Brawndo the Thirst Mutilat

Not to speak for anyone else, but I equate the phrase "free swinging" with players that cannot tell the difference between a ball and a strike and swing at bad pitches. Strikeouts have nothing to do with it. If you consistently make weak contact on crappy pitches outside of the strike zone, you are much more of a free swinger than someone like Adam Dunn, who routinely waits for his pitch, stubborn as a mule, even if it means taking a borderline pitch for a called third strike.

Since Fangraphs has oodles of projection systems and UZR/150 data on player pages, it really isn't all that difficult to compare what you should reasonably expect from a Braun / Cameron / Hart OF vs. a Braun / Edmonds / Hart / Abreu OF. For offense, I basically just averaged the linear weights WRAA projections from the various systems and then adjusted up to a full season's worth of playing time if the player was projected for less than that (even though its totally unrealistic to expect, say, Edmonds to play a full season, this will make it easier to play around with playing time allocations in the latter scenario). For defense, I used a 3-2-1 weighted average of the player's 3 most recent UZR/150 numbers. I gave Corey Hart a pretty generous -5 estimate as a CF because even though you'd expect an average corner OF to be 8-12 runs worse than average in CF, he is faster than most corner guys and did put up a positive UZR in his limited previous experience there. All units are runs above average (for offense, it's runs above an average hitter regardless of position, for defense, runs above position). Don't have to worry about positional adjustments here because we're not handing out MVP awards, just trying to figure out which arrangement would give the Brewers the most total runs. Braun is a constant, so I left him out. So here is everybody that matters, again, assuming a full season of playing time: Player..........Offense..........Defense Hart.................7..................0 in RF(-5 in CF) Cameron..........2..................5 in CF Abreu..............18...............-15 in RF Edmonds..........7................-10 in CF Okay, so now for playing time estimates. In the actual 2009 OF, I gave Braun 156 games (most players miss a few, but he ain't sitting if he can play), Cameron 135 (he's old, this is the mean of what the projection systems think he can do), and Hart 145 games, leaving 50 games for backup OF, which we'll assume are replacement level (TGJ, Nixon, Duffy, these are pretty much the definition of replacement players). In the hypothetical Edmonds/Abreu OF, let's give Edmonds 80 games, and Hart and Abreu 125 games each. That's 82 games in CF for Hart. Those are full games--in reality pinch hitting appearances, defensive replacements, and double switches would doubtless drive those totals up, but combined with Braun's 156, that gives you a full season's worth of OF games from just those 4 players (optimistic, but let's give the Edmonds/Abreu OF every conceivable chance to outperform the actual OF). Here's what you get for total contributions from everybody, adjusting the above rate stats for actual playing time allocated: Real OF.....................Hypothetical OF Cameron +6...............Edmonds -1.5 Hart +7......................Hart +3 Replacement -6..........Abreu +2 Total +7.....................Total +3.5 That's pretty close, actually. Given the margins of error involved with defensive metrics, you could probably call it a tie. The gap widens if you think that TGJ, Nixon, Duffy, or anybody else they can find can give better than replacement level production (I think Nixon can outhit replacement level, and I think TGJ and Duffy can probably give you some runs with their gloves). The gap shrinks if you think that a 3-2-1 weighting for UZR is unduly punishing Abreu and Edmonds for having especially lousy defensive seasons last year. On the other hand, both those guys are old, and neither is aging well. Cameron is old, too, but his production isn't slipping, and last year was actually the best he's had with the glove (by UZR anyway) in quite a while. I guess if you really think lineup balance makes that big of a difference, I could see preferring the hypothetical outfield. I personally don't care, and I'm happy we just kept the better overall player in Cameron. But I don't think it matters much at any rate, because I doubt you could have convinced both Abreu and Edmonds to sign here given that there would be so few starts to go around.

