Craig Counsell Kicks Ass

Pure Determination

Yes, he looks like he’s 12 years old, and he has the approximate power of a 12 year old as well. Craig Counsell, however, has managed be one of the most consistently underrated players in baseball over the last few years.

In fact, only once since 2002 has he had a bad enough year to be overpaid, which was in 2003. Let’s take a look at another graph that should give you a good idea of why Counsell has been so valuable over the last six seasons.

This graph looks solely at Counsell’s production, all pro-rated over a full season (700 PAs) to make the baselines easier to identify. We can see that Counsell, over his career, has always been around the average player mark, which is 0 runs above average (obviously) or 22.5 runs above replacement.

Other players who are also around this average baseline include Josh Willingham, AJ Pierzynski, Hideki Matsui, and Adam Dunn, which is pretty decent company for a guy who is only receiving one million dollars this year. The difference between Counsell and these other guys, especially Dunn, is that Counsell really excels with the glove as the graph above shows. 

The yellow line is fielding (including position), and the blue line is hitting, and the green line is overall production, which is the sum of the two. The gray transparent line is league average, and the black line is replacement level.

So we can see here that Counsell has been far above replacement level here, and even though his glove has slipped a little bit (which is partially due to him playing less shortstop and more 2B/3B), he has hit better over the last few years. If he puts up another season with a OBP of .355 and continues to play plus defense for the Brewers, he will be well worth the one million we paid him for.