This trade is very, uhh, interesting for Carlos Quentin himself. Quentin has been a pretty big fly ball hitter for his career; he has a 46.6% fly ball rate and the only reason his ground ball rate is as high as it is at 38.2% is because of his 15.2% line drive rate. I'll be honest, and I'll get it out of the way: Carlos Quentin's career is about to go down the drain.
Alright, let's get all geeked up in here. According to statcorner.com, U.S. Cellular Field increases home runs by 38% for a right handed hitter while Pecto Park decreases homers by 5%, also for right handed hitter. And yes, Quentin is indeed a right handed hitter and not only that but he is a big time pull hitter, as shown:
Just one opposite field homer for Carlos last season and that wasn't an outlier, just 16% of his homers have been hit to the opposite field in his career-19. U.S. Cellular inflates homeruns by left handed hitters by 26%, or right handed hitters going oppo. Pecto park decreases homers by 41% for lefties (or rightys going oppo). If we take Quentin's 19 opposite field homers for his career and subtract 26% of them to simulate him playing in a nuetral park, we get 14. 14 is our "nuetralized" number but we still have to find the year-to-year average, which is 3.5. 14 homers divided by 4 total major league seasons. But since he is going to Pecto, we have to subtract 41% from 14: 5.74 divided by 4 is 1.44 or 1 rounded down. So we can confidently expect Quentin to hit around 1 opposite field homer in 2012.
Back to the left side of the field. When we use the same method again, we find that Quentin averages about 26 homers per year when pulling the ball. As mentioned before, U.S. Cellular increases homers by 38%. 38% of 26 is 9.88 or 10. 26-10=16. Pecto decreases left field homers by 5%, which is .8 or 1. So 15 left field homers plus 1 opposite field homer is just 16 homers for next year. We can project that kind of power from him with a pretty good amount of confidence in 2012.
He'll probably also struggle to hit for average next year as well. He's never been a good pure hitter. He has a career 15.2% line drive rate. His .253 average is supportive of that and his .252 BABIP for his career suggests that he also has horrible hit placement skills. We can also look at the above chart for same conclusion about hit placement skills. And to back that up even further, his line drive rate going opposite field is just 11.8% and 4% last year. That combined with that fact that his power is going way down; he's probably in line for around a .220/.300/.350 line.
And that's not all. His defense will probably end up being among the worst in the league considering he is already horrible in the outfield and now he's moving to a spacious park like Petco.
This is a guy who we should feel really bad for because his career is about go out the window this year unless he makes some remarkable change over the winter.
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