Some San Diego fans are lamenting their team’s trade of shortstop Khalil Greene to the Cardinals as reminiscent of another trade that brought a Padre shortstop to St. Louis. With apologies to Lloyd Bentsen, we knew Ozzie Smith, we watched Ozzie Smith. Khalil, you’re no Ozzie Smith.

The comparison of the Hall of Fame Smith and one-year wonder Greene begins with their position and ends with the respective clubs. Ozzie was a defensive whiz who later developed on-base skills; Greene’s OBP was .349 his rookie year and it has declined ever since.

Truth be told, Greene — who hangs his hat on the 27 home runs he hit in his age-27 season (read: peak) — is more a La Russa-type than Whitey-type. He has fewer career stolen bases than Smith had in his rookie year, and his plate discipline is atrocious, striking out three times for every walk. His 34.8 O-Swing% (outside swing percentage, the percentage of pitches a batter swings at outside the strike zone) would’ve been worst on the Cardinal team in 2008.

And that spike in his home runs in 2007 is easily explained by "luck": his HR per Ball In the Air (HR/BIA) was 8.5%, well above the league average of 6.5%. Regrettably, he mistook his "luck" for skill and continued swinging for the fences in 2008, continuing an upward trend in his flyball rate.

Greene’s curious claim to fame of having a better road SLG% than Matt Holliday is fun as a trivia question, but it, too, is easily understood: Only one of the two players gets to count Coors Field (and the other doesn’t have to count Petco), the place where Greene has the most career plate appearances outside of San Diego (and where he, not surprisingly, slugs .656). For Cardinal fans hoping to see a substantial uptick in Greene’s numbers next year, remember that he won’t be playing in Denver as often.

It would seem that the only thing going for Greene is that the Cardinals reportedly will have to only pay him $5.5 (since the Padres are sending cash). That puts him in a favorable light compared to Jack Wilson ($7.25 mil) and Edgar Renteria’s new deal with the Giants ($7 and $9 mil over the next two years). So the good news is that, even if he has another dog of a season like he did in 2008, he’ll be worth his salary, according to RJ Anderson, who concludes that Greene was indeed worth trading for. Anderson also finds hope in a possible regression in BABIP for Greene.

In Greene, the Cardinals receive neither a reliable bat (the team will be foolish to bat him higher than seventh) nor a glove (he’s decidedly middling with the leather). One suspects that, had the Cardinals gone with either of their 2008 shortstops, Cesar Izturis or Brendan Ryan, they could’ve both saved money and saved some extra runs. Indeed, one wonders when, if ever, Brendan Ryan will get his chance in the Cardinal infield (Marcels expects him to have a wOBA of .317 next year; Greene: .301). The grass is always greener in someone else’s ballpark.

Perhaps, though, the comparison to the Ozzie trade is apt. After all, when the Cardinals acquired Smith in the winter of 1981, they made a few other deals to go with it. We’re still holding out hope that Mozeliak is going to turn around and deal Greene next week at the Winter Meetings. We hear the Orioles were interested.

This entry was posted by Pip on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 10:47 pm and is filed under analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.