FTW

Bill Hall’s Toe Tag: How Did This Get So Long? Why Didn’t I Mention Mat Gamel?

The Steroid Era has skewed the common perception of the good ol’ ball-player forever. Anyone associated with baseball, whether it be a writer or a fan, is stuck in limbo. Stuck, waiting for a definitive answer that will never come.

A “Career Year” during the steroid era is now almost impossible to attribute to the values our society preaches: hard work, patience and perseverance. It may be laziness on behalf of the baseball fan to just assume that a player is guilty of taking performance enhancing drugs (PEDs); but the easiest answer is most often the correct answer.

Bill Hall - jodieandlarry.flickr

With that said, onto The Mess That Is Bill Hall’s Career:

RECENT INJURIES:

Considering Hall is fighting for his job tooth and nail, he probably didn’t want to start out 2009 with a torn right calf on the first day of camp. The initial reports out of Brewers’ camp figured upon a 4-6 week recovery period, which would probably keep Hall out of the opening day line-up and start him down in Triple-A for some seasoning. Recent reports are hinting that while the time-table remains the same, Hall is feeling quite optimistic about an early return and should resume hitting shortly.

POWER SURGE:

In 2006, Bill Hall hit 35 HR, Scored 101 Runs, Drove in 85 batters, stole 8 bases, and hit .270.  The numbers surrounding such a power surge, should be examined — So, we will.

It’s pretty clear that Hall’s power-surge had it’s gestation period during the 2005 season as he managed to slug at a .495 clip. With this number in mind, it’s not that radical to assume that he would follow it up with a career year of 35HR while slugging .553.  However, aside from these two years, there is nothing else in Bill Hall’s professional career that shows his ceiling  is anything more than slugging at a .450 mark.

So I’m quick to judge: Steroids, is the answer.

In 2007, Bill Hall signed a delicious 4-Year/24M dollar contract. The old way of thinking dictates that Hall, now financially sound for life, simply lost the desire to play baseball. Yet the steroid question looms: Did Bill Hall just make himself 24 Million Dollars by sticking a needle in his ass for a year and a half?

We’re not Baseball-Philosophers though, we only care about statistics.  So the next logical set of questions are:

1. If Bill Hall lost the desire to improve, has his pride suffered enough to warrant a comeback of sorts? or…
2. If Bill Hall used PEDs to improve his performance, has his pride or pocketbook suffered enough to warrant a return to his mischievous ways?

We’d be fooling ourselves if we believed that there weren’t undetectable PEDs available to any player that wanted them.  Even after A-Rod’s recent omission of  ” I attained steroids from a cousin in the Dominican, and I didn’t know what it was…” — I refuse to believe that ALL baseball players are idiots.  If someone wants to inject themselves with an undetectable steroid, they’ll find a way to make it happen.

What Does The Future Hold for Bill Hall?

Hall underwent LASIK surgery to improve his vision this off-season; which has the benefit of removing annoying-ass contacts from the equation, in addition to helping you see better — duh.  In sports like baseball, where a batter is turning his head quickly to adjust to the pitch or a fly-ball, LASIK has been shown to help.  There’s an article on Denard Span and his LASIK surgery here.

Whether or not this can help Bill Hall’s consistently ridiculous 25-30% K is debatable.  Even during Hall’s banner year of 2006, he struck out a third of the time while walking less than 10 percent of the time. The difference was power. Hall had never posted a SLG percentage of .550, and he certainly hadn’t come close to his isolated power statistic (ISO) of .283.

The power came from a drastic change in plate approach. Hall has maintained a relatively stable line-drive rate throughout his career, posting a high of 24% in 2005 and a low of 19.1% in his 2006 season. The change comes from the amount of fly-balls and ground balls Hall hit. More specifically, the ratio of Ground balls to Fly balls (GB/FB).  Prior to 2006, Bill Hall hit 1.15 (2004) to 1.20 (2005) ground balls for every fly ball.  In 2006, Hall almost completely reversed the percentages and hit .69 Ground balls for every Fly ball.

Combine these findings with Bill Hall’s ridiculous 19.4% HR / FB ratio in 2006, and we have an issue.  Hall’s HR/FB plummeted after the 2006 season and has since regressed to his career average of between 12-13 percent.

Bill Hall’s competition mainly comes from Mat Gamel, who’s an incredibly intriguing prospect at this point.  I must stress the word prospect, however.  Hall is going to have a repeat of last year’s terrible, inexplicable, .225 BA and sub-.300 OBP for Gamel to get a shot. Unless Gamel comes out and pulls a Ryan Braun, slugging AAA pitching at a .709 Clip for first couple months of the season.

In the end, you’re not going to have to pay that much to grab Bill Hall.  With last year’s production, I’d imagine he’d be heading for the last round of your draft. When you consider the hype that a “30-HR potential” prospect brings to the waiver-wire; Bill Hall might just be a steal. You’ll also know fairly quickly whether or not Hall will excel or flop, which leaves the door open for snagging that prospect who has “30-HR Potential” — It might just be Mat Gamel.

Realistically in deeper leagues, or leagues based in Milwaukee — You may want to avoid Hall.