Thurston Fluff

I believe Melvin waited too long to trade Hardy - precisely one year too long... Even if we had known what would happen to Hardy last year I'm not sure it would have been wise to trade him last year. I don't think Escobar was ready to be an every day player last year. While they may have got more in return for Hardy it may have hampered Escobar's growth as well. So the net gain would have been somewhat lower by that.

I think he's saying that if we have $20 million tied up in 6 wins provided by Hardy+Cameron, freeing up $20 million to spend on pitching isn't likely to net 6 wins of pitching. We might be getting more balanced at the expense of getting worse overall. We'll have to see what DM has up his sleeve. I don't know if fielding the best possible team is as simple as adding up the total wins above replacement for the entire team and going with the one who has the most. While it does take into account defense it cannot take into account the value of defense for a particular situation. For instance teams with average pitchers who get a lot of ground balls need better infielders while teams with average pitchers who get a lot of fly balls need better outfielders. Strikeout pitchers need less help defensively than contact pitchers. A guy with a offense heavy WAR would be more valuable to a strikeout pitcher than a ground ball pitcher who may need defensive oriented WAR players to maximize his effectiveness.

If the Twins wanted Hardy, I'm sure they'd make that same deal in December. Or they find another shortstop in the meantime. It may be they only wanted Hardy but not likely. It is more likely they wanted a shortstop and Hardy was one of them they might have interest in. Attempting to out wait them may have taken away one of the best trade partners they had. I try not to take articles like that too seriously. It sucks that we are still more of a sideshow attraction for the national media but that will only change when they become annual playoff contenders. Until then we always have each other. (Que the sappy romantic chick flick music).

Party in Tim's car. He deserved it. He is the best pitcher in the league regardless of his class level. I guess for Card fans he should have drank more and smoked less then he would have been classy enough to have earned it. Really I can't disagree. The truly classy move is to have a tumbler or two of Scotch with a glass of wine as a chaser then drive. Smoking a joint while driving really is low rent. Certainly not worthy of such a high honor.

Such a reaction means Boras is more right than not. So it maybe $70m and not $80m, the point still holds. I guess you're seeing something I'm not. I've seen Boras make some statements that were off base in the past. Like last year when he said the FA market wouldn't be hampered by the economy because baseball isn't effected by the economy like other businesses are. The market proved otherwise. In all Boras makes statements that help his clients. What helps his clients is to have fans demand teams pay huge sums of money to get free agents on their team. The best way to make fans demand that is to say they all get huge sums of money thrown their way without having to do anything.

I reserve the right to be wrong on this but a back of the envolope estimate suggests that defense won't be a liability or a strength. Average to a bit above average, perhaps? Weren't they pretty well above average last year? If they improve even a little on that then they may be well above average. One thing that spending to get to 85 wins does is keep fans interested. That may actually go a long way to making more money for the team than it spends. Assuming the team's wins are spread roughly evenly throughout the seaosn 85 win teams are in the playoff race into September. That is all revenue that will not come in if the team pockets the money and is out of it in June.

The cardinals will always be in the race as long as they have larussa as a manager, That didn't help them stay in the race in either 07 or 08. Even good managers need good players. A little luck never hurts either. They had some performances from players this year they cannot reasonably expect again and had to trade a lot of good young talent to get where they were. They don't have those two things in perpetuity.

I know he gave up too many homers but say we give Randy Wolf a multi-year, multi-million dollars deal, does anyone think that he will be a significant upgrade over Looper. I have been advocating for Wolf for a couple years now. He has always been a good pitcher whose value was diminished because of injury a few years ago. He has been injury free for some time now and could be had at a reasonable price for his value. I also like the idea of another lefty in the rotation. That helps relieve the workload on the loogys so they are ready to go all year long. A really quick estimate suggests that 90 wins is going to take some overachieving and/or luck, IMO. Maybe the Cardinals and Cubs both fall flat on their face and each win 84 games. I realize you are doing a quick estimate but I think you are underestimating what impact the defense will play. According to the fielding bible rankings Gomez is rated he second best center fielder in baseball. Cameron for comparison is ranked 7th. Hardy was not rated in the top ten at short so I think Escobar will be an improvement there as well. link The cubs are a team with some big contracts to older players with diminishing skills. They over paid for some players wiht the hope of winning in the near future but didn't. Now they have these players who still have to be paid and are going to play but the best that can be hoped of form them is to stay as good as they have been. Which wasn't all that good. The Cards have to retain all their free agents to remain as good as they were last year or find comparable talent elsewhere. Given the fact they traded away a lot of their minor league talent last year they will have to do so without major help form their system. That means free agency. If they can't retain their free agents they are unlikely to get better ones in FA. They will need to get a little lucky in finding a reclamation project or two if they hope to repeat what they did this year.