I guess I don't really see either Stetter or Swindle as guys who would necessarily have to be used exclusively as LOOGYs. By FIP, Swindle's platoon splits in the minors have actually been somewhat wider than Stetter's, but that's mainly because of the absurd extent to which Swindle utterly annihilates LHB, not because he's bad against RHB. I'll feel better any time either of them faces a RHB than I ever did with Shouse. And I'm definitely in agreement in hoping both of them make the team.

Ben Hendrickson's numbers, properly adjusted for context, never justified any of the optimism people felt about him. He certainly never dominated. His last two years in AAA in the Brewers organization his MLE FIPs were 5.32 and 4.57. It would have been reasonable to hope for a 4.75 ERA from him, and he may have been able to do that if he had been given enough IP, but he never had anything like kind of minor league success that DiFelice and Swindle (in a different role) have had. Nelson Cruz's MLEs were also totally unimpressive for a corner OF right up until his demotion in 2007. It wouldn't be the first time a hitter developed a touch late (he was only 27 that year). And considering that he put up a 1.080 OPS in the majors last year (small sample), don't you think the Rangers are kicking themselves for letting his AAAA tag keep him in the minors as long as they did? His 2009 MLE OPS was .920 (that's 398 AB he could've been thumping MLB pitching). He'll probably never be a superstar, but there's still time for him to have a decent MLB career that proves people were foolish to dump the AAAA tag on him. He's probably already shed it because of 115 good AB at the end of the year. And that's really the whole problem with that kind of thinking. Guys at the margins of AAA / MLB are selected or rejected on the basis of such tiny sample sizes of data. Joe Dillon is neither as good as his first 75 Brewer AB nor as bad as his last 75 Brewer AB. But if you split the difference and call him a .750 - .775 OPS hitter (which is what the smart projection systems that use MLEs for players without enough MLB data think he is), that's a totally useful bench player who should absolutely have a bench job in the majors so long as he's only due to make the league minimum, and probably at least his first arby year as well. But MLB GMs routinely overpay worse players with lots of MLB experience to fill the last couple spots on their bench, when quality so-called AAAA players are usually available for nothing. Edit: And Ennder already said most of that, much more succinctly, while I was working on my novel.

The CHONE projections came out first this offseason, and Suppan's replacement level projection stuck in my mind. Plus, his FIP was below replacement level last year. I'm actually quite glad to see that some of the other systems think he's still a tad better than that, since regardless of what I think, the Brewers are going to let him pitch a bunch of innings this year and next year unless he gets badly injured.

DiFelice's success in the minors is as a SP, so I don't see how that argument specifically applies to him. I guess there's no reason that you couldn't apply the same logic to a minor league SP though -- if that is possible, why couldn't a SP just do that every time through the lineup? I don't think you're right about it in any case, and I would need to see specific empirical evidence that there is a bigger gap between good and bad AAA hitters than there is between good and bad MLB hitters to be swayed from my current thinking that all you really need to know is how much better the mean MLB hitter is than the mean AAA hitter, and simply adjust a AAA pitcher's numbers accordingly (MLEs). Swindle should be used as a LOOGY, and there's almost no way he wouldn't be excellent in that role. His career MLE FIP vs. LHB is 1.94 and his career MLE BAA vs. LHB is .156. Stetter should be a one inning guy, as his career platoon differential isn't very wide at all.

Link: http://www.fangraphs.com/...ct-mine-milwaukee-brewers There's probably not much information there that most of us don't already know, but it's a nice summary of the top talent in the system.

I know that the clubhouse politics and PR repercussions make it a practical impossibility, but these days Suppan projects as a replacement level pitcher. Maybe he can do better than that (especially if he is healthier this season), but if he can't, they should just cut him and eat the money. There's no sense compounding the mistake they made giving him all that money by letting him pitch a bunch of actual innings when somebody else could do a significantly better job.

