Ben Johnson Profile

Last week the Mets sent Royce Ring and Heath Bell to the Padres in exchange for outfielder Ben Johnson and reliever Jon Adkins. Johnson is the most promising of the four players, and Marc Normandin of Beyond the Box Score, Baseball Prospectus, and Heater was kind enough to put together a mini-profile to give us an idea of the player the Mets plucked from San Diego.

Ben Johnson was drafted by the St. Louis Cardinals in the fourth round of the 1999 amateur entry draft. He didn't spend very much time at all in the St. Louis system, moving on to San Diego during the 2000 season and staying there until his recent offseason trade to the New York Mets.

Johnson was never much of an offensive contributor in the minor leagues, routinely throwing up OPS figures in the 700-800 range, but defensively he's quite useful. He posted a +2 as a centerfield in 373 innings at Portland in 2006 - as well as some poor numbers in the corner spots, but the limited innings make those figures essentially useless - and his Rate is above average at all three outfield positions in his short major league career. This should help offset Shawn Green's various defensive shortcomings late in games - and who knows, Johnson might even out hit him to boot.

Johnson's major league career OPS against left-handers is .810, and he hit .316/.365/.561 against them in 2006 down at Triple-A. Coupled with his defense, this makes him valuable versus left-handers, whereas Green hit .242/.316/.402 against southpaws from 2004-2006. The sample size is too small to automatically assume that Petco helped to bring down Johnson's numbers, but the stat lines are .256/.333/.449 on the road and .222/.319/.436 at home; more of a batting average difference just as attributable to a small sample as it is to Petco, if not more.

One thing to watch out for is that Johnson's BABIP often seems to end up beyond what his line drive percentages say it should be. This may be due to the multiple small samples, or an ability of Johnson's to reach base due to speed, or just pure chance at this point. Even if his BABIP has helped him perform at somewhat higher expectations than we should have, chances are also good that leaving Petco may give him a bit of a boost, as well as his entering the peak years. All in all, this was a nifty pickup by Minaya, and excellent insurance against Green's rapid decline. It's also nice to know that Omar was watching and cringing at the same defensive "plays" that all of us at home were; picking up someone as defensively capable as Johnson to pair with Endy Chavez seems like a fairly good indicator of that notion.