Jeter was 3rd in the AL in fielding WAR by SS, only behind Andrus and Aybar who didn't play every day and are pretty young. I do think he played better this year but using WAR to say he was third best is hardly an overwhelming endorsement of him being the best. As far as the other two not being full time players if a DH can win the gold glove by playing 20ish games at first then I think the other two qualified for short.

Isn't he one of the worst defensive shortstops there is? Not that I think it's the end all be all of defense but I looked at his UZR this year on fangrpahs and it was much better than in the past but still not as good as Izturas who has traditionally been considered a good defender. I just don't get what criteria they use for it. link

young as in major league experience not age. I would be far more comfortable with Heether in the minors waiting to come up for injury than having him as a primary contributor off the bench. I think we can do better by having established veterans who knows the league and how to handle bench duty over having a rookie learn not only the league but a new role as well.

If they did it now without bringing him up in September I would think they plan on Heether being AAA depth next year more than a major league bench player. He has options so they keep him no matter what and they have a guy who can come up and play right away if there is an injury. I don't think Melvin is big on young players off the bench. More so after last season with Nelson flopping so badly. He commented on how hard it was for young guys tho handle bench roles. That is only compounded with the way Macha uses, or fails to use, the bench.

Can he be kept in the minors for another year without exposing him to waivers? If so he could be a nice replacement possibility for Weeks. If not he could be traded for help in other areas. I don't see him being able to handle part time duty on a Macha team. He's too young and inexperienced to be productive playing once a month.

This deal was made much like the Kevin Mench debacle. Melvin has simply mis-projected a player, and the results will severely hurt our team. either that or we are mis-projecting how Good Hardy really was. JJ Hardy could easily be Bill Hall JR. They both seem to have been improving every year then fell off a cliff. he converts more outs than just about all Ss's including Escobar. he has extremely quick hands and no wasted motion. Statistical analysis backs up this point time and again. Hardy had great range. You cannot use statistical analysis until there is enough data to make the analysis function properly. It is a complete misuse of defensive statistical analysis to include Escobar since he does not have near enough time in to make it anywhere near accurate. I think in this case it would be far more accurate to rely on scouting. Most scouting reports or tidbits from GM's and personnel people on the team I've seen seem to say he is better than Hardy. I am disappointed in what we got in return but when selling low it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. What we got was a highly regraded prospect who has disappointed so far. What we gave up was a highly regarded prospect who has disappointed so far. Hardy has shown more signs of being capable of handling the major leagues but he is also more expensive and older. It's a wash IMO. I think to say Melvin should have got a pitcher for him is easier said than done. To think Melvin didn't see what type of pitching he could get in return is to think he is an imbecile. I tend to regard him in higher esteem than that. He has completed wasted everything that Jack Z created here. Remind me tho thank Jack Z for all the pitching help he got us. Had Jack done his job properly we wouldn't be so mad we couldn't get pitching for Hardy. I liked Jack but he did not leave the cupboard as full as some think. If Jack had found us some pitching prospects maybe we would have been happy to get a bag of balls for a .200 hitting shortstop who makes $4 million.

Perkins would be ok in a package deal. He did have some amount of time in the big leagues so he should be major league ready but if what he has produced so far is close to his ceiling meh. I don't know enough about him other than he was a first round draft pick and is left handed so maybe there is something there as of yet untapped. I hope we can get more than him straight up.

All a stat like WAR is doing is weighting defense vs offense vs position. That more or less sums up the entire process. Sure you can do the same thing by just discussing all 3 areas separately but I think it is pretty obvious that it is important to include all 3 in every discussion of a positional player. While we might not always agree on how much to value each of the 3 I think WAR is an ok starting point to most discussions. There is nothing I disagree with in this as long as it is the starting point of the discussion not the definitive end of it. As Russ astutely pointed out these are models being tested and tweaked. That by definition means they are not conclusive even if it is using the best information available. Though it may not seem like it I use fangraphs. not as a end all be all but another tool in the arsenal. I like it for established players like Cameron not as much for part timers or young ones. I think the big question I have with some of these models are how they weight the various components. UZR seems to be the fashion these days. It's useful information to have as it gives us some amount of objective information in a very subjective area. It is far from being as definitive an indicator of defensive ability as it is being used in fangraphs IMO. I think they need to tweak that area. Maybe use an escalating weight of value assigned according to the amount of data available. Seems odd to me to say you need three years of information for it to be valuable then give one years worth of information the same wiegth in the calculation as 5 years. It is bound to give you some odd results.

