Is Ryan Howard Overrated?

After looking at the worthiness of Jayson Werth last time, I decided to turn my attention to his counterpart in that discussion, Ryan Howard. Now, before any Ryan Howard fans get themselves in a tizzy after reading the title of this post, I have two things to say. First, it's a question that should be posed in the discussion of the future of the Phillies, and the answer is not necessarily yes (you'll have to read on to find that out). Second, for anyone who has read Jayson Stark's phenomenal book, "The Stark Truth: the Most Overrated and Underrated Players in Baseball History," you'll know that calling someone overrated means that have to be pretty damn good in the first place to get that sort of consideration. For example, he considers Nolan Ryan and Sandy Koufax to be the most overrated right-handed and left-handed starting pitchers, respectively. If I do in fact decide that Ryan Howard is overrated, that's still some good company to find yourself in.

 (Image courtesy of Phillies.com)

For a complete overview of Ryan Howard's stats, see his entry on the one and only baseball-reference.com. That's where I'm getting my numbers from and you should too.

I'll start by looking at Howard's OPS+ over the years. OPS+ is a way of giving context to a player's OPS (on base percentage plus slugging percentage, a rough but decent estimate of a player's offensive value). According to The Hardball Times great stats glossary, OPS+ is defined as "OPS measured against the league average, and adjusted for ballpark factors. An OPS+ over 100 is better than average, less than 100 is below average."

With a career OPS+ at 142, Ryan Howard has been 1.42 times as good offensively as the average player. To give you an idea of how that compares to some other feared players, Barry Bonds had a career OPS+ of 182, Albert Pujols has a 172, and A-Rod has a 147. There are many others you could look at for comparison, but this is just to give you an idea of where Ryan Howard stands in the rankings, about 5 years into his major league career. While Howard may not be Bondsian, he is still up there in the rankings.

Now let's look at home runs and RBIs, more traditional measurements that are easier to witness first hand and numbers that Ryan Howard is best known for. He has led the league in home runs twice and RBIs three times, and is one of only three players in baseball history to have 4 consecutive 45+ homer and 135+ RBI seasons. The other two, for those of you scoring at home, are Babe Ruth and Sammy Sosa. Howard also happens to be the player who reached 200 home runs in the fewest plate appearances in baseball history. Not too shabby. Relatedly, Howard also has the highest Isolated Power (ISO) of any active player in baseball today. Put simply by baseballprospectus.com, "Isolated Power (ISO) is a measure of a hitter's raw power, in terms of extra bases per AB." So in terms of his reputation as a feared power hitter, he's certainly not overrated.

Now for the other side of his career numbers. First, the strikeouts and walks. As you can see from the chart, Howard struck out over 180 times each season since 2006, including those two ugly 199 K seasons, which was bad enough to set a new record the first time in 2007. He was saved from maintaining that dubious distinction in 2008 by one Mark Reynolds of the Arizona D'backs who seems to have decided he wants to beat his own strikeout record each year. The good news about strikeouts is that 2009 showed meaningful progress over the previous two years. However, anyone who watched the 2009 World Series knows that Howard still has a serious strikeout problem. As for his walks, they have decreased significantly since Howard's ungodly MVP season in 2006, and this trend continued in 2009. For a better analysis than I can do on these numbers, check out "Fall from Ridiculous Pace" over at Philliesflow.com.

The second part of Howard's weaknesses are two issues that are often pointed to as Howard most important flaws: his glaring platoon split and his relative inability to hit curveballs. These are both very real problems for Ryan Howard, and if he can improve on these then I wouldn't be writing this blog post right now. His career line (BA/OBP/SLG) against right-handed pitchers .307/.409/.661. Those are MVP-caliber numbers in any season. Now for the ugly part: against lefties Howard is .226/.310/.444. Those are mediocre numbers in any season. As for the curveball issue, Tom Verducci over at SI started the most recent discussion on this with an insightful column that points out that not only does Ryan Howard struggle mightily against breaking balls, but the problem has only gotten worse over the course of his career. Verducci is well worth the read so I recommend you go do that and I'll move on from this depressing facet of Howard's career.

So there you have it, a small but important sample of the good, the bad, and the ugly of Ryan Howard's career thus far. My final pronouncement is...

Yes, Ryan Howard is overrated, judging by the number of MVP votes he has gotten since his much deserved award in 2006 and the way that many of us Phillies fans think of him. But as his OPS+ and power numbers show, he is still a huge offensive contributor and one of the best sluggers in baseball, and that's saying a lot. You simply can't argue with those power numbers, from the old fashioned RBI and home run totals to the more advanced ISO stat. But for all that power and fear that he elicits in response, Howard has some glaring weaknesses that will be become easier to exploit as more teams figure them out, if they haven't already. If a player can be effectively neutralized, for the most part, simply with left handed pitching and breaking balls, he would have to put up numbers like Howard did in 2006 for me to write those weaknesses off as insignificant. If Howard has another year like that, I'll be happy to revisit this discussion.

Howard still puts up fearsome numbers and carries the Phillies year after year through the month of September, which is a better month to carry the team in than say, April. He also could be even better simply by hitting a few bloopers out to shallow left field now and again to force teams to stop employing the extreme defensive shift on him. He has already shown the ability to do that in spring training this year and that bodes well for the coming season.

Even with his painful weaknesses, I would still take Howard at first base over nearly any other in baseball, and he has certainly established his place in Phillies history already. If he can solve his lefty and breaking ball problems, he will be well on his way to establishing his place in baseball history as a whole, as well as a nice trip to Cooperstown sometime down the road.