Buy Low Candidate: Jonny Gomes

Jonny Gomes has quite the history at BTB, dating back to the Marc Normandin days. As most of you probably know, Marc is a huge Adam Dunn and three true outcome players fan in general. Normandin even wrote one of his signature player profiles featuring Gomes, saying this:

Overall, Gomes appears to be on the path to a very good career with the bat, as long as he can continue to get on base and mash homeruns. He is a player that is very hard not to like (at least for me, considering my favorite style of slugger) and he has overcome a great deal of adversity in his life so far to get as far as he has. Here's wishing him a successful career mashing homeruns, walking, and striking out. Long live TTO!Since that May 2006 piece Gomes has yet to show the same promise of his rookie season, and found himself in Durham or on the bench for most of Tampa's season With no options remaining Gomes' days in St. Petersburg could be coming to a close soon, which could make some team very, very happy.

While Gomes 2008 role morphed from the southpaw bashing portion of a platoon into team pugilist make no mistake that Gomes did not play up to his true talent level with a sub-.700 OPS. Consider Gomes' 10% line drives and .200 BABIP for a moment. Knowing what we know about LD% and BABIP, one would expect a BABIP around .220 for a hitter with 10% liners. That's only a difference of two hits, but for a guy with a limited number of at-bats an extra single and double could have made his line look a bit better.

Moving forward I would expect Gomes LD% to be closer to his career average of 19% than 10%. More interestingly about Gomes tendencies were his decrease in strikeouts, dropping from 36% to 29% with minimal decrease in walks. At the same time though Gomes O-Swing% increased yet again coming dangerously close to 30%, leaving myself and others to wonder why Gomes insists on hacking.

Although Gomes offers little in the way of defensive value (comedic factor gains him points) as a cheap DH Gomes is probably just as deserving of a job as Josh Phelps, who was recently waived yet would have the built in advantage of a couple of arbitration seasons remaining and his prime years remaining.

Reference:

Fangraphs