There's no such thing as a AAAA player. That's an incredibly old institutional bias with next to no basis in reality. It's a product of knee-jerk reactions to small sample size successes and failures. Think of the concept of a sophomore slump. That's the converse myth, and it comes from overreacting to one season's worth of MLB rookie success. A guy like Pat Listach winds up having a much longer MLB career than he should've had simply because he was lucky enough to have a fluky good year as a rookie, and that impression sticks. Properly adjusted for context, numbers from the high minors are every bit as useful for projecting future performance as actual major league numbers. Swindle and DiFelice miss tons of bats and don't walk anybody, and they will do that whether they pitch in AAA or MLB this year. Morlan isn't better than Coffey, Julio, or Gagne right now, but he also might not be that much worse, and if they can find a way to keep him up, they get to send him back down and get 5 more cost-controlled years of a high upside player. Besides, the way that long relievers tend to be deployed these days, somebody on the staff is going to have the job of pitching three innings every time the team is getting slaughtered. It's an incredibly stupid way to define a bullpen role, but the upshot is that there is always room to have exactly one truly terrible pitcher on your staff who will never get the chance to effect the outcome of any games. That's the only silver lining. Morlan could do that job as well as anybody, since there's really no way to screw it up.

DiFelice didn't start throwing the cutter until 2007, so his failure to make the majors until age 31 shouldn't really be seen as a reason to discount the chances that he could be effective now. If a pitcher who lost a big fastball due to injuries made it back to the majors on the strength of learning to throw a killer knuckleball in the minors, you wouldn't really think of trying to use his pre-knuckleball successes or failures to predict his future performance, would you? With respect to the "but LHB kill him" thing, if you're looking at his MLB splits, that's a total of 28 PA by LHB, so it tells you next to nothing. His career minor league splits show a .045 platoon differential in BAA but it's been about half that since adding the cutter. Seth McClung's platoon split is .047 for his career, and nobody's thinking about restricting his usage against LHB. What really bugs me is that people in the organization seem convinced that DiFelice's failings against LHB are what holds him back. I just don't get it. PECOTA projects his ERA at 3.99, and his MLE FIP from AA and AAA the last two years beats that by around 30 points, and that was as a SP. Truth be told, I'm dead certain he's a better option for the rotation than Suppan, and I'd personally pick him ahead of Looper too. I know the club won't really consider that except in an emergency, but I think they should. I will be hugely disappointed if they waste any of DiFelice's 2009 in AAA. He's probably the 4th or 5th best pitcher (SP or RP) in the organization.

I really don't think Gagne is better than Swindle, though. But then I don't share most fans' and baseball mens' predilection for short relievers who have "proved it at the MLB level" and "big game closing experience". Swindle's career MLE FIP is 2.98, and that's including some extraordinarily heavy league adjustment penalties from A ball numbers. That PECOTA 3.69 ERA projection is totally reachable for him. Gagne, on the other hand, may be a totally cooked goose at this point. I just don't see the sense in risking $3 mil or so on a pitcher who could very easily give you worse than replacement level performance again. I really hope that both Gagne and Julio fail to make the team out of spring training, and I don't really care whether they keep Coffey or not (not swayed by 7 measly IP at the end of last year). I'm pretty darn sure that Swindle, Stetter, and DiFelice are better than all of those guys and they would only make the league minimum. Hoffman, Villaneuva, McClung, and Riske are all going to be there barring injury. I'd love to have room to keep Morlan around, but I can't justify sending down DiFelice or Swindle, even though they have options, when it seems so obvious that they are better than half the bullpen I'm keeping. I might try to take the salary savings from cutting Gagne and see if I could pay somebody to take Riske off my hands to make room for Morlan. Doubt I could make it happen that cheap though.

