It appears that Chone Figgins is close to signing a free-agent contract and I've been looking a little bit into his numbers. He has a career OPS+ of 99 suggesting that he's just about an average player offensively, but an argument can be made that he's not all that productive.

For example, his seasonal total base numbers aren't that good, having not cracked 250 in each of the last 4 years. Dividing his career total bases by his career plate appearances yields the number 0.342, meaning he gets one base for roughly every 3 plate appearances. (For point of comparison, Albert Pujols' value is 0.531, meaning more than 1 base every 2 PAs and Willy Tavarez is at 0.299.)

I did a season finder search for career totals of active players who had a TB/PA ratio of less than 0.35 and ranked them by most career plate appearances:

Figgins slots in at #13 and he's grouped with other players I'd put in a similar category: guys good enough to play every day or almost every day but not all that productive. Note that Marco Scutaro, just signed by the Red Sox, makes this list too.

Also while his 280 SB put him at 15th among active players, his 96 CS tie him for 8th with Johnny Damon, who himself has 374 SB.

Here are the players with 260 to 300 career stolen bases (1969-present):

These guys are ranked roughly by stolen base percentage, worst to best. First of all, Carlos Beltran's success rate of 88% is incredible.  Note that Figgins is fairly high on the list, and all of the guys ahead of him have either been active a lot longer or are retired. Stolen base success rate usually drops off later in careers as guys "lose a step" and for Figgins to already rank so high is a shame. He should probably pick his spots a bit better for steal attempts.

Figgins' two best seasons were 2007 and 2009. In 2007 he batted .330, the only season in which he batted .300 or better. In 2009, he drew 101 walks, which was 36 more than he drew in any other season. Both were flukes. Take out those 2 seasons and his career OPS+ is around 93.

Among active players with at least 2000 PAs and at least 50% of their games at 3B, Figgins is way towards the bottom of the pile in OPS+.

There are good things to say about Figgins too.

Here's one of them:

These are the only active players with at least 20 games at 2B, 3B, SS, LF, CF, and RF.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 4th, 2009 at 9:19 pm and is filed under Season Finders. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.