sheet, did you miss this post from rluzinski? Fangraphs tweaked Tom Tango's methodology and will come up with a slightly different number than him. They had something like a 7 part series outlining exactly how hey calculate it. Others are free to tweak, refine and improve as well. It's a model. If somone is arguing that one player was worth 2 runs/.2 wins more than fangraphs indicates, they missing the point. This shows a little why some do not buy into any one place or system for definitive answers. The simple fact that tweaks and adjustments can be done shows there is some amount of subjectivity in the whole thing. One person thinks one aspect deserves a little more weight than another and prove it through a 7 page formula while another does another 10 page formula to prove why their version is better. Next thing you know you spent half your life reading different arguments about which formula should be used, confuse one for the other a few times, reread them all just to be sure, and try to figure out which objective measurement is better. The upshot of it all is one person forms their opinion of a player based on one figure and another a different one then argue the merits and everyone agrees/disagrees they are roughly worth X. Which in the end is the exact same thing all of us lesser in depth stats calculating guys do. We look at how well they played, their relative age and health and decide if we think they are worthy of a spot on our team or not.

The owners are playing for projected performance. It wouldn't be right if the numbers did match up, because you're comparing salary to actual value in salary. I fully understand that. But the value in the contract is based off of something and that something was what players really get paid. So there has to be some amount of connection between the two. I don't think the disconnect is the fault of fangrpahs as much as it is the use of it. To say Kapler should be worth more than he got because fangraphs says he is discounts the reality that he didn't get it. IF you want to say according to fangrpahs he will likely perform above his contract fine. To say he was actually worth $5 million is up for more debate. I don't think I'm explaining myself well so I'll try one other tact. We all know there are ways to find players and the most expensive one is free agency. If I understand it right Fangrpahs bases it's player values on FA market value as compared to performance. Yet market value is not set solely by performance. It is set by demand for that particular player and whether or not teams who need him have cheaper alternatives. His value is based off a much wider array of things than simply production. Thus to use only production is likely to get numbers that will not correspond to real value. This is where the measure is misunderstood. Pre-arby and arby players are paid less than they would be worth on the free agent market. Market value for Hardy on a 1-year free agent deal putting up the year he did was about $20 million. I understand. I used the Hardy example because that is one that many of us think was off base not because he was actually a lot cheaper than that. Part of the value of free agents is their true abilities are better known than a 3rd year player. CC Sabathia got his payday because he proved himself to be a durable top flight pitcher for 6 years. I'd venture to say he would be worth more money on the open market than Tim Lincicum because the jury is still somewhat out on him. Yet fangrpahs would ignore that in estimating what they are going to be worth next year. JJ hardy might have looked to be worth 20 million but he would never have got that if he was one the open market after that season because nobody would have been sure enough of his continued production to offer it to him. He simply hadn't proven himself yet. If he couldn't get what fangrpahs said he was then why say he was worth that much? The other aspect of it is some teams who have no better alternatives and are competing wit other teams for one player his value will be higher than his performance because of circumstance not ability. Thus using ability as the measuring stick for all players based off inflated players pay will almost always cause the calculation to be well over their true value. That is going off what I read from TLB's post in the other thread a while back. If my memory is wrong and it bases it off all players contract, arby and pre arby included then my bad. Never mind.

You mean, teams don't pay players after the year is over, for how much value their performance was worth? I think we already know that. And if they did, you would see a significantly higher variance in what players currently get. That's because we expect performance to have a higher variance than projected performance. Players are paid for projected performance. I guess the point I was making is if a system is used to show a players value by attaching a $ figure to it and it doesn't match up with what that player actually got paid it appears to me that something is wrong. Either with the owners and GM's or fangrpahs. To believe in the results of fangraphs when it goes counter to what reality is means one has to think fangraphs knows more about determining players value than the actual teams. That very well may be the case at least in some instances. Then again if fangrpahs did field a team it may be a AAA level team with a Yankee payroll. The fact they rate players like JJ Hardy as being worth $21 million seems to me to suggest the latter but that is just me. I think some of us get defensive when others suggest those of us who think actual GM's and owners might be the ones who are right (when there is a discrepancy) are ignorant or do not understand the methodology seems to me a bit off base. Maybe even missing something of significance fangrpahs missed. Overall I think my problem is more with fan use as it pertains to $ value than the actual system itself. I think theBruce44 had it right and they should just eliminate that column.