Braun signed a long term deal, and sold off a couple of free agent years in exchange for permanent financial security. But by and large, the fan base tends to see that as Braun taking a home town discount, or whatever, because most people really don't understand how salary arbitration works in MLB or how enormous an amount of leverage a team has over a cost-controlled player in his first six years of service time. Prince took a different route, which is totally understandable if you just try to put yourself in his position, and has been demonized for his weight, his defensive failings, and his attitude largely because that route seems to point toward his leaving town at some point in the near future. They're both great players, and Brewer fans should feel equally lucky to be able to watch both of them as they enter their primes, but because Wisconsin sports fans are so feebly insecure about pro athletes (in essence, every star is Kareem Abdul Jabbar, just itching to leave town, until he proves otherwise), only Braun will benefit from the kind of unconditional adulation we are capable of when we really feel like a guy likes us as much as we like him.

I think you were right the first time, Brian. The problem with Jocketty / Quirk's story is that Tavares bunted exactly the same number of times in '08 as he did in '07 (59 times, granted he did have 130 more PA, but if you look back at his career he basically drops down around 60 bunts every season irrespective of playing time). He just had a lot less success reaching via the bunt (41% vs. 64%, in other seasons he's never been above 50%, so it looks like 64% is the outlier). Bunt singles aren't as good at advancing runners as normal singles, so his .296 SLG (.337 career) actually is even less valuable than it appears on the surface. One would also think that if he "tried to hit more home runs" it would show up in his FB%. Alas, that was down 3% in '08. His GB% was exactly the same in '08 as it was in '07, so there's no reason to believe the Reds can squeeze more IF hits out of him either. To top it off, he might not even be an above average defender. UZR has him at +2.2 runs for his career, but -17 combined over the last two seasons.

I think I might have to make it a minor quest of mine to rid this board of the notion that Weeks would benefit from a switch out of the leadoff spot. I suppose there are anecdotal and theoretical reasons to believe that this could be true, but there is absolutely no objective evidence that it is the case. It is true that Weeks hit slightly better last season when not leading off, but his non-leadoff playing time only amounted to 32 PA. That's nothing. Single season splits are almost always too small to put any stock in, and this particular single season split is ludicrously small. His career numbers tell a totally different story. Leading off (1338 PA) -- 253 / 362 / 425 Any other spot in the lineup (569 PA) -- 225 / 329 / 362 To the extent that I believe such things matter (which isn't much), it is clear that Weeks has hit significantly better in the leadoff spot than not in the leadoff spot. I do not believe that he would benefit from hitting in a different spot in the order, and I do not find anything wrong with him as a candidate to lead off again next year. Moreover, I am dead certain that the team would be worse off if, in a desperate move to acquire a "true leadoff hitter", they were to jettison Cameron, Hart, Weeks (or any useful player) to make room for burnt-out dreck like Dave Roberts. Edit: I read my post and I felt like a bit of a jerk disagreeing so vehemently with an opinion that was posted in the most polite manner humanly possible. So I'll say, as a post-script, thanks Bernie for the the kind wishes and same to you, and you make a really well thought out case for a position I find totally indefensible.

Very smart roll of the dice. His career MLE FIP is 2.73. His career MLE FIP vs LH is 1.52. If he misses this many bats, who cares what the radar gun says?

Right -- that's why the Gamel and Escobar projections are virtually identical -- that's the league average hitting line (plus a boost due to their success in those 4 AB). It's important to understand what Marcel can and can't do. With established major league players, a Marcel projection gets you roughly 90 - 95% of the way toward the very best projection systems. For players with a limited MLB track record, you need to look at one of the other projection systems (ZiPs, pecota, chone, and miner all use MLEs for such players, if I'm not mistaken). The advantage a Marcel projection offers is simplicity. Since they are just a weighted average of a player's recent performance (more recent = more weight), adjusted for age and regressed toward the mean of a league average player, you can easily run them mid-season (for example), whereas the better projection systems only come out once a year. For a player who is having a year that is unexpected (by the projection systems at least, e.g. Ray Durham's resurgence last year), you are probably better off including the current season info in a simple projection than omitting it in the fanciest projection you can muster. Mid-season projections are, in my opinion, the best use for Marcel. You can even do them yourself, with just a bit of copying and pasting, thanks to the Hardball Times: http://www.hardballtimes....cle/is-this-guy-for-real/

I'd have voted for Sizemore, but Pedroia probably wasn't that far behind in real value. Morneau winning again would have been a joke of cosmic magnitudes.

