this year. We'll be back this weekend--sorry if the blog posts are sparse between now and then.