Abraham Nunez's Splits

Yesterday's Abraham Nunez signing would not be a bad one if it were a spring training minor league invite or even a cheap one year deal. However, for the next two years the Phillies are going to pay over $3M to Nunez in reaction to three months of his 9 year career. Check out this comparison:

Obviously, the pre-2005 row includes Nunez's stats before this past year. The 2005 Part 1 row, very similar to the pre-2005 row, shows his combined stats for April through May 1 of this year and August 1 through the end of the year. The 2005 Part 2 row shows his stats from May 2 through July 31.

So, basically, for about 200 at-bats over three months in the middle of 2005 he produced at an .863 OPS clip and had a great batting eye. However, for the 1700 at-bats and 8.5 years that constitute the rest of his career, including the rest of 2005, he has been a terrible hitter, batting around .240, getting on base only about 30% of the time (with an awful batting eye), and slugging a terrible .300.

Clearly, this is not production you reward with more than three million guaranteed dollars over two years.

[editor's note, by Alex Falzone]So much for the platoon split. Here's a table for Nunez's 2005 splits, both post All-Star Break and vs. righties and lefties. (n.b. I had to add this here because the comment field wouldn't take my table.)

Update [2005-11-30 13:39:34 by Alex Falzone]:Here's the good news though. From 2002-2004, which is as far back as I could find splits for, he fared better against RHP's than against LHP's.

So maybe it's not as bad as it looks. Of course, a .650-.700 OPS guy with no power isn't what most of us phans were hoping for as a platoon with Bell. But if he is going to spell Bell against RHP's, at least he has more power batting RH than he does batting LH, although his BB/K rate is substantially higher batting LH.