I'm surprised about that Endder...there isn't much I've encountered in the world of sabremetric thinking that makes more intuitive sense to me. Over 70% of line drives turn into hits, compared to like 25% of grounders and 15% of flies. If you want to have a consistently high BABIP, it seems like the thing to do is hit a lot of line drives. The only real blind spot a LD%-derived approach to BABIP would seem to have is guys who run out an abnormal amount of infield singles on bunts and grounders. But even somebody like Ichiro (as extreme a specimen of that sort as I think you're likely to find), has a career LD% of 21.0% and a career BABIP of .356 (vs. an expected BABIP of .330 using LD+12%). I'm totally willing to believe that Ichiro is buying that extra 2.6% with his wheels, but I'd also tend to think that an extra 2 - 3% in play is then around the upper limit of what you can do with your legs. Heck, Willy Tavaras bunts 60 times a season for about 30 hits (and he's played the last two seasons at Coors, which, looking at the Holliday BABIP numbers Logan posted, seems to turn an awful lot of BIP into hits) and if you do the same sort of comparison with his numbers I just did with Ichiro's, you get 3.2%. Braun certainly legs out more infield hits than Fielder, but then he isn't exactly Willy Tavares either. And even if he was as fast as Tavares and bunted for as many hits, unless his LD% comes up it, it looks like .320 is the ceiling for a BABIP he could reasonably sustain from season to season.

I just wish that guys like Haudricourt actually had the courage of their convictions. If Pujols can't be the MVP because the Cards weren't in the playoffs, why does he deserve a 7th place vote? Why isn't he left off the ballot entirely? Why do any Mets appear on his ballot? If somebody had the stones to turn in an all playoff participant MVP-ballot, I would at least admire his/her consistency and intellectual integrity. Now, granted, those admirable traits would be employed in the service of a stupid idea. But as it sits now, with ballots like Haudricourt's, we've got the stupid idea contorting wildly, gyrating this way and that, logic be darned...a staggering showcase of humanity's awe-inspiring inability to clearly think through even the most basic of problems in the most irrelevant and inconsequential arenas. Doesn't exactly provide the basis for much faith we'll get this climate change thing (just an example, feel free to insert your own impending cataclysm, e.g. skynet becomes self-aware and declares war on humanity, etc.) wrangled, does it?

The best way to try to suss that out is to look at BABIP relative to Line Drive % (fangraphs has it), which stabilizes over a much smaller sample of PA than BABIP, and which is the primary source of sustainable BABIP ability. In fact, if you are trying to predict next year's BABIP for a player, you would do much better to use his LD% +12% than his actual BABIP. So far, Braun is around a 17% LD% guy, which yields an expected BABIP of .290. While I would agree that we don't exactly "know" whether Braun is BABIP-lucky or BABIP-good, I think that, unfortunately, the smart money has to be on "lucky" at this point.

Instead of what you invite me to do, I will say whatever I like about "productive outs". Actually, I've already said it in a post here: http://forum.brewerfan.net/search.php?keywords=423334#reply-423334http://brewersfandemonium...reply/423334#reply-423334 I'll even repost the relevant section. The Great Productive Outs Debate of 2004, spurred by a Buster Olney article on ESPN, produced some of my favorite moments in sabermetric research. For example, here Cyril Morong demonstrates that for an entire season's worth of data (2004), if you hold team OPS constant, run scoring actually decreases the more productive outs a team makes. Larry Mahnken had a couple of gems that are still archived at Hardball Times -- check out this one. A couple of findings: - The top five teams in POP have scored 4.33 runs per game, have a .351 POP and a .392 winning percentage. - The bottom five teams in POP have scored 4.74 runs per game, have a .230 POP and a .534 winning percentage. Recoding an aversion to strikeouts as an affinity for productive outs doesn't accomplish much, since caring about whether enough of the outs a hitter makes are productive is at least as silly as caring about whether a hitter strikes out too much, if not even sillier.

