Get to Know ‘Em

Mike Lamb, your newest Minnesota Twin. Lamb is will be 32 years old on Aug. 9, 2008. He was drafted out of high school (but not signed) by the Twins in 1996.

Lamb played four seasons for the Rangers and then the last for seasons for Houston. He had three pretty good seasons hitting for the Astros (119, 113, and 112 OPS+) and one clunker (89 OPS+ in 2005). He's got some punch, averaging a homerun every 26.3 ABs as an Astro (then again, that is the home of the popup home run). Well, it is for right handers -- Lamb is a lefty. So, that's an encouraging number of home runs (but do we need more lefties?). It turns out that Lamb's platoon split is fairly small. In his career, he's hit .284/.340/.430 against right handed pitching and .268/.336/.411 against left handed pitching. He's hit quite a bit better at home as opposed to on the road in his career and that would make sense as both Texas and Houston are hitters' parks. His road line looks like this: .269/.329/.399. Not too great. He's been better during his Houston years at home vs. on the road, but the numbers are a little better than what you see here, as he was a lot better hitter during his Houston years overall.

Defensively, he never played more than about 50 games at third base in any one season at 3B and his range numbers are not particularly great, but not uniform, either. SSS? We'll see.

Not a bad signing, I don't think. ubelmann, feel free to chime in with your own post.

<ubelmann>I don't really have a whole post on Lamb at the moment, I think. My initial reaction is that Lamb won't be very good, but it's a small enough commitment (~$3M/year for 2 years), that it's not really a big deal. With Tejada off the market, and no talks with the Dodgers (LaRoche) in progress, I didn't really see a way for the Twins to make a huge splash at 3B this year. They're probably not going to be competitive anyway, so just doing something that's a small upgrade but doesn't hamper the team's future is fine with me.

We got a stopgap who isn't very good, but is probably somewhat better than the alternatives. ZiPS has:

.214/.263/.305 -- Moses
.235/.311/.306 -- Punto
.231/.302/.359 -- Macri
.255/.306/.363 -- Tolbert
.268/.330/.409 -- Harris
.273/.344/.433 -- Lamb
.268/.332/.436 -- Kubel

(I threw Kubel and Moses in there for fun.)

Lamb's numbers will get knocked down a bit moving from Houston, so it looks like he'll be about the same hitter as Brendan Harris. You hear bad things about Lamb's defense, so that could be a problem. UZR has him as basically average at third base over the last 2-4 years, so it might not be a big deal. (Other metrics could disagree.)

In an ideal world, Lamb would take over Jeff Cirillo's role on the team, but things are not too ideal these days. Considering that everything I've seen on Harris' defense makes him a liability at every position he's played in the infield, if Lamb is even an average defender, I probably prefer him to Harris at this point.

In considering how the Twins will dole out playing time, I'm not sure. I could see Harris/Lamb mostly platooning at 3B, with Everett starting at SS, and Punto starting at 2B. Then, if the situation dictated, you could pinch hit for Everett or Punto with Harris or Monroe and shuffle everyone else accordingly. Like most moves a GM makes, this isn't either a huge loss or a huge gain for the club.</ubelmann>