I agree. One should not discount any stat or measurement system, fangraphs included. On the flip side I don't think one should use any single system as a definitive indicator of true value, fangraphs included.

I don't think anyone made such a definitive claim as "fangraphs correctly calculated a players value in real life." They certainly have on this site. The JJ Hardy was worth 21 million Mike Cameron was worth more than 10 million were both claims based on fangraphs. There are many examples of that type of use of the site. The only definitive claims I have seen in this thread are that Fangraphs is ridiculous, which is a close minded stance. I think you are overstating what we are saying. You can use closed minded if it makes you feel better about your position but I tend to think skeptical is a better word. being skeptical about a system that doesn't match real world results with it's system of calculating value can and should be viewed with a healthier dose of skepticism than you seem to believe. I don't want to accuse you of being closed minded yourself but if you want to call the kettle black you should first check to make sure you are not a pot. Saying those of us who disagree are closed minded does nothing to show your position is correct. It just appears to be a cheap way to discount anyone who opposes the way you think. I've read enough of your stuff through the years to know it is not a common tactic of yours so let's just chalk it up as poorly chosen words. Lord knows I've been guilty of that enough myself.

If there ever was a guy whose batting average tells us more about his true hitting ability than OBP it is Mac. A lot of his OBP is due to his power treat which was enhanced. If he would have been an average power threat pitchers wouldn't have been afraid to pitch to him. That is why I wonder how much a career .260 hitter who needed chemical help to get there really has to offer in his first coaching gig.

I feel bad for people who are so closed minded that they will just call Fangraphs ridiculous without trying to understand some of the information provided there. as opposed to the open minded people who ignore the fact that it doesn't match up with what really happens. Call me closed minded but if reality and mathematical formulas don't match up I tend to think it's the calculations that have it wrong not reality. Using fangraphs to compare one player to another is different than saying fangrpahs has correctly calculated a players value in real life. The other thing some of us question is how good can it be in comparing players if it can't accurately calculate players worth compared to reality? The comparison within the system is only as good as the accuracy of the system as a whole. I tend to think it's on the system to show it's value not the other way around. Since the system as a whole does not match up with real life then why should we believe it is good at comparing players worth in real life? I think it has some worth in comparative situations, though not as definitive as some open minded people like to think, but relatively worthless in calculating actual value. Calling something stupid when you don't even know what it exactly is seems more like a defensive mechanism to me. I think when you see teh results of it's calculations not match up with real life it can be seen as less than perfect without knowing the exact mechanisms being used. If you have a car that gets 9 mpg and you see it's rated as getting 25 mpg it doesn't take knowledge of the components of how they arrived at that number to know it's wrong. Sometimes real life results trump paper calculations. When Gabe Kapler cannot get what the calculation says he is worth then it appears to me real life situations should be given at least as much credence as a mathematical formula that tells us what real life should situations should be. Of course you are correct in saying if you want to see why it doesn't match up then you have to look at the formula used. I think you are also right to think the use of UZR in this situation might be the culprit. But that gets right back to a fundamental shortcoming of one size fits all formulas. It doesn't take into consideration any intangible variable between sugjects. For example it uses age regressions but doesn't account for the difference between one player who takes care of his body and one who doesn't. I think players like John Kruk see age regression issues earlier and faster than workout warriors who eat right and don't drink or smoke. Lumping a 38 year old Mike Cameron in the same category as a 38 year old Andrew Jones is probably going to get you the wrong real world results. In the end fangrpahs is a useful tool for use in gathering some amount of objective value but should not be seen as giving anything close to definitive truth. In either the real world or even within it's own mathematical universe. It is much better if used in conjunction with other information.

you really should learn about how its constructed and take objections in the methodology, not the end results. I think the end results show there must be something wrong with the methodology. In this case I think it might be over valuing UZR as it relates to overall defensive value.

Some good points OWBC. Maybe it should stay at it's current level but have harsher penalties for exceeding it. If a team sucks to badly that it con only compete by outspending everyone else by 50% then maybe the current system is rewarding poor management. I don't think nay sport remains healthy if substandard organizations not only survive but strive simply because the system is rigged in it's favor.