If you can only have one of Kennedy or Cabrera, count me as overwhelmingly pro-Kennedy. His MLE FIP from his past two seasons of minor league work is 3.55. That is based on over 200 IP. He's been bad in the big leagues, with a FIP of 4.91 and an actual ERA of 6.14, but that's over just 59 IP, and a lot of young pitchers that turn out to be really good have some initial struggles in the big leagues. Split the difference and call him a likely 4.00 to 4.50 ERA guy right now with the possiblity of much better numbers now or soon-ish. As for what to do about CF if Cameron is gone and Cabrera isn't acquired to replace him, I'd try to see if I could get Nick Swisher from the White Sox for speedy junk like TGJ and Hurricane and an actual prospect if they require one, and if they won't go for that, I'd trade Hart for Swisher and let Gamel have RF in '09.

Swisher is stretched as a CF, but he's not a total disaster. Chone Smith's 2009 defensive projections have him at +5 runs in LF/RF and -3 runs in CF. Cameron projects as a +3 CF -- call it a dropoff of between half a win and a win or so. If the White Sox really want him gone, he'd absolutely be at the top of my priority list were I any MLB GM. His .219 AVG last year was a total abberration -- his 20.9 LD% should have resulted in a BABIP around .330 instead of the absurdly unlucky .251 it actually was. Even if his BABIP just rebounds to his career rate he should hit around .250 - .260 next year, if it actually gets up to where you'd statistically expect it to be he'll hit .280 - .290 with an OBP over .400 and an SLG over .500 (i.e. better than Ryan Braun was this year). I would prefer him to Corey Hart by a very sizable margin if it comes to making a spot for him, and it sounds like Hart is exactly the sort of player Williams and Guillen think will make the White Sox better. Vazquez is another ideal target. His previous big game failures matter not a whit to me, since I do not think they are of any more predictive value than it turned out Suppan's previous big game successes were. He puts up a FIP around 3.80 every year, and while he's been in the league long enough (several thousand IP) that you can start to trust his actual ERA as a better predictor of his future ERA than his FIP, the fact that his FIP so far outstrips his actual prior performance leads me to have a lot more optimism that he could actually pitch really well than someone like Suppan. I think he's a decent bet to put up an ERA slightly on the happy side of league average and an amazingly excellent bet to throw 200+ IP. And the wildcard is that he's got a small but noteworthy chance of a lucky BABIP year vaulting him into the Cy Young race if he pitches on a team with a good offense. And it sounds like the White Sox are basically giving him away. If all it would take for Vazquez + Swisher is something like Hart + Hall, or if the White Sox could be snowed into taking some of our speedy no-upside minor leaguers (TGJ, Hurricane) as part of the package for one or both...that screams "no-brainer" to me.

That was 7 innings you're talking about. He's pitched 200 innings in his big league career that tell us he's a little south of average for a short reliever. If they want to bring him back for a cheap one year deal that isn't crazy, but it would be pretty loopy to expect anything better than an ERA between 4.20 and 4.40 out of him. He could certainly exceed that (short reliever ERA is an extremely high variance proposition from year to year), but it's just as likely that he gets Turnbowed right out of the big leagues in the first month of the season. I just don't think it would be wise to count on him as one of the primary back of the bullpen options next year.

Hardy was runner up (to Jimmy Rollins) for a 2008 Fielding Bible award for best MLB SS. He did lose by more votes than any other second place finisher, but it's certainly still worth noting that a 10 person panel that reads like a who's who among the SABR stats crowd (including Bill James, John Dewan, Rob Neyer, Tom Tango, and Joe Posnaski) thought he was the second best defensive SS in the majors in 2008. Link: http://baseballanalysts.c...08/10/the_new_testame.php